I wholeheartedly disagree with your editorial in your paper three weeks ago concerning corporal punishment.

Your editorial would have been appropriate in the Los Angeles Times or The Washington Post or other big-city papers where their liberal beliefs are completely different from ours here, in what you seem to believe is backwards, silly and ignorant, podunk, USA.

You call us and our rules silly, outdated — and insinuate ignorant. I would ask you to do some research into the schools who use corporal punishment and the ones who do not and find who has the most discipline problems.

I would suggest that you would have to go no farther east than Tyler and west than Athens to find the results.

If you need more drastic differences, check with the Dallas, Washington, D.C., and California schools.

I would further advise you to check out a 1950s movie, “The Blackboard Jungle,” and you will see the beginning of the results of the behavior of our children when discipline changed from somewhat strict to what it is today — nearly nonexistent.

Not that it makes me any kind of authority on the subject, but I served 20 years in the military and 20 as an adult-probation officer, and I can assure you every individual, no matter what age, needs and wants discipline. Some need it worse and more harsh than others.

For some, a few words of encouragement works and for others, a good chewing out. Some may require a few pats on the rear. For the persons who never conform to the rules, they sometimes find themselves incarcerated.

When the Bible and prayers were forced from our schools, the discipline problems multiplied. Proverbs contains several passages on this subject. In Proverbs 22:15: “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; the rod of correction will drive it from Him”; In Proverbs 13:24: “He who spares his rod hates his son, but he who loves him disciplines him promptly”; In Proverbs 29:15: “The rod and rebuke give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his mother.”

If you do not believe in the Bible, you will not understand anything written herein anyway.

Dwayne Garner

Brownsboro