Christ and Punishment (Get it?)

Merry Christmas to you, as I'm typing this the holiday is just puttering out for you. I had a rather nice holiday. Danny, Rie, and I went to the batting cages and hit some baseballs for a while. Next, we went to the arcade, but left when we saw that Peter was there. (Peter is a Korean who tried to be our friend. He is emotionless and annoying. So, we passively avoid him.) We then went shopping at Home Plus, bought some ingredients and made one helluva vegetarian chili. It was quite delicious. All we were missing was cumin, garbanzo beans, and jalapeno peppers. Tane arrived when we started making it. He told us about the Church service we went to, he let us in on the secret, and then we ate Chili. Forgoing the normal holiday classics, we enjoyed our chili with Scrooged, and Champagne courtesy of Tane's parents. Thanks for the stockings you two! And now for something completely different.

Punishment
Korea is a rather odd country in terms of how students are disciplined. Many practices that are common here would lead to rampant firing and high class lawsuits in America. Corporal punishment was officially banned by legal decree several years ago, but its use is still widespread. I felt uneasy during orientation when I was told that it still occurs. I felt that I could not take the sight of adults hitting children with switches.

Upon arriving at school, I soon realized how prevalent and integral it was to the education system here. Every teacher has a small arsenal of different implements to use when doling out punishment. Some sticks are meant to look intimidating, some are meant to make scary *Thwaking* sounds, and others try to increase the damage area. Not every teacher practices these methods, but I'd only need one hand to count them.

All of the punishments are not carried out with weapons. Many of them involve putting students in stress positions or making them do calisthenics. Students that are late each morning are corralled and forced to stand at the entrance gate of the school and do squats as their peers trickle in to join them. The stress positions involve students sitting on their knees for long periods of time writing the same lines over and over and over for as long as an hour. Other punishments involve relocating your desk to the hallway outside of the teachers office. This cold drafty hallway is spent in near isolation except for the transition time and those using it for access.

At first, all these practices shocked me, seeing them over and over again. Occasionally hearing yells and screams from the hallway was very unnerving. But now, I don't seem to notice or even mind. Seeing a student get his ear tweaked or receive a short noogie seems in order in some cases. What do you do with a student who yells during class, punches to person sitting next to him, or tells the teacher, "Fuck you." Here, you'll get a slap on the wrist or you'll spend a lot of time in the hall to think about what you've done.

The main idea in all of these cases is applying negative reinforcement. It's simple psychology. You reward good behavior with praise and bad behavior with punishment. Both need to be an appropriate level of stimulus as you wouldn't buy a student a new car getting an A or burn down the house of a student who burped in front of you. So what is appropriate here? I started thinking about this today because of this news article that I read. It also brought to light two older articles.

http://koreabeat.com/?p=3286
"Sixth-grade Seoul English teacher Kim Yeong-hwa has written a book about the trials Korean teachers are now facing because of the impossibility of imposing corporal punishment. Apparently she doesn’t read the newspaper; corporal punishment keeps getting banned because teachers keep using it in ever-more creative ways."

The other articles that are referenced are stories on punishment. One of them is about a day-care center that punished children by stripping them naked and locking them out on the fire escape for 10-15 minutes. This is abhorrent and may seem barbaric of Koreans, but it's not anything different than from what can be found in the US. In fact, I'd wager that the US has far more cases such as this that are even more extreme.

For example, a current practice in place in US prisons and schools is the isolation room. These have been around for a while and don't seem to be going away. Isolation is an interrogation method used that's designed to break down the mind. It's designed to disassociate you from the outside world and break down your thought patterns. They are especially cruel to those with mental handicaps as even shown in Iowa. Many of these "tombs" have been green lighted as okay, but child psychologists have given strict recommendations and requirements that make the use of these okay, such as constant supervision, wall padding, and discretion that the punishment is used appropriately. Many times these guidelines are not followed.

How are guidelines like these made and how should they be enforced? Voluntary enforcement only works if people have a good sense of of morality or are trapped in the panopticon. As reported here, educators are still grappling with this issue even though it has finalized as law over a decade ago.

"In the future, principals at schools involved in corporal punishment-related incidents must make immediate reports to the appropriate board of education.The Seoul Office of Education announced on the 5th that it plans to implement a system to punish teachers, principals, and other educators who have been concealing such cases rather than quickly reporting them as required.

The Office also plans to conduct inspections through the end of the year on the regulations at individual schools regarding corporal punishment and hairstyles.

The inspections are intended to discover and ameliorate cases of violations of students’ rights. The inspection committee will be made up of educators experienced in guidance counseling as well as human rights experts.

Corporal punishment regulations will be inspected to see whether the rules are being observed, what the reaction would be of school committee members to creating or revising the rules, whether there have been cases of corporal punishment, and how such cases ought to be handled. Hair regulations will be investigated to see whether they are used in the most limited degree necessary for educational purposes, whether students’ opinions have been taken into account, whether the regulations are appropriate and can be applied at the actual time, and whether there are forcible haircuts."

I wouldn't hold my breath over this issue. It doesn't seem like it will be resolved anytime soon. I do wonder though how this is affecting people though. I've read that Child psychologists demarcate the line between punishment and abuse with the use of an object. If a parent strikes a child with an object, it's considered abuse. If they're spanked with the hand or scolded in some manner short of punching, then it's not. I wonder what sort of long term affects all of this punishment has on the students if any. When I see them get punished, they bounce back really quickly and just take the punishment as any old thing. I wouldn't guess that they're developing a psychological victim complex that will affect their upbringing into adult hood, but I don't know. I've prattled on for too long now, tell me what you think.