A recent bill pushing for increasing corporal punishment in homes and schools died in committee shortly after being introduced to the Kansas state legislature by representative Gail Finney. While the moral victory of the bill being shut down stands, it represents a sickening value in this nation. Corporal punishment needs to be abandoned in school across America.

When one thinks of being spanked or hit in a classroom, most will picture a Hollywood movie set in the time of their grandparents. Even though people here in Minnesota haven’t seen such a thing in a very long time, it still takes place in schools in much of the country.

“Nineteen states allow teachers and caregivers to spank children and administer other forms of corporal punishment,” said Rose Eveleth in a smithsonian.com article.

In the case of the states that do allow corporal punishment, nearly all of which are in the notoriously behind-the-times southeast, the system does not persist as an antiquated series of laws protecting a mostly unused method of discipline. In fact, it is a method that is still widely and unfortunately used.

“Numbers collected by the U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights and released in March 2008 showed that 223,190 students were physically punished in American schools in 2006, the most recent year available,” said Alyssa Morones for edweek.com.

The bill, which was designed to increase Kansas’ threshold from “spanking without leaving marks” to up to ten blows to a child by any caregiver with parental consent and allowing for the possibility of leaving redness or bruising. This goes against almost all research that shows any form of corporal punishment to be harmful and ineffective in disciplining a child.

“Research shows that physical punishment is associated with increases in delinquency, antisocial behavior, and aggression in children, and decreases in the quality of the parent-child relationship, children’s mental health and children’s capacity to internalize socially acceptable behavior. Adults who have been subjected to physical punishment as children are more likely to abuse their own child or spouse and to manifest criminal behavior,” said psychologist Elizabeth Gerschoff in a position statement for the American Psychoanalytic Association.

This issue has been left to state governments to rule, with the federal government only giving basic guidelines on corporal punishment in the home and in school, whereas almost all other nations have taken measure to prevent it on the federal level.

“The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child issued a directive in 2006 calling physical punishment “legalized violence against children” that should be eliminated in all settings through “legislative, administrative, social and educational measures.” The treaty that established the committee has been supported by 192 countries, with only the United States and Somalia failing to ratify it,” said Brandon L. Smith for the American Psychological Association.

It is time that the United States abandoned the old ways of raising our children and became on par with the rest of the modern world. Physical discipline must end.