Punishment- what's the point?

Punishment- what’s the point?

If you haven’t figured it out yet, you soon will be able to put the list together of my pet peeves with schools and the education process. They all have to do with the umbrella phrases I use- either Mental Health in Education or Social and Emotional Learning. Either way you choose to call it, it refers to the mind and the emotions and their connection to the process of learning and of course teaching.

So far the peeves I have revealed here are competition in the classroom and effects of emotions and emotional experiences on learning.
Another of my ‘favourites’ is the issue of punishment, especially corporal punishment. I am well aware of the mass of hornets that start buzzing around as soon as I say those words. But as with all other issues of Mental Health and/or Social and Emotional Learning we cannot leave our heads buried in the sand or elsewhere.

I will release the hornets with a few thoughts. We need to understand what is punishment and its real effects on our young people. There are still parents and teachers who believe that the only way to motivate students to learn is by threat of some form of punishment, either immediately or later in life or by instilling fear.



Some of the types of abuse that our children are being constantly subjected to in schools include:
Verbal abuse: insults, put-downs, or name-calling. We tend to brush these off as insignificant partly because the effects of these are not so obvious or instant. But each of us could think back to how badly we felt to be called a derogatory name or to be insulted or put-down.
Isolation/seclusion: We teach our children from early on not to play with a friend when we are not pleased with him. Teachers and parents use the practice of ignoring or isolating a child when he most needs attention and someone to help him through a bad time. “Time out” is convenient for adults when they are too busy or preoccupied to figure out how to really help the child through the emotional distress that is causing the disruptive or inappropriate or unacceptable behaviour at the moment.
Invalidation: Students receive subtle and not so subtle messages about their self-worth and academic potential from the school environment. Minority students are typically discouraged from having and pursuing big goals academically. Females are still not as encouraged as males to enter fields that involve Math and Science.
One of the real sad aspects of the issue of punishment is the way some adults have convinced themselves that the punishment is for the child’s good. Unfortunately this has been instilled in them when they were being punished and was the only way to resolve the pain in their minds and to continue to survive through it.