Memories: Truanting for fear of the belt

I know of one school where the pupils became so enraged with the regular, unfair beatings they received that they went back into their school after dark and stole all the teachers’ belts from their desk drawers. They then cut them up and replaced the severed pieces. -- Former Lennox Herald editor Bill Heaney recalled in the Daily Record in 2016 how teachers in Dumbarton, Scotland, disciplined him and fellow pupils in painful fashion.

How could anyone possibly like school?

Is it any wonder that pupils played truant – or plunking as it was called in my day?

You would have to be dighted – an old Scottish word meaning ‘round the bend’ – to want to go to a place where you were likely to be belted from dawn to dusk for not doing your homework.

Day dreaming and not paying attention were also punishable by a stroke or two of the tawse [also known as the belt]. That or possibly even a clout around the earhole.

Fear was the name of the game and even the lure of eight 40-minute periods of Latin verbs, algebra and geometry, and the glories that were Shakespeare, could not banish it from my psyche.

Pulling the covers over my head and staying in bed seemed preferable to getting up and walking down the road to The Penitentiary.

I know of one school where the pupils became so enraged with the regular, unfair beatings they received that they went back into their school after dark and stole all the teachers’ belts from their desk drawers. They then cut them up and replaced the severed pieces.

Undeterred, teachers, some of whom were members of societies committed to protecting, caring and nurturing their pupils, made the next day’s quota of children selected for corporal punishment bend over a desk and beat them with the remnants of their Lochgelly [the makers of the tawse].

These were the teachers who believed they were in the right; that a good dose of the belt would encourage a steady harvest of high achieving pupils.

They were probably encouraged by the words of Lord Mackay of Clashfern who said: “Why are the considerations so different between extra homework or detention and a stroke of the belt on the hand? Why is the punishment of the mind trivial when the punishment of the body is regarded as of supreme importance,” he asked.

I know that I for one had little or no education at secondary level because of my fear of what one teacher called “these savage, barbarous beatings, which collectively comprise the daily round of legal assaults in Scottish schools”.

Picture credit: Unknown

 

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