Moral and Political Arguments Against Corporal Punishment in Schools: On the Need for Democratic Discipline

• In Event: Improving Schools Through Advocacy and Change

Abstract

Today, 19 states still permit the practice of corporal punishment in public schools, despite widespread acknowledgement of the short-term and long-term harms that such practices cause. Miller-Perrin and Perrin (2017) demonstrated that a combination of interventions addressing both the empirical research about spanking and progressive biblical interpretations about spanking show a significant association with diminished intent to use corporal punishment as a form of discipline among conservative Christians who plan to be parents. In this paper, I propose moral and political arguments that could inform a third intervention tool that could be tested in combination with these other two with the aim of further decreasing support for corporal punishment. The ultimate goal of such interventions would be to address the most common challenges in the way of achieving the cultural shift necessary to end the use of corporal punishment as a disciplinary practice in schools.

Author

• Eric Thomas Weber, The University of Kentucky