IT REALLY is a mean season in education when we only can rely on corporal punishment to maintain school discipline. It is as if educators are bankrupt about creative and innovative ideas for classroom management. And this bankruptcy, if it does exist, places into question the role of the school teacher in enhancing the quality of student/teacher interaction. Advocates of corporal punishment do not bring to the fore its myths, its capacity to create more problems than it can solve, the perception of the act being violent giving the school an inbuilt evolving framework of violence, and the use of alternative learning methods. Part 1 addressed these matters through presenting limited aspects of studies on corporal punishment.

And I suspect that advocates for and against corporal punishment may feel justified in their respective positions. Nevertheless, it is evidence that policy makers need, to work out whether the pros outweigh the cons, and vice versa, and then formulate policies consistent with that evidence.
Today’s Perspectives will continue to present some studies on corporal punishment, and in no way I am trying to provide an exhaustive listing of findings. To do this would require conducting a systematic review of the literature on corporal punishment. And this is not what these Perspectives set out to achieve.
British schoolchildren in the 19th and a good part of the 20th Centuries experienced corporal punishment, where the assumption was that corporal punishment was good enough and not divisive for upholding school discipline. Nonetheless, Middleton (2008) in the History of Education disputed these assumptions. He found that these assumptions did not prevail in many schools. Given this situation, those schools still engaged in physical punishment should seek to experiment with disciplinary methods of those schools not applying corporal punishment. And schools that use corporal punishment must begin to look at its impact on the physical and emotional demeanor of children experiencing such physical acts.
John and McNaughton (1990) and Strauss (1999) argued that major models of behavioural management do not see physical punishment as effective for maintaining discipline. And the American Academy of Pediatrics (1996), among others, has devastating evidence demonstrating that corporal punishment physically and emotionally damages children. Clearly, policy makers are ignoring evidence from reputable scholars, and consequently, creating educational policies for children that are not evidence-based.
In the U.S., 31 States have now done away with corporal punishment. And where it prevails, that usage disproportionately applies to racial minorities and the poor in the primary and intermediate grades (Hyman, 1996). The UK did away with corporal punishment in its public schools in the 1980s, and the private schools abolished it in 2003. And declining use of corporal punishment is not only a factor in the U.S. and the UK, but also in large parts of the developing world. Countries today still engaged in corporal punishment should seriously reconsider its policy position in light of the declining significance of corporal punishment and the growing evidence available against its effectiveness.