preview

Essay on Corporal Punishment

Decent Essays

The deciding factor in the future of corporal punishment is seen in the Ingraham v. Wright Supreme Court case. In 1970, James Ingraham, an eighth grade student of Drew Junior High School was one of the many beneficiaries of corporal punishment distributed by Willie Wright, the principal of the high school. The rationality behind Ingraham’s punishment was that he was slow to respond to his teacher instructions. As a result, his teacher sent him to the principal office where he bent over the table was given twenty licks with a paddle. The paddling was so severe, according to the Ingraham’s doctor, he needed to miss weeks of school due to hematoma on his buttocks. Defined by Merriam-Webster, a hematoma is clotted blood that forms in a …show more content…

He continues to say, this can develop to be too expensive and time consuming and that the country is split on this issue… yet we can discern no trend towards the elimination of corporal punishment by making it so costly (Hyman and Wise, 1979, p. 184).
After a losing battle Ingraham faced, both in the U.S. and State Supreme Court, Principal Wright and his colleagues around the country were able to continue in practicing physical discipline, even with the new added uncertainty surrounding it. This case increased the awareness of corporal punishment in Florida and around the country, especially extreme where this level of discipline was displayed in schools. As seen in this trial, the collaborative effort by the justice departments and their want to stay out of state-based issues, sided with the Florida law and educational system because they believed that the actions toward Ingraham and Andrews were justifiable on the basis that they were in school and because educators performed the punishment. Questions that I have developed. The first question is why? Why did the teacher not reprimand the student? Why make the student miss any class time because he did not respond? Why punish a student because you feel that the student is not going to be late for class? Were we not taught that late is better than never? More specifically,

Get Access