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RichardKennaway comments on The Wire versus Evolutionary Psychology - Less Wrong
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This post is an example of the dangers both of fictional evidence and generational forgetting. Less than 100 years ago teachers did beat their pupils. Corporal punishment was an accepted part of educational practise. My parents are in their 80's and can remember this.
The script writers for The Wire are too young to have experienced this themselves, so they put a plausible line in their script: "They beat you if you get the count wrong." If they had been beaten themselves in their schools days they would know that it doesn't actually work. Worse they seem not to have realised that beating children to make them learn is only just dropping out of living memory. They could have asked around and realised just how ignorant the line is.
Being beaten into learning your sums is a perfectly plausible idea. Toddlers become competent at running about through a painful process of bumps and bruises administered by their environment. Perhaps an artificial environment with tawse administered by the dominie would work as well for sums?
Ofcourse it is no longer plausible once it has been tried and proved surprisingly useless. I'm disturbed to witness a dead educational idea coming back to life through a combination of fiction and forgetting.
(The point about toddlers may also be false. There is a rare genetic condition that results in pain receptors not working. The popular accounts I've read give the impression that sufferers run and play like normal children, with the exception that freed from the constraints of pain, they are more daring than normal children and do things such as breaking their legs by jumping off walls that are too high. So painful bumps and bruises may not be part of motor learning skills even when their presence is inevitable.)
The only argument I've ever heard for not beating children is the moral one. Has whether it works to encourage learning actually been studied?
BTW, for children born without a sense of pain, it is far worse than you describe. They typically end up with crippling arthritis in their teens or twenties, because they have no feedback to tell them when they're overstressing their joints. An adult with the condition can understand that they have to consciously compensate for what they can't feel, but you can hardly stop a small child from ever running around.
The Behaviourists did lots of laboratory work on rats and pigeons. They had spectacular success at building up elaborate behaviours by using positive reinforcement to select fragments of the desired behaviour. The idea of training animals by beating them was killed off by experimental work.
I don't know the history of the decline of punishment in education. Perhaps there was real experimental work with children, perhaps not. I find it hard to care; given the animal work, the idea that beating works to encourage learning by children now lacks even minimal credibility.