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

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

Wow...what year was that?

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Wow. I was in grade seven that year. I had no idea Ontario was still giving kids the strap at that point. I know no one in my family ever got it, and my brother might well have deserved it that same year.

[anidada.livejournal.com]

The strap was routine in my Ontario elementary school, in the 70s and early 80s. One particular classmate of mine got it at least once a year. It wasn't much of a deterrent, let's just say. :P

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Well, that's why I think it's better that it's disappearing - it doesn't work.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

Holy crap, that's only a year before I started! If there had been junior kindergarten in my board at that time, I could have had the same experience. (I was born in '83.) That's surreal. I always thought of corporal punishment as something from my parents' era.