My Texas HS employed swats, especially for football players. Misbehave? Down to the principal’s office for swats: Pull your pants down and expose your bare ass, grab your ankles, and prepare to be hit multiple times with a board with 1" diameter holes drilled in it. You couldn’t sit comfortably for a week after getting four or five swats. Fortunately, my grades were never a problem, so I only got swats for mouthing off or fighting.
Pedagogically, swats did nothing for me but reinforce the fact that a lot of fat old men have a gay BDSM perversion. I swear the principal got off on that shit. Fucker.
There is absolutely no pedagogical benefit or significance to inflicting pain on a child in response to bad behavior. The child needs to be raised so as to want to please the parent or authority and to feel bad themselves when they misbehave. Most kids know when they are misbehaving and ultimately feel bad about it or can very easily be made to feel bad about it by a parent drawing their attention to why their behavior was poor. To the extent a child repeatedly knowingly misbehaves, it is a cry for help, and that is what they need, not a fucking swat.
End of rant.