I\'m a firm believer of corporal punishment. I for one don\'t think that kids can tell the difference between right or wrong and the only thing that they can really respond to is pain. I think it\'s important that before resorting to such things that whoever is punishing the kid should not do it out of fury.
Children in general have no idea about how things are like in the long-term, and are driven by short-term gain whenever opportunities arise, such as when they need to share stuff or just decide to misbehave. Sometimes it might be easy to lose control when punishing kids, but punishment should not turn into abuse. I think if one is level-headed enough things should turn out ok. In the case of soap shoved down the kid\'s mouth in this thread it\'s a clear-cut case of abuse.
Coming from the same country as Snow_Raven who touched on the book incident, I thought that the principal was wrong to have hit the girl with the soft-cover book, but don\'t think that he should have stepped down considering that the girl had a record of lying compulsively and being a real troublemaker on many other occasions. Similarly I don\'t think anybody in Singapore thought caning Michael Fay back in the \'90s was wrong but look what the Americans thought... Human rights abuses indeed
And to think he got away with fewer strokes than the Hong Kong kid who joined him in his exercise in car-painting. Somebody should tell them that our cars are 3x more expensive than anywhere else in the world and that whipping the guy was the only way to set an example for anybody else silly enough to try that kind of stunt.
The only punishment I am not quite comfortable with is capital punishment, but I guess that should be left to another discussion altogether.
