Four years after the ban on corporal punishment in schools, many teachers are still looking for disciplinary measures that are effective yet not too severe. The photo, taken some years ago, shows junior high school students in Taipei taking a standing timeout for talking in class. (photo by Vincent Chang)

For thousands of years, the notions that "blades can't be sharpened without beating" and that "filial sons are made by the stroke of a rod" embodied the philosophy embraced by most Chinese teachers and parents. But as the shackles of authoritarianism have loosened in Taiwanese society since the lifting of martial law in 1986, liberal ideas about education and child-rear-ing have been gaining growing prominence. A case in point is the campaign to eliminate corporal punishment, which was led by the Humanistic Education Foundation and other educational groups for more than 20 years. Due to their efforts, amendments to the Basic Act on Education, which were finally passed in 2006, introduced a prohibition on corporal punishment in schools.

But old habits die hard. Four years later official statistics reveal that corporal punishment is still being used in some classrooms. What's more, some teachers, fearing legal trouble but unequipped with other effective methods of discipline, are simply turning a blind eye to inappropriate behavior or weak effort.

Excessive discipline lies at one extreme, and indulgent permissiveness at the other. How can we strike an appropriate balance between them? What challenges are being faced in the age of zero corporal punishment? And what should parents and teachers learn about raising, teaching and disciplining children in these new times?

Ironically, it was the corporal punishment that US-based Taiwanese filmmaker Daisy Lin endured in junior and senior high school that pushed her into creating Out on a Limb, a short that won "Best Animated Film" at the 2010 Marbella International Film Festival in Spain.

Selected from among 500 submissions created by filmmakers around the world, Out on a Limb tells the story of a young bird that can't keep up with its flock. Suffering social rejection and physical attacks, it leaves the flock to fly on its own. Lin describes her personal motivation in creating the film as being rooted in trying to heal the wounds from the beatings she suffered in junior and senior high school due to performing poorly in math.

"The truth is that I wanted to be a scientist," she explains. "When learning math I didn't want simply to memorize formulas. I was willing to test my own true understanding and spend more time on it than other people." Lin's older brother scored well on tests, but she worked slowly and tested poorly. Her junior high school math teacher was a neighbor she had grown up around. He would beat her in class, describing it as "for your own good." Out of school he attempted to stimulate her achievement by injuring her pride: "Are you truly stupid or just lazy?" The torment he put her through made her lose all self-confidence. And when she finally graduated and moved on to a newly established senior high school, the teachers, eager to lift test scores so as to improve the school's ranking, continued to beat her!

"In Taiwan I was always unhappy in school, but I didn't know why," Lin says. It was only after she went to America for graduate school and experienced American parenting and educational values by working as a babysitter that she slowly began to discover that the general anxiety she suffered from was connected to being threatened and physically punished when she was little.

In comparison to Lin's experiences growing up, current elementary and secondary students in Taiwan ought to have it much easier. In 2006 the Basic Act on Education was revised to say: "Students' rights to learning and education and their rights to develop mentally and physically shall be protected by the nation, which will also safeguard students from psychological abuse or corporal punishment." These days if you ask elementary or junior high school students if their palms have been beaten or their ears boxed, or if they've been forced to hold up chairs for extended periods or had some of their hair shaved off in punishment, they usually react with bewilderment. If they have suffered corporal punishment, they usually say that it has occurred at home or at cram school.

According to Ministry of Education surveys carried out yearly at various junior high schools in Taiwan since 2006 (and for which teachers are asked to step out of the room), the percentage of students who say they have not been beaten or physically punished in some way over the last two months has grown from 57.5% in 2006 to 83.1% in 2010. Of course, that means that 16.9% of students are still enduring corporal punishment despite the new legal protections. But a Humanistic Education Foundation survey puts the number of junior high school students being beaten at a much higher 42%, with schoolwork falling below expectations, and breaking school rules, ranking first and second as the reasons for punushment.