Big red lines across the bum

Ian Mckinney remembers being caned frequently at secondary school. “You’d come home and look in the mirror and you had big red lines across your bum, which would bruise. It would be quite sore to sit down for a couple of days.” – In 2007 Susana Talagi looked back at the dying days of school corporal punishment in New Zealand.

McKinney, 37, now a police officer in Christchurch, was a student at Fraser High School in Hamilton in the 1980s.

He says he was caned throughout secondary school, but less frequently as he got older.

The pain varied from teacher to teacher.

“Some teachers it [would be] a couple of light whacks and you’d think, ‘Oh, yeah nothing to it’. But when you got it from another teacher who put a bit of oomph into it, it’d bring a tear to your eye.”

However, he says he never cried in front of the teacher who inflicted the punishment. “You didn’t want them seeing you cry. But when you walked away you’d find it hard to breathe and you were sort of hyperventilating.”

In 1987, corporal punishment was still practised in New Zealand schools but its days were numbered. It had just been banned in British state schools and many people were campaigning for similar action to be taken in New Zealand. It was eventually abolished in 1989.

Tony Steel, principal of Hamilton Boys’ High School from 1979 to 1990, says canings were carried out at his school only according to a strict formula.

“The caning was logged with the time, the date, the reason why, the teacher who caned, and it had to be witnessed.”

He says he never caned a student himself, but adds with a smile: “They were sent to the deputy headmaster.”

Martin Elliott, principal of Hamilton’s Fraser High School, says he caned two students in his teaching career but does not regret it.

Nor does he agree with the abolishment of the cane. “For some kids, even now, I would rather cane them than expel them. I’m not convinced that total banning of corporal punishment is the correct thing.”

He says some children need a physical correction. “A whack on the bum would change their behaviour.”

Against a background of increasing violence among young people — one recent survey showed one in seven primary school teachers had been struck by pupils — some people are now calling for corporal punishment to be reintroduced in schools.

Bob McCoskrie, national director of the organisation Family First NZ, blames “political correctness” for increasing violence among young people. “It is significant that as schools have removed corporal punishment, schools have become more dangerous,” he says.

Ian McKinney says that as a police officer he sees huge differences in the relationships between students and teachers today compared with his own time at school.

“Now there is lack of respect for teachers. Kids come and go from school and swear at teachers.”

Extracted from Waikato Times (New Zealand) 11 August 2007.

Picture credit: Raymond Glendenning’s Book of Sport for Boys (Publisher Andrew Dakers), 1961.

 

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