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I wouldn't say that the majority of run-of-the-mill, badly-behaved kids commit their misdemeanours for any reason other than they can. There were plenty of times in my schooldays when I'd quite have liked to look daring and witty in front of my friends by lashing into a teacher I didn't like, or walking off halfway through a bollocking doing "talk to the hand", or slapping Sister Pauline one back. But I didn't because I would have been thrashed with a ruler or a cane immediately, and given another hiding when my ashamed mother found out. Even when I started teaching, verbal abuse from a pupil to a teacher would have got you sent to SLT for the cane or the rule, so kids didn't do it. The game wasn't worth the candle. Unless that child had no control over his/her responses, could not resist the urge to mouth off or lash out, in which case they would have been in a Special School anyway, it didn't take much of a mental battle to decide that sulky, resentful discretion would be the better alternative. Now, we have the media model of lippy smartarsy interaction between teens and adults, the equality with which kids are treated by their parents, the confusion between healthy self-control and unhealthy repression, and the general erosion of respect for authority of any kind, set against the dogmatic, institutionalised horror of physical discipline - of anything that makes the child feel more than mildly inconvenienced for a short time - which means that teachers are always entirely dependent upon the inclination of the child on that day, at that time, for reasonable, civilised behaviour.
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