Q. It is important for children to learn the difference between right and wrong at an early age. Punishment is necessary to help them learn this distinction. To what extent do you agree or disagree with this opinion? What sort of punishment should parents and teachers be allowed to use to teach good behaviour to children?

Education has been always the main interest for parents. Especially, the way to enhance the children’s ability to discern what is right and what is wrong is very critical. Some people believe that punishment is the most effective way to teach about it. However, I am convinced that punishment is not the right way to teach children about developing moral judgment.

First of all, there is no scientific evidence to prove that punishment have shown its effectiveness as an educational tool. But it seems that many people still believe that punishment is necessary to achieve the educational goal which help children to recognize what is socially acceptable behaviour and what is not. For instance, violence is something students should abstain but, in order to teach the fact that violence is bad, you have to use another form of violence to teach students what behaviour is socially acceptable, which lead to fall into being contrary to each other.

Secondly, the problems caused by punishment seem to be much more severe than we expected in schools. It is hard to expect educational effect for students who are constantly exposed to the violence as they will be eventually accustomed to the punishment. Thus if we keep abiding by this method, we have to employ more harsh punishment for each case to accomplish the educational object. Thus we can easily realised that it is not right way to use punishment to achieve the goal to develop children’s ability to discern what is wrong and right.

In summary, it is apparent from the above arguments that there is no effect of using punishment as a tool to teach moral distinction. Therefore I totally agree with the idea that an effort to come up with new measure to help children learn the discrepancy of moral behaviour is absolutely necessary.