Corporal punishment used by the Occident to guarantee the civilization process – one is not born as a human being but has to be subjected to physical punishment to become one, a summary of the basic educational motto of our culture – might today be applied to a much lesser degree, the culture of disciplining the body, however, is still present. Corporal punishment as a prerequisite for the civilization process remains deeply rooted in our habits and our culture. If we are less inclined to use physical punishment on our children, the training of our pets, for example, a dog trained with a many-layered system of punishment and rewards to become housebroken (civilized to the degree that the dog can cohabit with humans), illustrates how instinctive and deeply we believe in this form of punishment and its objective of civilizing the individual. A classical pedagogic sentence, which is also the motto of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth] serves well to illustrate this point: “If you are not driven hard, you are not being educated.”Patrik Alac
I don't see how it's related to the rest, but interesting, nevertheless. Discuss.
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