Number Eleven of Seth Godin's Manifesto: My Fear of Corporal Punishment

 My friend showed me an article by Seth Godin that blew me away. It's a manifesto on changing the public school system and the different ways the current system is beyond messed up.

 Seth's manifesto is broken down into numbered points. I will be writing about number eleven today.

11. To efficiently run a school, amplify fear (and destroy passion)

School’s industrial, scaled-up, measurable structure means that fear must be used to keep the masses in line. There’s no other way to get hundreds or thousands of kids to comply, to process that many bodies, en masse, without simultaneous coordination.

And the flip side of this fear and conformity must be that passion will be destroyed. There’s no room for someone who wants to go faster, or someone who wants to do something else, or someone who cares about a particular issue. Move on. Write it in your notes; there will be a test later. A multiple-choice test.

Do we need more fear?

Less passion?

This is for all of the children who were, and in some places still are,  subject to swats, whips, beatings, and other forms of physical and mental punishment. All of which destroy passion to instill the obedient type of fear listed above.

In my youth I had my fair share of hits. My now non-existent backside was first broken by a first grade teacher. We'll call her Ms. Growler. She would use a ping pong paddle on anyone that 'bothered' her. She saw me as an easy mark, due to my meek and sensitive nature. 

 One day, I recall that her voice had a break in it when she shouted my name to come to her desk. I froze in shock. I was trembling for the whole two minutes that I took in going up to her desk. When I arrived, with head lowered, she pierced my soul when she yelled,

"Be Quiet!".


Oh the hot tears ran to the edge of my chin, only to dive to their deaths onto the speckled tile floor, under Ms. Growlers desk. 


 "Why did she just yell at me?" I couldn't understand the logic behind someone yelling to silence someone else. Someone who was not talking, but spacing out in serene silence.


 "I can't handle this!". I broke down and sobbed, right in the middle of my walk back to the desk. That's when she got the upper hand.


 "Shock, in the hall, now! I will not have this kind of disruption!"


 I sobbed all the way into the hall. She came to meet me thirty seconds after I had leaned on the wall. 


 "Bend and touch your ankles", she said as she rubbed the red rubber texture on the paddle.


 I had no choice but to do what she said. I had been looking for the only adult that I could think of that would stop this madness, but even the sweet old lady principal was not going to save me from the first of a huge series of unwarranted swats. 


 She hit me once, and in doing so sent a rage through me that has never left my body. A blind, ignorant hatred that has skewed my perception on all educators. As a sign from the gods, her paddle broke over my tiny body. I felt like I had been spared by a divine power, but she had a back up.


 I got three more that day, and about a hundred that year. I never had another teacher who had swat me that many times, but those early experiences with corporal punishment started a fight against the fear that I still cling to today. Instead of instilling an obedience, they turned away someone passionate to learn. The direction that my career as a student took was one fueled by rebelliousness and subversion.  




 I recommend reading Seth's Manifesto to anyone who has any interest at all in the future of the public school system. If we all believe in change, we can work toward a better future for our eventual leaders!


Read the manifesto here