Education letters 7/5

Sweden holds model 
of how to treat children

Encouraged as I was by Maureen Downey’s column about not allowing corporal punishment in schools, I don’t think she went far enough. Since she included “parenting expert” John Rosemond, who advocates beating children, I fear she, too, adheres to this philosophy — especially since she used cute words (“whacking,” “whupping,” “paddling,” “hit,” “smack”, “spanking,” “swift kick in the rear”) or clinical ones (“physically discipline,” “corporal punishment”) to describe what is, in essence, the terrorizing of small, helpless creatures.

Someone who is abused as a child generally becomes an abuser as an adult. We should look to countries such as Sweden where the beating of children was outlawed many years ago. The young people of Sweden who grew up under this law are harmonious and well-adjusted.

Mercy Wright, Atlanta


Force is never justified, even in school funding

Is force (corporal punishment in this case) an appropriate method when dealing with public school children who exhibit “discipline” problems?

The answer by all people should be a resounding, never. Unfortunately, many people’s proper abhorrence of this method in public schools is not consistently applied throughout their view of education. Public schools themselves rest on the idea of the permissiveness of force.

Schools are funded by taxes, forcefully taken. Anyone who might try to withhold taxes because of issues with public schools — including corporal punishment — would find this to be the case. A citizen’s continued resistance results in government force — incarceration.

The abolishment of corporal punishment in public schools should be the first step toward a complete elimination of all force in education.

Aquinas Heard, Marietta

Threw away his paddle and never regretted it

Maureen Downey took on a very emotional and polarizing issue, but she got it right. Corporal punishment in our schools is wrong. When I started as a principal 40 years ago, I was in a community that supported corporal punishment. It had been practiced there for years, and it was accepted and expected by parents, teachers and children.

I even used the paddle a few times during the first year, but when I thought about it intellectually and professionally, it made no sense.

How could I rationalize a grown man taking a wooden paddle and hitting a defenseless child for the sake of school discipline. Surely there had to be other options. I took that paddle, and threw it away and vowed never to use it again.

Jerry Schwartz, Alpharetta

Kathy Cox praise
of teachers too late

I have been pleased to see state school Superintendent Kathy Cox’s comments in recent weeks celebrating the hard work of the teachers of Georgia and giving them the credit for improvements in their students’ test scores.

My appreciation is muted, however, by the realization that her comments have come only as she is leaving office when, for the past eight years, she has quietly acquiesced while the talk-show-driven conservative Statehouse has squeezed those teachers’ salaries, stretched their hours and cut their resources — all the while demanding better results and blaming them for every social ill this side of al-Qaida.

It’s easy to talk the talk, but for two terms, Cox has declined to walk the walk, and that, along with a state school system that remains mired near the bottom of the nation’s rankings both in spending and results, will always be her legacy.

Ed Udall, Marietta