Access to education is a privilege not a right

Access to education is a privilege not a right

OK, Michael, I’m going to sneak up on my argument here and start out by agreeing with you — yes, this yellow dog leftist liberal isn’t afraid to dip his toes in the conservative waters every now and then.

Out-of-school suspension is one of the dumbest ideas in the world of educational discipline. You take a kid who clearly has no respect for the school, no respect for the teachers, and no respect for his or her fellow students, who doesn’t even want to be at school, and you punish them — by telling them not to come to school for “x” number of days.

That’s akin to a child pitching a fit because he or she doesn’t want to eat their green beans by saying, “You know what? No green beans for a week!”

Or as Charles Manson once said, “You whip a man, and he likes a whip… well, you’re just making a fool of yourself.”

And yes, Charles Manson was a crazy murdering psychopath, but using that quote allows me to transition to another form of school punishment that seems to have finally almost completely gone away — paddling.

Call it corporal punishment, spanking, or just a plain old butt-whoopin’, I survived it, you survived it, and you know what, it definitely made me think twice about the consequences of acting out in school… but I can also see how that’s just not going to realistically be an option in today’s world.

Yes, there are places where it’s still “legal,” but I’d be willing to bet that even in those places, it’s not done much at all. There’s just too much gray area. You don’t have to use much imagination to think up all the questions spanking raises.

Who are you to be beating my child?

How dare a man/woman spank my daughter/son on the butt?

Is the white/black principal hitting the black/white student harder?

Who can I sue about the bruises on my child?

And of course, there’s all kinds of studies, opinion pieces, etc. that will suggest that spanking is ineffective or it causes psychological trauma or isn’t’ applied fairly or, I don’t know, a human rights violation probably at this point.

So, I’m not really an advocate for paddling. I’m also not one of those “oh no one is spanking my child” people. I started out in parenting thinking I would just use logic and reasoning to raise my children, but it did not take long to realize that a sharp smack on the posterior can send a message quickly and effectively in a way that words sometimes fail. I’ve got one in law school, one about to go into teaching and one on the 7th grade honor roll, so the occasional pop on the booty doesn’t seem to have left any lasting scars.

So, suspension is pointless. Paddling is out of vogue.

Where does that leave a public school administration when it comes to handling ne’er-do-wells, incorrigibles and trouble children?

Make them do work.

That’s it. Yes, take them out of the classroom. As a former teacher, I can tell you there is little more frustrating than having an engaged class only to have someone who couldn’t care less about the lesson causing a distraction and a disturbance.

No, do spank them. Don’t send them home. Put them in an environment where they do not have an audience, where they do not have anyone to show out for and where they have nothing to do but the classwork they are given.

You’ve heard of “in-school suspension,” and that’s effective to a certain level. What I’m talking about is the “ALE” or Alternative Learning Environment. It’s also called simply “alternative school,” and it solves a few problems all at once: the kid is still in school, the kid is being punished by being separated from friends and other school activities, and the kid is still getting his or her assignments. In fact, I don’t know how it is at all schools, but at the Academies of West Memphis, teachers will go to the ALE building periodically and offer instruction to students who actually want it. And really, what more could you ask of them.

I guess there’s always the firing squad.

By Ralph Hardin