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Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

theguardian.com

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

#511

Post by sebastiennight »

abc123abc123 wrote: post #283
quiet35 wrote: 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…

[flagged]

> A light slap in the face can be very beneficial for snapping hysterical children out of tantrums. This is proven!

Can you share any reference or scientific study affirming this? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

> hysterical children out of tantrums

In my humble experience, children throwing tantrums are likely experiencing overstimulation or emotional overwhelm, and fixing the causes could eliminate the problem more effectively that slapping the problem out of them.

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

#512

Post by ASalazarMX »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #376
sholladay wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the generic policies can be very strange, too. I once got detention for getting punched in the arm. I was much taller than any of the school bullies, so they mostly didn't start anything with me. But every now and then, they would try. The punch barely hurt and I didn't really care, but another student saw it and reported it. The staff knew what happened, understood that I was the only one that got hit, and t…

> But I became fixated on how unfair it was. I hope from this episode you learned your lesson that if any form of enforcement authority is given to any person or institution, this entity will sooner or later abuse it. If you "got" this lesson, you learned something insanely important for your life: to deeply distrust every authority with (enforcement) power - something much more valuable than basically everything els…

The real lesson is that people in authority prioritize preserving that authority rather than solving problems with it. Even if they're not deliberately malicious, they will risk others before risking their status. The sooner kids understand this, the better they will understand adults.

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

#513

Post by andsoitis »

madaxe_again wrote: post #488
andsoitis wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stereotyping all Afrikaners with that brush is despicable.

I’m sorry, calling Dutch colonists colonisers is despicable? Well, I suppose not just Dutch colonists, they did have their population bolstered by a lot of Austrians and Germans escaping war crime prosecution in the 40’s. Anyway. In the early 90’s, in the U.K.? They were coming over for one reason only. The Afrikaner masters were always racist, always fans of collective punishment and bizarre corporal punishments.

I will just say you lack basic knowledge of history of Afrikaners and South Africa in general and that, coupled with your prejudice on display, is a pretty ugly sight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaners#

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa#History

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

#514

Post by kbbgl87 »

rayiner wrote: post #490
kbbgl87 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when I was younger there was a TV series showing the differences between how things are done in Singapore and my home country. The show showed how efficient, clean, organized, fair Singapore is. An example, how they prevent traffic jams by providing licenses to roads which forced people to find and organize ride shares. Fast forward to a few years ago, I had the privilege to fly there for a few days on vac…

Singapore can undoubtedly be brutal to some. But it's surrounded by countries where that brutal existence is the norm for almost everyone. My dad tells stories like that about his village in Bangladesh. He has a hard time denying my kids treats when they ask. When he was a kid, one of his cousins had asked for his favorite meal and his parents told him they'd have it the next day. But he got a fever and died overnigh…

The ironic thing is that the latter taxi driver I mentioned was actually Bangladeshi-Singaporean (I believe ~9% of Singaporeans are of Indian descent). Reading the book Banker to the Poor by Muhammad Yunus really opened my eyes to the instability and poverty in Bangladesh.

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

#515

Post by ASalazarMX »

novaleaf wrote: post #491
danpalmer wrote: post #129

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 think many people who wouldn't be disincentivized by demerits/expulsion/etc would find the threat of intense physical pain highly motivating. Caning is no joke.

I went to primary school when some teachers were still allowed physical punishment, and that was even encouraged by many parents. Our version of caning was slapping your face-up palms with the yardstick, and that honestly was so terrifying most kids behaved.

There was one though, small kid that probably had a harder life at home than us, he wasn't fazed by the caning, didn't even flinch. Even him avoided getting in trouble too frequently, so caning still kind of worked.

Edit: I think the most terrifying thing wasn't the pain, but the sharp SLAP!.

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

#516

Post by xdennis »

throwawayk7h wrote: post #188

I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.

> I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.

It's kind of a weird take to say that the issue here is that girls aren't being whipped too.

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

#517

Post by donkers »

dtj1123 wrote: post #387
sholladay wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the generic policies can be very strange, too. I once got detention for getting punched in the arm. I was much taller than any of the school bullies, so they mostly didn't start anything with me. But every now and then, they would try. The punch barely hurt and I didn't really care, but another student saw it and reported it. The staff knew what happened, understood that I was the only one that got hit, and t…

I had a similar issue. A teacher found me with a smaller boy (poor kid had some genuine emotional issues, in retrospect was probably being abused outside of school) who was nevertheless doing his best to rip my ears off. The fact that I had my hands on his wrists was seen as reason to split the resulting punishment between both of us. These days I pin a lot of this kind of thing down to the psychology of teachers, wh…

> relatively dull intellect

You can see data for this by looking at GRE or SAT scores across intended majors. It made me sad to see education majors generally do very poorly compared to the rest.

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

#518

Post by xdennis »

joefourier wrote: post #469
xienze wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Boys and girls being different does not mean one sex deserves corporal punishment and one does not. Girls are equally capable of cyberbullying (which is covered by this law), why should they only get detention while a 9 year old boy has to suffer physical violence? What does this teach girls - that they can get away with more? That they're more fragile than even a prepubescent boy? If the law punishes one demographic…

> Boys and girls being different does not mean one sex deserves corporal punishment and one does not. Girls are equally capable of cyberbullying (which is covered by this law), why should they only get detention while a 9 year old boy has to suffer physical violence?

In many systems of law, the punishment should mirror the crime. You gouge out an eye -> the government gouges out one of your eyes.

In every country, men commit almost all violent crimes. In school, boys physically bully other boys. Hence the physical punishment for them.

> What does this teach girls - that they can get away with more? That they're more fragile than even a prepubescent boy?

Yes, for homo sapiens, the female is more fragile than the male. This is basic biology. I'm sure that in praying mantis society, females get harsher punishments.

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

#519

Post by dotancohen »

gambiting wrote: post #403
dotancohen wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

12 year olds? My son was hammering nails into wood and drilling into masonry at 8. The Bedouin children are in the fields unsupervised with the goats at age 6. 12 year olds are not babies. Both my daughters were skydiving at 9. Kids can do a lot.

>>My son was hammering nails into wood and drilling into masonry at 8 And was he doing that 8 hours a day, 5 days a week? Like you know...he would do at work? Or was it just a nice thing he did with his parents helping out with some construction projects you had going on? >>12 year olds are not babies. Of course not, but then again I have to ask the same question once more - if you were in charge of national policy,…

  > And was he doing that 8 hours a day, 5 days a week? Like you know...he would do at work?
No, he was doing it for maybe a few hours at a time, no more. He demonstrated capability.

  > if you were in charge of national policy, what kind of work program would you establish for 12 year olds that misbehave at school?
I would not establish a work program for 12 year olds that misbehave at school. I would however ensure that there exist programs for 12 year olds who have proven that they can not function in the company of polite mannered society.
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