That was a great article Brucie, and I have to say it rings true: Contempt rather than conflict being the cause of bullying, I mean.

At school I once received ten whacks on the open palm with a ruler in front of the class for having lied, and I will never forget it. Not the pain, that was nothing; but the shame will always stay with me. Not the shame of being singled out, but shame for having lied.

You see, despite the fact that there was corporal punishment meted out at my school, that was almost incidental. Society then was such that the shame of having committed the "crime", whatever it was, was sufficient deterrent by itself. It was not the beating that deterred.

Now society is different, and while I agree that corporal punishment teaches nothing, it has not been replaced with any other (non-corporal) kind of public punishment. On top of that, the values in society are such nowadays, that lying or bullying would not necessarily confer shame on the miscreant - the only shame is from being caught.

We are not "building" a disaster - we have built it already, and we are now enjoying the fruits of our well-intentioned social engineering. I wouldn't know how to start to put it right, but I believe one thing: As long as society's values are the ones we have today, no tinkering with the system will have much effect.

And I worry about my son. He graduated last year and started on his first teaching job (kindies). It saddened me that his first consideration upon graduating was to join the Union and get legal protection. It saddened me not because it was the wrong thing to do (it wasn't), but because he had already been taught at the Uni that as a teacher he will be under attack and under suspicion all his working life. No cuddling a little kindie student who grazed his knee, no talking to the kids behind closed doors, his back must always be covered.

For a sweet lad of 23, married with 2 children of his own, yesterday's kid himself, to have to do that at the start of his teaching career, is an indictment on us and the society we built.