I suspect my position is misunderstood.
The job of educating children rests with the parents. Marx didn't like that idea:
But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations when we replace home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.
Fast forward to this story. Marx would be happy. Public school is serving a troika of societal needs such as training, day care, and indoctrination. Parents are happy with their kids getting 15 min of fame through corporal punishment.
Within public education, the state stands in loco parentis during school hours. That means our forefathers were OK allowing the government to strike their kids, because, well, that's what they would have done. That worked for millennia.
However, just because our elders' generation (and apparently some FRiends) are ok with some dude at school in a suit and tie hitting their kids, I don't share in that happiness. Not just because if someone hits my kids it's war, but because there is a fundamental, game-changing truth that has been established.
Regardless of the alignment of the punishment with the crime or that paperwork is in order, forget for a moment one's feeling about corporal punishment: a vital principle - the rights of the parent - has been surrendered. By extension, you have equally OK'd your child being forced to watch anti-gun films, receive Sex Ed at 6 years old, and attend environmentalist-driven field trips.
Oh sure, there is the School Board, PTA and other flaccid pseudo-levers of power handed to the parent. And maybe after months of fighting and blood, sweat and tears, Johnny doesn't have to go on the field trip.
In the end you cannot ignore the truth: you've surrendered your child to the state.
Thanks for listening.
"He said the three received the punishment only after their parents provided permission."