What Disciplinary Sanctions Should Teachers Be Allowed to Use?

In earlier centuries, physical punishment was a common thing. Teachers would use a cane to hurt their students when they misbehaved, even more extremely teachers would have their children kneel on the ground with their hands in the air for an hour to cause them considerable pain in places such as Africa. However, now these types of punishments are seen as immoral and unthinkable by parents and teachers. Students are now punished with detentions and notes to their parents which although less severe is arguably a better and more popular policy for schools.

Firstly, hitting as a disciplinary sanction should not be allowed by teachers because it does not teach children anything. School is designed to teach children the skills they will need as a grown up which includes knowing right from wrong. Hitting as a punishment does not teach this lesson because the child will only fear pain the next time, instead of understanding that what they did was unacceptable, and this means that they can not advance intellectually. Furthermore, hitting is wrong because it is hurting children. A lot of the time, naughty behaviour stems from problems at home which children usually cannot prevent from happening.

So hitting leave children feeling more despondent and confused when they should be getting help from their school. Teachers can also so easily go to far when they are hitting children, and even if guidelines are put for how long or for what reason a child should be hit, there is no way we can monitor the teachers. Therefore hitting can not be a long term or safe way to bring up school children well. However, some argue that hitting as a disciplinary action should be brought back because detentions and other types of modern day punishments are just not good enough.

Surely making them feel fear before doing a naughty thing, will eventually condition them to realise that doing certain things are bad because you will be severely punished? Moreover there are some students who are too naughty for other less severe punishments and therefore hitting is the only way to get them to behave. The more modern disciplinary sanction of detentions are an arguably much better form of punishment for all students because it forces them to stay in school one hour longer than usual. Most children can not wait to get out of school so that they can go out with their friends.

Therefore staying behind at school makes children feel left out and this will arguably stop them from doing a naughty thing because they would not want to stay in school when they could be with having fun with their friends. Furthermore, other methods such as being hit by your teacher can not be made aware to the parents as easily as getting detention after school can. In most cases a letter is sent home, but even if one isn’t, the parents would notice the lateness of the student and would eventually find out.

Students would have to deal with their parent’s punishment for getting a detention coupled with the school punishment and this all means that a repeat offence should be much less likely. However this is not practically the case because detentions simply are not severe enough to stop exceptionally naught children from misbehaving. Children are easily able to fabricate lies for their parents and never have them no about the hour they had to spend at school doing homework or even being with their friends who got detention as well.

Detention, nowadays, is more of an annoying chore than anything to really avoid by students. Recently there have been studies showing a huge increase in the amount of swearing and abusive behaviour in classrooms in poorer areas of Greater London. It is imperative that we have proper sanctions for these students because without it a naughty student will continue his or her bad behaviour onto the street and this could result in terrible consequences.

So, arguably the method of detention is a weak way of punishment because it is not harsh enough to stop children being naughty but at the moment there seems to be no other relatively effective way to punish children. In conclusion, hitting is seen mainly by all as inhumane and unnecessary for the development of children and simply too severe. Detention similarly is seen as a waste of time, ineffective and just not severe enough. Therefore, it is crucial that schools come up with a new modern disciplinary sanction that has the right amount of severity to be able to combat the raising number of naughty children in certain schools.