I HAVE never detracted from the view that a teacher who applies corporal punishment is a teacher with a failing teaching method. Indeed, there are some who will argue that teachers applying physical force in the classroom tend to achieve the best exam-oriented results from students. In this situation, good results perceived as coming from the use of physical force may conceal the real psychological trauma a child experiences, and where such results may even dissuade parents and guardians from seeing the true colours of physical punishment in the classroom.
Education theory and education philosophy address many issues other than corporal punishment. Nevertheless, what I am addressing in today’s Perspectives is mainly focused on corporal punishment.

An appropriate content pedagogy (teaching skills and abilities) and education philosophy may be factors that could work against the use of corporal punishment. In fact, they could make the application of physical force unattractive. And this is what I am presenting in today’s Perspectives.
Many classrooms prone to using corporal punishment are functioning with a traditional, and less so, a progressive education structure. Let me explain.
John Dewey in Experience and Education (1938) noted that educational theory over the years has presented a conflict between the view that education is development from within on the one hand, and that education is development from the outside on the other hand; and it is the job of education, therefore, to remove this view that education is development from the inside (traditional education), creating in its place a development happening from the outside (progressive education). This educational theory really

poses a conflict between traditional versus progressive education.
Dewey mentions three features of traditional education: curriculum from the past, standard and rules from the past, and the distinctive prototype of the school organisation as supportive of things past, and I would add vis-à-vis ‘imposition’. Dewey believes these features determine the purpose and pedagogy of classroom instruction and discipline. Corporal punishment would thrive under these circumstances.
For instance, under traditional education, the school structure, using an ‘imposition’ modus operandi, transmits to a new generation a curriculum comprising  information and skills coming from an earlier period; and from the past too, we find that standards and codes of conduct shape moral behaviour.
Some people reject traditional education, and attempt to use progressive education as its replacement; a new education that exhibits the opposites of traditional education. Notwithstanding that perhaps the new education did not fully accept corporal punishment as in traditional education, in its attempt to replace the old with something new, we still have a problem. Dewey refers to this problem, thus: given this new education that by definition rejects the past, how do we still transmit that past that will enable students to appreciate the present? This question becomes real in making a  choice between either traditional, or progressive education.
And in discussing the way forward to assess the status of corporal punishment in learning, let us not become entangled in this complex web of traditional versus progressive education. Both have endearment to corporal punishment, but traditional more so than progressive education. There is a need then to work out the exit route from these two systems: traditional and progressive.
The exit route to assess the significance of corporal punishment in the classroom may require us to observe and apply the connection between education and educative experience which is part of the Deweyan philosophy of education.
In Dewey’s terms, experience can be educative as well as miseducative. Educative experience has the capacity to generate further experience. In fact, education is of, by, and for educative experience in Deweyan philosophy. Certainly, corporal punishment as an experience may be miseducative, as it is inhibits the growth of further experience.
And corporal punishment as an experience for students does produce callousness which would limit further experience. In the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire (1982) sees education as a banking concept, where education develops into an act of depositing as occurs in a bank; the the teacher is the depositor and students are the depositories.
And this banking concept of education produces miseducative experience, as it restricts the growth of further experience; students have no say in what is deposited, and when students as the depositories  become recalcitrant, the teacher as the depositor unleashes the whip. And, indeed, corporal punishment is not on the radar in the Deweyan connection between education and educative experience.