Different attitudes to punishment

Soon after we moved from Singapore to the UK, I had admission interviews with a number of schools. Thanks to the trivial, controlling Singaporean experience, I got offers from all the schools I had applied for.

This time I was no longer in the primary education, but a newbie in the secondary section, just like everyone else in the school. This time I did not only have a few subject teachers, a class teacher but also a house parent. My dad told me stories of the scary teachers at a boarding school in Scotland when he was a boarder in the 70s, but it was an entirely different story when I went to mine in England in the late 90s.

Different from David Copperfield, no teacher shouted at anyone, let alone spanking anyone. In many ways my school was like the one I went to in Singapore, where teachers almost never had to yell at anyone. It was the atmosphere in the school that made you feel like behaving yourself.

At my boarding school, it was the same. Everyone was good, at least academically.

There we set the rules together. Then the teacher gave each of us a copy of the rules. We signed it and kept it in our student handbook. It was a new experience to me, because rules were prescribed to us back in my schools in Singapore and France.

Another difference was that students were rarely punished. Every evening after the dinner, we had one hour with our house parent and we could talk about almost anything, even some bad behaviors in class. They had a very clear distinction between a person and her behaviors, but of course it did not mean it was totally acceptable to behave badly on purpose.

When someone kept making troubles at school, she was sent to the headmistress. It was more about understanding what was wrong and helping the student solve the problem rather than just prescribing some punishment. The Singaporean school and the French school I went to were keen on fixing or eliminating the problem with punishment, while the English school focused quite a lot on understanding the cause of the problem.

If a student had to be punished, the punishment always had to do with the problem itself. It was more than just a deterrent.

I was almost never punished at the English school over my two years there, but I remember something what my friend had after swearing.

She was sent to the headmistress and probably got scolded. The headmistress then asked her to write a 100-word passage using only swear words that evening and bring it back to school the next day with her parents' signatures.

Recently I have been looking back at all these, as I started thinking about what to do one day when I have my own kids. Should I not spank my kids? Should I lecture my kids? Should I become friends with my kids?

And should my husband and I stop practicing Christian domestic discipline?