The only argument I’ve ever heard for not beating children is the moral one. Has whether it works to encourage learning actually been studied?
BTW, for children born without a sense of pain, it is far worse than you describe. They typically end up with crippling arthritis in their teens or twenties, because they have no feedback to tell them when they’re overstressing their joints. An adult with the condition can understand that they have to consciously compensate for what they can’t feel, but you can hardly stop a small child from ever running around.
The Behaviourists did lots of laboratory work on rats and pigeons. They had spectacular success at building up elaborate behaviours by using positive reinforcement to select fragments of the desired behaviour. The idea of training animals by beating them was killed off by experimental work.
I don’t know the history of the decline of punishment in education. Perhaps there was real experimental work with children, perhaps not. I find it hard to care; given the animal work, the idea that beating works to encourage learning by children now lacks even minimal credibility.
The only argument I’ve ever heard for not beating children is the moral one. Has whether it works to encourage learning actually been studied?
BTW, for children born without a sense of pain, it is far worse than you describe. They typically end up with crippling arthritis in their teens or twenties, because they have no feedback to tell them when they’re overstressing their joints. An adult with the condition can understand that they have to consciously compensate for what they can’t feel, but you can hardly stop a small child from ever running around.
The Behaviourists did lots of laboratory work on rats and pigeons. They had spectacular success at building up elaborate behaviours by using positive reinforcement to select fragments of the desired behaviour. The idea of training animals by beating them was killed off by experimental work.
I don’t know the history of the decline of punishment in education. Perhaps there was real experimental work with children, perhaps not. I find it hard to care; given the animal work, the idea that beating works to encourage learning by children now lacks even minimal credibility.