Not enough information, but interesting.

[velvetpage]

I followed a link somewhere and came up with a page about corporal punishment in U.S. schools. It seems 21 states have not yet banned corporal punishment, and of those, about 13 use it on more than 1000 students per year.

While that is nothing short of appalling, I found one image even more interesting. It's the map of which states have banned corporal punishment, which punish fewer than 1000 students per year, and which punish more than 1000 per year. Here's the map.

Now, that map made me sit up and take notice, because it looked an awful lot like a memory I had of maps from a few years ago. So I went looking, and I found:

1) Not a single state that went blue in 2004 allows corporal punishment.
2) The states that have been Republican stronghouses for as long as I've been an adult almost all not only allow it, but have more than 1000 cases of such punishment per year.
3) The states that go back and forth between Republican and Democrat in recent years make up the bulk of the states that allow corporal punishment but practise little of it. There are states in this category that fall into all three categories on the corporal punishment map.

Now I want a study of the possible correlation between the state of the education system and the likelihood of states voting a certain way. This has peaked my curiosity.

Comments

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Well, you've heard the old joke about Canada being a country that works better in practice than in theory, right? Nobody really has it together - every country in the world has a chunk of the population convinced that they're doing it all wrong. Some of them are even right. :)

Education systems are naturally of particular interest to me, especially since, when I tell some Americans I'm a teacher, they mentally lump me in with the people from their own region. The comparison is often not favourable.

[starry-midnight.livejournal.com]

Well boo for them lumping you in and making generalizations. That makes me sad when people do that...especially to teachers. You guys are IT. You have your finger on the pulse of what's happening and what to come...you are helping mold the future...screw politicians it's the teachers who bring new hope and ideas into this world. I think you are a wonderful teacher who thinks outside the box and challenges herself and THINKS and in an excellent field doing hard, underappreciated, noble work. I applaud you and all teachers.