Bad and wrong in every single way. Largely because it ignores simple child psychology that a one month Introduction to Psychology I took when I was 17 showed.
If you strike a child, they don't learn that whatever they did was wrong. They learn that when they did a certain action they were struck. Conditioning sets in and they realise that they don't like being struck so they stop doing the activity. Fair enough, if a little simplistic.
BUT
What the child has also learned, that so many people seem to forget, is that the solution to someone doing something wrong is to strike them, as they were struck. For one thing this can lead to such obvious developmental problems you'd think a retarded monkey could figure them out but I'll spell it out for the moron brigade.
Child A hits Child B because the Child B did something Child A thought was 'wrong.' Their parents have taught them that wrong acts must be met with physical force, so they struck Child B, where's the problem? Then, Child A's parents hit them because they hit Child B. What's Child A to think? Hitting people is obviously what you do to someone who's been naughty, because otherwise why would mummy and daddy hit him when he did something wrong? But why is him then hitting another child also wrong?
Children have been proven to have significant mental problems based on far less than that. My mother works as a teacher and has done for thirty two years now, and in all those years she believes that the real problem children are the ones whose parents hit them. A child who is disciplined in other ways, by the removing of toys, or being shouted at, or a more reasonable child who it can actually be explained to why they were wrong, a teacher can deal with much easier. A child who only understands force can only be met with force.
No problem say the hitters, just bring back corporal punishment in schools. Fine, except that Corporal Punishment at home will be different to corporal punishment at school because there is no way to regulate it.
'A child does something wrong, their toy is removed.' This is simple to understand, easy to implement, and most importantly consistent between home and school.
'A child does something wrong, and is hit.' How hard is the child hit? Open palm? Implement? Belt, slipper, shoe? Exact degree of punishment which requires hitting and at what level of hitting? Impossible to even keep straight within on class, let alone taking the student's home lives into account.
Now for my personal experience:
I was not struck, neither was my sister, we are both grade a students, have been all our lives, and the one things all of our teachers have commented on is our level of maturtity. This was based on my mother, as noted above, having recognised that corporal punishment in schools didn't work, and refused to use it on us.
Several of my classmates were struck. They were unmanagable in class even to the age of 18, and they were often violent, and any situation they didn't like would be met with violence. This wasn't at some East End of London public school either but an incredibly Middle Class boarding school.
Second and my most enjoyed account. A young boy was beaten by his father on a regular basis for wrongdoing. He grew up hard, loves knives and guns and other manly things, and when he reached the age when he could take on his father? His father tried to hit him for something and he fought back. Because his father had taught him through the beatings that it was okay to match wrongdoing with violence, and since clearly hitting him was violent, he was allowed to match it. His father ended up with a broken jaw, the boy now lives mostly with his mother. Also, again, this is not some benefit-scraping by to live family, the father is a Conservative Party member and a literal millionaire in British Pounds.
And you want to know the really fucked up part? Both of them think he did the right thing by fighting back. I'd like to live in a world where we don't raise our children to believe that violence met with violence is the only answer to all life's problems.