Good Children

In the United Kingdom, corporal punishment of children in schools was banned in the mid 80s. Ever since then there have been repeated calls for it to be reintroduced, with supporters claiming that beating children with a cane or other implement is the only way to achieve discipline with a school.

But it turns out the Daily Mail brigade [readers of a highly conservative British tabloid that tries to promote old fashioned values to its out of touch old readers] were dead wrong about the need to beat children.

A long term study has shown that children under the age of 11 in the UK are in fact more engaged and better behaved than they were back in the 1970s. Furthermore, they noted that this improvement has accelerated since the mid 80s when corporal punishment was abolished.

Too often conservatives love to preach to us about how good the 1950s were, and express a desire to model our current society on their misty dreams of yesteryear. But in reality, every generation contains old people within it who like to bang on about the 'good old days.' In all honesty, I suspect these people are simply out of touch with reality.

The world is not going to Hell, each new decade brings change. Some things get better, and some get worse, and some things stay the same. Pretending that that has ever been a perfect time in human history is just simply not realistic or honest.

We all have nostalgia for our youth, and the same will be true for these well behaved young children who are growing up today.