Jack Brewer's plan to fix public schools? Let teachers hit kids and convert them

His tirade on Fox pushed paddling and forced Christianity as "solutions" to crime—ignoring decades of evidence to the contrary

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In a disturbing tirade on Fox last week, Jack Brewer, an ordained minister and former NFL player who once co-chaired a “Black Voices For Trump” group in 2020, argued that children needed to be physically abused and converted in their schools in order to make up for the lack of Jesus.

He was defending Donald Trump’s decision to send the National Guard to Washington, D.C. to deal with “uncontrollable” crime, even though violent crime in D.C. has been on the decline for years and Trump arguably just wants to distract people from the Epstein scandal he’s now fully mired in.

… It starts locally. First off, in these schools. These schools have to start back disciplining kids. They took the paddle out of the school, and everything collapsed.

We gotta get the paddle back, Rachel. Listen: Corporal punishment is the only way when you have a knucklehead kid that’s willing to rob you or me at gunpoint with a car full of kids or anyone else.

You see, these things don’t happen in states like Florida. You know why? Cause if you carjack me, I’m liable to shoot you, no matter what your age is. And that happens in red states. But when you take the Second Amendment away from so many citizens in these liberal cities, they can’t protect theyself. And so now, these kids that don’t have a fear of God, they’re emboldened by the culture, by the music that they listen to, by the movies that they watch, by the culture that they take into their spirit.

None of these kids go to church on Sunday morning. These kids don’t have a fear of God. These kids don’t think about Heaven and Hell.

And that’s the problem in our nation. We’ve let these liberals… go so deep into removing God from schools, now these kids don’t have spirituality. We gotta put the Ten Commandments back in our schools. We’ve got to get the fear of God back into the children of America, particularly the young Black boys that look just like me and my son. Where 71% of these kids are born without a father in a home. Every Black man in America should feel despicable about the reality that our culture right now is terrorizing the streets of America.

That last line comes across like a caricature of a self-hating Black man whose understanding of these issues hasn’t progressed one bit in the past few decades.

Setting aside the racism of his remarks, and the myth that Florida has less crime because everyone can just threaten each other with murder now, and the lie that God has ever been removed from schools, the idea that religion or physical abuse will solve disciplinary problems has no basis in reality.

A lot of conservative Christians who echo Brewer cite Proverbs 13:24, the infamous verse that gave us, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” Hitting kids is especially popular among fundamentalist Christians. Years ago, Michael and Debi Pearl wrote an infamous guide to faith-based abuse called To Train Up a Child. It’s a book that tells adults how to properly hit their kids, and it’s as awful as it sounds, recommending that Christian parents physically discipline kids as young as six months with “the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules.”

But the experts who study this subject reject those ideas entirely. The American Academy of Pediatrics supports banning any form of physical discipline against children because there’s plenty of evidence showing the harm it causes in the long term. That’s true for both parents and teachers.

What if you don’t actually hit kids but merely suggest it as a possibility? As any decent teacher could tell you, if your classroom is so chaotic that physical discipline appears to be your only solution, you need to find a different job. And if you believe threatening children with abuse is the only way to maintain order, you’re a shitty person, period.

None of these facts are accepted by right-wing abuse enthusiasts.

Hitting a kid with a paddle won’t prevent that kid from robbing you when he’s older. If anything, it’ll teach him that violence is always an option.

And while younger generations are far less into organized religion, the lack of forced Christianity in schools isn’t the cause of societal problems. (Remember: nearly half of people born after 2000 still identify as Christian!)

Forced Christianity in schools hasn’t been permitted since the early 1960s. And schools in red states, where politicians are passing Ten Commandments laws and trying to inject the Bible into classrooms, are usually the worst states in the country when it comes to education.

Honestly, I would argue kids today have a far more nuanced understanding of religion than generations past, largely because many of them have grown up in a more diverse environment and have seen the harm caused by the most fervent religious nutcases in government. We are in a more dangerous society today because of people who reject evidence in favor of religious mythology and other conspiracy theories.

Despite Brewer’s complete and utter ignorance on these matters, the Daily Beast notes that corporal punishment is still on the books in some states:

As of 2024, according to the National Education Association, 17 states allow corporal punishment in public schools, and it is still practiced in dozens of districts—despite calls for it to be outlawed.

Black students are four times more likely than white students to experience this type of punishment. But Brewer, who is Black, said: “Listen, corporal punishment is the only way.”

It’s not like any of this is new for Brewer. In 2022, speaking on a House Judiciary Committee panel during a session on “Solutions to Ending Gun Violence,” Brewer said, “If we are serious about addressing gun violence, then we need to first get serious about bringing the paddle and prayer back to our public schools.”

Violence and religion are his go-to solutions for a world made more chaotic due to people who embrace violence and religion.

Brewer isn’t interested in helping children. He just wants to control them, dominate them, and indoctrinate them. He doesn’t care that corporal punishment breeds trauma, resentment, and more violence, while mandatory religion in public schools—and that religion would inevitably be Christianity—would undermine the very freedoms he claims to want to protect.

Hell, there are plenty of Bibles and God-talk in churches, yet none of that has ever prevented abuse within those walls.

Obedience should be earned through mutual respect and critical thought, not fear. But when you’re promoting an authoritarian government, fear is your best weapon. You use force to beat people into submission. It’s what Republicans are doing through their ICE thugs and what Brewer wants every adult doing to every child.

The fact that he’s even pushing this shows that Brewer and other Republicans have no actual solutions for crime, poverty, or broken communities. So they’re peddling the myth that America’s problems stem from a lack of God or a lack of beatings, rather than a lack of justice, opportunity, and equality. That’s the real crime here.

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