http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=27779

In December 2009, I started the above thread about corporal punishment hobbyist Colin Farrell (aka Alarics (T-C-L-K-R-D) ) and his posting on his website about Chamberlain-Hunt Academy employing bare-bottom paddlings to its students. I scolded him on using a DeviantArt poem by an alleged former student as a source for his information. I eventually got him to change the CHA's description to:



That's still sloppy research and academics (if not libelous to the school). The strange thing is that I was looking at the poet's DeviantArt page and saw a conversation between him and another person. He responds that he attended CHA in Spring 2003! Bare-bottom paddlings in 2003!?! Even for a reclusive, backward, private, military-style Christian boarding school in the heart of the Deep South Bible Belt, it just not seem possible in the 21st century. Could Alarics possibly have been right?

I did notice that the CHA website has been completely refinished since we talked about it (and Somey asked them to comment on the thread) and it does take some effort to find the handbooks about corporal punishment (and they do not go into details about what that entails, no pun intended).

I am often perplexed and sometimes ashamed by the actions of my fellow Southerners (especially the crazed fundamentalist close-minded ultra-Christian kind), but this really takes the cake. I wonder if they ever got the message about Robert E. Lee surrendering at Appomattox? In all seriousness, I do not think even a private school in any US state or territory could legally do what they are doing there if the poet's testimony is true.

(Note to Mods: I do not know if you think it would be best to move this and the other CHA thread to a NOINDEX forum or not. If you do, I understand.)

If they allow corporal punishment in the military itself, then it stands to reason that they might allow it in a private military academy too. As I recall, the issue wasn't so much that CHA did or did not use paddles to punish kids (legally or illegally) - it was that Mr. Alarics was using DeviantART as a source for an "encyclopedia" article.

The problem was only exacerbated by the fact that nearly all of the search-engine results supporting Mr. Alarics' contentions were themselves scraped from the Wikipedia article, which in turn had been primarily written by... wait for it... Mr. Alarics!

In any event, if Mr. Alarics' website is to be believed, at least 20 US states (still) allow corporal punishment in private schools, though presumably there are a variety of legal requirements that each school has to (hopefully) meet before they're allowed to do that sort of thing. And if anything, Mississippi is likely to be one of the least stringent, requirements-wise. I suspect it will also be one of the last to finally ban such practices.

Last but not least, as you mentioned, I did send an e-mail to the CHA PR office, and got no reply. You'd think they'd be eager to correct any misconceptions though, given that the WR thread is fairly prominent in the Google results on their name, and even more prominent on their name combined with the words "corporal punishment." So, maybe it's not a misconception - but that still doesn't excuse Mr. Alarics from using DeviantART as a source (though it's to his credit that he later corrected this).

It also doesn't help that CHA's various PR and marketing materials are written by, quite frankly, some very, very weird people. Here's an example that I got from teacher411.net, which is one of those bogus "background-check" sites that specialize in schoolteachers (i.e., you pay them $40 for a "detailed report" on the person(s) you're trying to destroy, get revenge on, or maybe just "check up on"):


I mean, this is Mississippi, not Outer Mongolia. Who writes like that? I'd almost think it was a hoax, but... why make something like that up? For SEO purposes, maybe... but you'd think they could do better than that.


I don't see why that would be necessary, not yet anyway...

I do come from a state that allows public and private schools to paddle, though the public school paddlings are on a sharp decline. They were rarely used in elementary school and middle school, and not at all by high school. Eventually the county gave up on it because few if any principals were willing to use it and parents were moving against it. And even in private schools, I have never heard of pants-down paddlings going on and I doubt there is any law that would give private schools the right to use that form of corporal punishment. It's true though, that if pants-down paddlings in schools do go on, it would be in Mississippi. Nothing good has come from that state since Faulkner and Shelby Foote.

In researching this topic (and wondering why I was researching this topic?), I come across anecdotes of pants-down paddlings going on in private schools in the US, but nothing authoritative. No journalist investigations, no sworn testimonies, no court cases... nothing. As you say, Alarics used a terrible "source" and now the Internet is crawling with this misinformation. Even if it is true (and I do pray that it isn't true), a DeviantArt poem is not a valid source even on Wikipedia. Why would a scholar use it on his website?

As for the weird PR language, the school is run by retired military people. No offense to Coffee, JennaVencia, and other military folks, but military people (particularly officers) are stereotypically considered hopeless at communicating plainly. PowerPoint is especially abused by the military.



In civilian-speak, the above would mean "We allow potty breaks so students can learn."

*cough*, thought there was something odd about Alarics, *cough*.

That word salad isn't military speak. Military speak is longwinded but actually does say something and is used when they want to fulfill a requirement to communicate something while avoiding the use of keywords that might trigger an undesired response. The advertising copy quoted above, on the other hand, says nothing at all, which means it's flat out corporate PR speak. That's the language of corporate mission statements, and anyone who has spent time around large enterprise has seen it thousands of times, always coming out of the marketing department. The purpose is to sound grandiose while at the same time making no actionable promises.

That is correct. His website is full of crazy--crazy that he cheerfully reposted on Wikipedia.

Allowing him to edit WP articles is a bad, bad idea. But no, they love him.
He even has an admin who protects him and his lunatic ravings.


That MUST have been written by a committee of corporate drones.
"Me use big wordz, impress stupid Christian parents......"


They're still paddling high-school students in Texas.......courtesy of Colin Farrell's own website.....

Plus, don't forget the British MP who kept trying to reinstate corporal punishment.

That will be enough Public Relations bashing for today, folks.

That word salad (good phrase) is machine-generated, like lorem ipsum, only in English. Here's the mission statement of Ashland Elementary School, according to the site Somey found:



Frankly, I'd be surprised if some school hasn't issued a take-down notice or two against TEACHER411.NET, P.O. Box 821650, Vancouver, WA 98682, for damaging and misleading presentation of information like that.