School brings back the cane
In 1978 Skegby Hall school an Approved school for young offenders in the English Midlands reintroduced the cane after a two-year absence.
An approved school
was a type of residential institution where young people could
be sent by a court, usually for committing offences but sometimes because they
were deemed to be beyond parental control. They were modelled on ordinary
boarding schools, and it was relatively easy to leave without permission. This
set approved schools apart from borstals, a tougher and more enclosed kind of
youth prison.
Regional TV station ATV
reported from Skegby Hall, Sutton in Ashfield in Nottinghamshire. Headmaster George Lincoln said the cane was an
effective tool. “My colleagues in ordinary schools who have in the main what
might be described as ‘normal children’ do have the right and the authority [to
cane] and many of them do exercise it.” He asks why should he be barred from
using corporal punishment?
The extract below begins
with a stilted reconstruction of boy being caned. We see two boys waiting
outside the headmaster’s office. One goes inside and from his point of view he
is talked to by the headmaster and then receives the cane. We cut to the boy
waiting outside who winces at the noise.
Later the headmaster is
asked for what types of offence he would use the cane. “The one that readily
springs to mind is bullying, acts of vicious bullying, because most bullies are
by nature cowards anyway and it is, I think, a very effective deterrent to
would-be bullies and also it stops further bullying,” he replies.
Some children are
interviewed about their views on the use of the cane: some are for it, others
against.
A longer version of this
clip is online
here.
Picture and
video credit: ATV via The Media Archive for
Central England (MACE)
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