It is said that constant reform is necessary to maintain fairness in the social milieu and I'll leave that statement stand by itself to be as clear as possible to start off.
Recently I've read some proposed changes as to how parents are to administer corporal punishment according to the law and there was one curious point I noticed in the report:
parents are the best judge of what and how to administer punishment. This was something we would have taken for granted years ago. Today it appears the media has expressed the need to reaffirm the special place a family has when a child's misbehaviour is at stake. I noticed the choice of words too given to specify what type of physical punishment should be used. I used to think that was all common sense, I mean like you don't want to hit a 2 year old in the head with a baseball bat and get away with properly administering corporal punishment. I noticed that teenagers were also to be excluded from any potential parental hit list. Times have changed.
Am I better off today that I have read reports on what kind of parental punishment should be given and how it's administered? Am I better off knowing that the teacher has the right to be protected besides the child in an educational milieu when normal verbal exchange isn't sufficient to address an incorrigible child?I believe it does help us see how vulnerable adults can be before the law if we do go outside of what would be accepted as the 'right' punishment to apply either as a parent or as a teacher. And we have come a long way from the abuse I personally witnessed many years ago in the classroom which might have affected my academic performance and sociability back then. I mean it's more difficult for a teacher to have her/his way at applying physical punishment to a child.
On a happy note I wanted to conclude that a judge was referred to as saying that it's okay to use corporal punishment, he could have been discreet about that statement.
Now all I have to do is sit back and watch to see how many parents will take his advise to the letter. You can see I'm cynical about how effective his advise would be for the population as a whole, all it takes is one parent who'll think that any amount of punishment is good. Clearly that is not the case.