1:
You wrote: “Today’s kids are different because they have to be worshipped by parents and teachers. It’s 1960s values that aren’t based on reality.”
Either you’re being sarcastic, or you have some serious disorder. Your comment is bizarre. No one is worshiping kids. But you gotta understand something about chinuch that is often missed. The classroom and the school are about the kids, not the teachers or rebbeiim. That’s not 1960’s. That’s Torah. Perhaps you need to review the countless quotes in Chazal about the immense value of our children. How about אין העולם מתקיים אלא מחמת הבל פיהם של תינוקות של בית רבן? Maybe you will be more fond of בנינו ערבים אותנו as a prerequisite to מתן תורה. The main character in the yeshiva or achool is the student. The teachers and rebbeiim are there to serve them. No, the kids are not boss, and they cannot do just anything they want. It is the עיקר of the school day to provide the education to talmidim who should enjoy the experience and want more. NOT to make the teachers and rebbeiim happy. The good rebbe runs a class that the talmidim enjoy, and has the value system to have the internal and external smiles seeing the chinuch working. The good rebbe rarely turns to discipline. And the strict rebbeiim are either untrained, in the wrong career, or have class that is poorly matched for that rebbe.
It’s not about the 1960’s. It’s about the common situation of a rebbe entering a classroom to teach to a large class without the skills to manage that crowd. When he resorts to the equivalent of riot gear and tear gas, we have lost the dynamic of teaching, and have sunk into crowd control. Success would then be measured by the degree to which that rebbe has managed to cram the kids into his cookie cutter, and created enough fear to beat them into shape. This is an utter disgrace, and has zero connection to real chinuch or a derech of Torah.
No, I am not grouping all mechanchim into this category. But I am saying that there was a phase in the development of our communities where this approach was more prevalent, and it had horrible outcomes. Things have reversed a lot, and there are many who deserve credit for that. We are not out of the woods.
It’s not at all about worshiping kids. It’s about following Divrei Chazal without picking and choosing. They never advocated corporal punishment. Quite the opposite. They were quite advanced in their understanding of the human psyche. They knew that the use of fear and coercion will not produce אהבת התורה and all that follows from this.