Archive for the ‘punishment’ tag
Corporal Punishment #
While discussing the broad decline of the practice, The Economist made a point I’d never known:
Countries where teachers still use force include the United States, where a Supreme Court ruling in 1977 (concerning two pupils whose beatings with a wooden paddle caused medical harm) found that a constitutional ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” applied only to judicial proceedings. That left individual states to decide; in 22 of them, corporal correction in schools occurs in at least some districts.
Perhaps more glaringly:
Indeed, [the United States] is the only country, along with Somalia, which has failed to ratify a United Nations convention on children’s rights, which since 1990 has protected children from “all forms of physical or mental violence”. American officials helped draft the document, but it faces stiff opposition in some quarters of the United States.