About the book: 2012 / “To hit or not to hit?” is the last book by the outstanding Russian social scientist Igor Semenovich Kon, written by him shortly before his death in the spring of 2011. In this book, relying on numerous world and domestic anthropological, sociological, historical, psychological, pedagogical, sexological and other scientific studies, the author tried to present a general picture of corporal punishment of children as a sociocultural phenomenon. What is their social and pedagogical meaning, how effective are they, and why have these venerable thousand-year-old practices suddenly fallen out of fashion? Or does it just seem like they are out? The purpose of this book, as I. S. Kon himself formulated it, is to help readers, primarily teachers and parents, to meaningfully, and not dogmatically, form their own life position on these difficult issues.