“I wish there was a world where principals didn’t beat children,” he said.
It turned out that during many of those visits to the principal’s office, the principal had been beating Gray with a paddle he kept in his desk drawer. I learned, to my surprise, that corporal punishment was legal in Texas. School officials did not need the approval of the parent to hit a child, nor did they have to inform the parents. Furious, frustrated, and emotionally bereft, I reminded myself we were in the middle of the Bible Belt, where many believed that to spare the rod was to spoil the child, but that didn’t help much. The week before, the Dallas Morning News had published an article about the use of corporal punishment in schools. The principal of a Texas Christian elementary school had been quoted as saying, “We should be passing bills to encourage corporal punishment.”
The next morning, I marched into the principal’s office determined to let him have it. He motioned me to sit down and pulled the paddle out of his drawer. Years later, Gray would say to me, “Do you remember that principal who beat me? Did you know his paddle had pictures of the Smurfs on it? Isn’t that sick?”
In that moment, I didn’t notice the images on the paddle. As the principal stroked it, I only registered that it was painted bright enamel blue and peppered with brightly colored stickers.
“You have to understand, Mrs. Gideon, that if you refuse to have Gray tested for ADD, we have to take other measures.” He paused. “You know, one problem with Gray is that he’s not afraid.”
“What do you mean he’s not afraid?”
“He’s not afraid. He comes in here, knowing he’s going to be paddled, and he stands there, defiant, and refuses to apologize or promise that he won’t misbehave.” The principal tapped the paddle against the palm of his hand, thinking.
“He’s only five years old!”
“Why do you think he’s not afraid, Mrs. Gideon?”
“St. Germain, Sheryl St. Germain, I don’t have Gray’s dad’s last name. Please don’t call me that again. And I guess he’s not afraid because he’s never had to be afraid.”
“Don’t you discipline him at home?”
“He has to do quiet time when he does something wrong.”
“Does that work?”
“Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.”
“What about your husband?”
“What about my husband?” I felt like he was speaking a foreign language.
“Does he discipline your son?”
“We both do quiet time. We try to be consistent.” Instead of building up to tell the principal off, I was weakening. I could feel myself becoming emotional, and I knew that if I didn’t get out of there soon, I was going to cry. I couldn’t bear the thought of this man hitting my son, however sanctioned it might be.
“Well,” he said, “once you get him on Ritalin, I’m sure he’ll be in here less often. It really does help, you know. The teachers like it. It helps them do their job and keep order in the classroom. And Gray will find that he’s better able to make friends too. Right now, I don’t think too many of his classmates want to hang around him because he’s always getting in trouble.”
“But this is just kindergarten!” I said. I was beginning to feel like I was in a Kafka novel. Nothing made sense. “I thought kids just colored and hung out and got used to each other in kindergarten. Since when did it become like the army?”
I felt like I was suffocating. I left the principal’s office and drove around and around the neighborhood, looking at the homes of the parents and children who went to Gray’s school. I had never noticed how neatly clipped and submissive their hedges looked, how their trees were pruned until they looked like spiritless soldiers. I wondered if the children playing in the yards were well-beaten children. I had thought I’d done the right thing trying to move into what was supposed to be a good school district, but now I was confused. Had I done the right thing? Why hadn’t I told the principal never to touch my son again? What kind of wimp was I? Was I so unsure of my own methods? I had to conclude that I was. What did I know about raising kids? Gray was my only child.
I remembered the beatings my father used to give us. His belt always hung on the back of his easy chair, and if we did anything wrong, we would “get the belt.” I remember being whipped so hard my thighs blistered. I don’t remember it ever changing anything, but I do remember it making me mad, then humiliated, and then I’d cry and my father would eventually stop. He was usually measured when he meted out punishment to the girls, but my brothers really got it, especially Jay, who was always in trouble, and who wound up dropping out of school, going to prison, and dying in his early twenties of a drug overdose. He got a lot of beatings, and my father would sometimes go into a rage when he beat him. Sometimes he was drunk, my father, and the beatings would last longer, though they’d be sloppier. Jay and Gray shared enough traits—asthma, defiance, trouble with authority, problems attending and organizing—that I was already beginning to worry that Gray might share Jay’s fate. Jay would surely have been diagnosed with ADD had he been born a generation later. Would Ritalin have saved him? Repeated beatings surely had not.
I imagined the principal beating Gray. I imagined what Gray must have been feeling. Rivers rising in him, flooding, unchecked, something in him drowning. The principal saying he needs to learn fear. My father beating and beating my brother, throwing him up, down, against the door. For each demerit a beating, my brother not giving in, not hitting back, not crying in front of anyone. Like my son, maybe, the welts rising in his heart, his guts twisting and weeping.
Over the next weeks, I spent several nights sleepless, the principal’s words and his twangy Texas accent infecting every conscious moment: You have to understand that if you refuse to have Gray tested for ADD, we have to take other measures. So, were these my options? Drug him or beat him? Suddenly, Ritalin didn’t seem like such a bad choice.
Corporal punishment is a time-honored and traditional method of discipline in American schools. Historically, it was seen as a method of literally “beating the devil” out of misbehaving children. Learning theorists, however, argue that punishment as a means of behavior control is complex, and that it can accelerate or retard performance of some behavior. A child can habituate to punishment and, if beaten enough, become a psychopath. Every study I could find on corporal punishment suggested it led to violence and aggression rather than self-discipline. It made tragic sense to me that Texas, the state with the worst record for the death penalty, would also be the leading practitioner of corporal punishment in the schools.
In 1999, almost 74,000 of Texas’s 3.9 million students were paddled. About eighty-three percent were boys, according to a U.S. Department of Education survey. (Unsurprisingly, the percentage of boys versus girls diagnosed with ADD is around the same.) In 1989, the year Gray started kindergarten, Texas was one of very few states that had no procedural requirements for corporal punishment. Teachers needn’t have approval of the principal; the punishment did not have to take place in the presence of another adult, or without undue anger. It did not have to be reasonable, nor did the punishers have to have approval from the parents. School officials could strike on the head and face, and there was no restriction against deadly force. It could even take place in presence of other students.
Most researchers agree that corporal punishment often appears to result in the temporary reduction of undesirable behavior, and in this it is not unlike Ritalin. To be effective in the long run, however, the punishment must be extremely harsh and repeated—and even then, the results are inconclusive. In an essay about the link between corporal punishment and delinquency, Ralph Welsh writes that no recidivist male delinquent existed who had never been exposed to corporal punishment, be it a belt, a board, an extension cord, or a fist.
As late as 1994, almost all