NEXT L.A.: A look at issues, people and ideas helping to shape the emerging metropolis. : Dialogue : Paddling Doesn’t Teach Responsibility

Retired elementary school principal Gene Bedley spends much of his free time poking about in secondhand stores, looking for old furniture to refinish and restore. He has a keen eye for discovering the hidden value in all sorts of things--especially children.

Author of many books on education reform and parenting, the Irvine educator’s “values-based” curriculum is used in hundreds of schools. In May he received the $25,000 National Educator Award from the Milken Family Foundation for his work in encouraging the teaching of ethical behavior in public schools.

Bedley, 56, says teachers are not unsympathetic to calls for reviving spanking in public schools. But he strongly disagrees. In 33 years in public education, Bedley says, he never had to resort to physical punishment to get cooperation from his students.

These are edited remarks from a conversation with The Times’ Russ Loar.

“There are teachers who feel corporal punishment is a definite deterrent [to] inappropriate behavior. There are those who feel kids need to have some fear, because they have kids coming to school who have no fear of anything, who have a ‘What can you do to me?’ kind of attitude.

“There are a lot of educators out there who are asking, ‘How can we punish the kids? What can we do anymore when a kid is disruptive?’ There’s a great deal of frustration on the part of the teachers.

“One of the first things I ask teachers is: ‘What does responsibility mean and what does control mean?’ What you begin to find out is that they are two very separate issues. Control deals with telling kids what to do. Responsibility deals with consulting, working with kids and families and leading them toward what they need to do.

“The bottom line is, most discipline books have been written about control. Ninety-nine percent of them emphasize parental controls and needs. But whenever you reach punishment, then you’re dealing with past performance.

“Responsibility addresses the present and the future. It considers the past, but its real focus is on the next choice a student is going to make.

“The first person to raise their fist, the first person to raise their voice, the first person to clobber somebody, is the first person to run out of ideas. When people don’t know what to do, there’s always the temptation to say, ‘Let’s go back to the way we used to do it.’

“It’s kind of lying to kids to say, ‘I want you to work it out with words, but I’m going to take out my paddle and whack you on the rear end.’

“Telling someone that they’re bad just perpetuates their badness. If they screw up, they know they’ve made a bad choice. I always tried to let students know they could handle the next situation.”

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