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Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

theguardian.com

281–290 of 713 posts

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#281
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment explains absolutely nothing and it feels utterly irrelevant in either direction and probably shouldn't have been posted. It can be read negatively against boys or negatively against girls so why post it?

> This comment explains absolutely nothing Sure it does. Boys and girls are different. Hence, they receive different treatment, which the OP was originally befuddled by.

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Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#282

The only effective punishment/threat that I saw work on my bullies at school was the threat to remove one of them from the football team and prevent him from playing for the school. He turned it around and was ok after that. It was highly effective because it was a bigger punishment than those used for not doing your homework, and because it was highly relevant to him specifically. It worked because we had 16 student…

I was no bully, but I was caned frequently at school for various other offences. It had zero impact. I saw having to go and queue at the headmaster’s study in the morning for six of the best as a cost of doing business. Short, sharp, sore palms for the morning, over and done with. Now, satisfecit was much more of a threat - having to report every half hour all day every day, having teachers report on every lesson, ev…

We called it a report card. That was a load of nonsense too. I quickly learnt how to forge signatures for it, and even getting the real signatures was a hassle... For the teachers who resented doing it themselves. Absolutely no benefit to it.

We also got punished collectively for things we didn't do. Happened to me on many occasions and I'm still bitter about it. It never flushed out the perps as it was supposed to. I despise the notion of mass punishment for someone else's misdemeanours.

Sounds like you went to the posh place. LOL. Either on a scholarship or family money.

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#283
post #78

I see at least 2 issues with the physical punishment: - it will only make the bullies taking their revenge on vulnerable ones with even more cruelty. And they will plan it carefully to be hard/impossible to prove. It will lead to the escalation, not to the resolution - the power will be abused, it's inevitable. I would be so scared to be in a class where "teacher" has the power to harm me physically! (to clarify: I a…

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Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#284
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds crazy, I know, but perhaps boys and girls are different.

This comment explains absolutely nothing and it feels utterly irrelevant in either direction and probably shouldn't have been posted. It can be read negatively against boys or negatively against girls so why post it?

> It can be read negatively against boys or negatively against girls so why post it?

This part I really do not understand. The undeniable fact that boys and girls are different in several aspects does not make either superior or inferior in value or in dignity.

On the other hand, anything can be read negatively if you put enough will and effort into it, as so many people around here demonstrate.

How about being a bit more constructive in our criticism?

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#285
post #157

This seems a good place to point out that the evidence for the harmful effects of corporal punishment is very low quality: https://wyclif.substack.com/p/the-academic-literature-on-sma...

That's an interesting article, but I find the conclusion peculiar. So there's no good scientific evidence that corporal punishment helps children in the long run, and the best available evidence links it to worse outcomes rather than better ones, but because we can't do stuff like double-blinded studies with control groups, "bans on smacking have got far ahead of the evidence, and should be actively opposed until the…

One point is that "the best available evidence" is of very poor quality, with known obvious confounds and mishandling of longitudinal data. (For example, Robert Larzelere argues that by the methods used, grounding children, and giving them therapy, also harms them: (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/1471-2431-10-1...) Another point is that parents may be well placed to know what is best for their children - better than "experts".

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#286
post #217

I was horrified to read this, assuming it was the same type of caning used on prisoners that causes severe damage and leaves lifelong scars. But apparently it is a much milder form for students [1]: > In a much milder form, caning is used as a disciplinary measure in schools. Boys aged between 6 and 19 may be given up to three strokes with a light rattan cane on the buttocks over clothing or the palm of the hand as a…

If they like it so much, they should apply it to all kids, not just boys.

They like it as a punishment for boys exclusively.

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expel the kid I want everyone to succeed as much as possible, I feel bad for such kids. But at that point, the kid won’t learn, won’t launch, there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for the good kids.

Two problems: 1) school education is mandatory until 16-18 in most countries, so what do you do with them once they get expelled. They have to be in education somewhere - so do you just put them in one school for all the expelled students, which is just constantly on fire? You made the problem much worse for yourself(as in - the state). 2) " there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for th…

So other kids should just be their victims? How is that better?

We should do whatever we can to help kids with problems, but that doesn't include victimising people. Remove the bullies and deal with them elsewhere.

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expel the kid I want everyone to succeed as much as possible, I feel bad for such kids. But at that point, the kid won’t learn, won’t launch, there’s no benefit to keeping them in school and massive consequences for the good kids.

The moment you abandon any attempt to correct the behavior you guarantee they are “lost” to society.

That can be just fine to me.

I still live in my hometown, and while I was never bullied, a bully a year or so above me killed himself in his late 20s.

lol lmao was my reaction xD

Re: Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

#289
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We have overwhelming evidence that corporal punishment is harmful in general, and very harmful for kids. This is false. The evidence is not overwhelming; it's actually extremely poor quality. And the research question is one of the most difficult to resolve in social science. I wrote on this here: https://wyclif.substack.com/p/the-academic-literature-on-sma... . See also this guy: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citati…

There will never be proper studies with control groups to test exactly how harmful beating children is, so this is an unrealistic standard to expect. Given this context, the person you're responding to is correct: we have overwhelming evidence that corporal punishment is harmful in general and very harmful for children.

The point isn't just that we can do RCTs. The point is that the methods used are not even adequate on their own terms. Just as one example, the standard method with longitudinal data would be to throw in individual fixed effects. But they don't do that. Another example: I know of no serious cross-country panel analysis with (say) time and country fixed effects to examine the effect of national spanking bans. There is a cross-country cross-sectional analysis, which is just not adequate to draw any conclusions.

Even if the methods were the best possible given the difficulties, you wouldn't then say this was "overwhelming" evidence. You'd say "the best evidence we've got" and you'd then assume that parents don't know nothing and exercise a bit of humility. (Though to be fair, that argument does not generalise to the Singapore decision-making authorities! Maybe they don't have any deep local knowledge that should lead us to trust their judgment.)

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