Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, July 17, 1993                   TAG: 9309040307
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SPARE THE ROD IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Many parents would also agree with this statement from Farris: "One of the reasons we have so many discipline problems in the schools is that kids figure out that they can run over adults who have responsibility but not authority."

How many, though, want to give teachers authority to pull down an errant child's britches and take a razor strop to a bare backside?

How many parents would want their young children publicly humiliated, not to mention hurt, by officially administered floggings?

Have no illusions. Abuses happened before corporal punishment became illegal in Virginia schools. Not just a quick swack with a small ruler to get a kid's attention. But manhandling and sometimes serious hurting of very small bodies by much bigger and stronger adults.

Even where there is no abuse, hitting is inconsistent with the mission of teaching. (It is also inconsistent with the mission of parenting, its wide acceptance in former generations notwithstanding. But leave that aside for now. At the least, hitting does not belong in public schools.)

Farris, the GOP nominee for lieutenant governor, is the father of eight children, with another on the way. We're not suggesting for one moment that he favors cruelty.

But his call for a return to corporal punishment in schools - made at a recent meeting of the Virginia Press Association - is misguided and potentially dangerous.

Child abuse - physical, mental, emotional and sexual - has already reached awful proportions in this state and nation. It is a vicious, vicious cycle that must be stopped, not promulgated in the name of discipline.

To be sure, most children are abused today by their own parents or guardians, not their teachers. But society should not give anyone - parents or teachers - a license to physically hurt youngsters.

Doubtless, that's not what Farris has in mind. He, and he's certainly not alone on this, simply believes an occasional spanking or paddling of a child by a teacher would do no harm - and might do some "bad" children a lot of good.

But too often, hitting is an expression of anger and frustration, not a controlled exercise of discipline. And what does it teach children?

There's already enough violence in their world, thank you. Teachers should not be adding to it - or suggesting, by example, that it's acceptable behavior when things don't go the way they want.

At the press-group meeting, Farris struck a favorite theme of his - that an anti-religious militancy has invaded public schools. "It is simply wrong," he says, "to run over the rights of students merely because they are religious."

It is simply wrong, too, to run over the rights of students not to be physically abused.