A schoolmaster's views on corporal punishment

I find this Archive to be a fascinating read but the material I have looked at so far would not convince me of the effectiveness of corporal punishment as a way of dealing with misbehaviour among juvenile boys. Physical chastisement is a crude sanction which surely belongs to the dark ages.

When an adult says to a juvenile 'You've been bad so I am going to beat you,' he is unlikely to earn the respect of that boy. The punishment is more likely to arouse bitter resentment and reinforce the warped belief that hurting other people is OK. I speak from some experience, having been at both ends of a cane as it were.

I had the misfortune to be consigned at the tender age of seven to a prep school where the disciplinary system revolved around the slipper and the cane. Boys lived in constant fear of 'whackings,' which could be awarded for relatively trivial offences. Yet it was all quite unneccessary, as is proved by the fact that today's prep schools can function quite well without thrashing their pupils on a regular basis.

Fortunately there was not nearly so much corporal punishment at my next boarding school, a minor public school in Dorset. The right of the senior prefects to beat other boys had been abolished just before I arrived, which probably saved me much pain and anxiety. This reform had been initiated by a new headmaster as part of a laudable effort to reduce the general frequency of canings. Under his enlightened dispensation, you had to be pretty bad to merit corporal punishment, although there were a few recidivists whose names continued to appear in the punishment book over and over again.

This state of affairs is surely an argument against the claimed deterrent effect of corporal punishment. The fact that the same old faces found themselves repeatedly bending over for the cane proves that the punishment ultimately had little effect. This point was hammered home to me when I later took up a teaching post myself and inspected my school's punishment book. I noticed that the names of a small group of boys appeared over and over again; yet it never occurred to anybody to wonder whether all those repeated canings might ultimately be pointless.

I brought the matter up in the staff room where I was quickly slapped down by the traditionalists. The old argument was rehearsed that it was not the names inscribed in the punishment book that were important, but the names that were absent. Those were the names of all the boys who had been deterred from misbehaviour by the very existence of the cane. As one master claimed: 'If it wasn't for the cane they'd all be running riot.' Well, that point cannot be proved one way or the other and I think the fact that certain boys suffered repeated beatings without changing their ways is more telling.

A few years later I was appointed as a housemaster in a boarding school where one of my duties was wield the cane when required. As might be expected I was not too happy about this part of the job but there was no way I could evade it. I always tried other sanctions where possible, but when a caning could not be avoided I endeavoured to ensure that the miscreant would not wish to return for another dose.

There were a selection of canes available for my use, ranging from light whippy rods (almost useless) to heavy thick ones (equally unsuitable). The most effective cane, in my opinion, was of medium thickness yet quite springy, formed from a dense rattan. Six of the best (and I mean the best) delivered with such a rod across a tightly stretched trouser seat soon had an offender squealing for mercy. I felt no compunction in laying the cane on hard, since my aim was to avoid having to beat that boy again.

On the whole my philosophy proved effective. There soon developed a real terror of the cane in my house and the boys became wonderfully well behaved. It was an extremely small coterie of hard cases who came back for repeated doses of the stick. In such cases I tried to discover the motivation behind the offending behaviour, talking to the house prefects, quizzing the boy's friends and so on. In a few cases of repeated misconduct I had to threaten expulsion, but there was only one actual instance of a boy being 'sacked' during my housemastership.

My final teaching post was as headmaster of a dayboy college in the midlands where one of my first acts was to abolish the cane. Naturally there were dire warnings from veteran staff members of the impending end of civilisation as we knew it, but oddly enough the school continued to flourish and the bad old days of 'Bend over boy!' soon seemed like a distant memory.

Lionel P, Southwell