Sparing the rod, flirting with chaos

A public school teacher in Cebu is in hot water for “physically mishandling” a student. As a parent in a society with more modernistic and sophisticated pretensions, I would agree to corporal punishment, since defined as physical abuse, being frowned on and banned.

But I also cannot in all honesty feel comfortable with the fact that erring children are getting off the hook so lightly. And my discomfort does not spring from a sadistic desire to inflict harm on anyone, least of all children.

I just happen to believe that discipline cannot be exacted with the use of kids gloves. Kind words and psyching up may work, but only up to a point. In the end, human beings, and most especially children, still learn and learn more effectively from bitter experience.

So, while I agree that corporal punishment should remain a thing of the past, I also cannot help but look wistfully at the past when mistakes were dealt with more fairly, which is to say more commensurately, in accordance with the gravity of the mistake or mischief.

My ambivalence stems mainly from facts that are very apparent and glaring today. Many of today’s kids no longer know what is right from wrong. More serious crimes are not just being committed by kids more frequently but also more blatantly.

I do not wish to engage in generational comparisons, but I happen to belong to a generation that still saw the prevalence and acceptability of corporal punishment and we all emerged all the better for it.

The 1960s, the decade that I grew up in, may have been a very tumultuous one, but it was mainly due to youthful energies suddenly finding strange new freedoms to push the once restrictive barriers that hampered growth and development.

But underneath all the restlessness and angst of that decade, there was that underlying sense of discipline that eventually reined in most of those who experimented with drugs and free love and made of them some of the most provocative innovators of all time.

In almost all of the modern aspects of life that we enjoy today, the original germ of the idea can most probably be traced to the great experimental tides that swept the world during the turbulence of the 1960s.

And we happen to enjoy them today because their innovators happened to be disciplined enough not to be unhinged by the times. Freedoms may heighten passions to dangerous limits, but well-founded discipline eventually kicks in to keep everything steady and orderly in the end.

It is for this reason that I long and ache for such institutions like the Boy Scouts and the ROTC. From activities rooted in their principles sprung well-rounded personalities who can both lead or follow with a high sense of dedication and responsibility.

In fact, though I may have had some painful memories of my childhood, I do grudgingly long for the time when I was growing up under the tutelage of Spanish Augustinians who ran the Colegio del Santo Niño in Cebu.

These Spanish priests were never in the mood to spare the rod, and falling into occasional mischief, as I did in Grade School, invariably meant a few lashes with a belt, or kneeling down along school corridors for entire periods.

But to the best of my knowledge, no one schoolmate of mine from that period ever fell so miserably from the human race as to become serious criminals like murderers, rapists or plunderers.

In my time, a time when corporal punishment was still prevalent in both the home and in the school, there was order in the streets, neighborhoods and communities. An occasional crime, like a stabbing, was so rare that one happening becomes a hot topic for a month.

It is so unlike now when nobody gets shocked anymore by daylight killings. And yet, this seeming callousness with which we regard major crimes is particular to a time when society is supposed to be so modern and sophisticated we no longer allow physical discipline for kids.