Corporal punishment on a ‘much more lavish scale’ needed in schools, public meeting told

“The reintroduction of a more liberal dosage of corporal punishment would be a very healthy return to some sane and normal practice. The use of the cane, has not done half as much harm nor caused half as much upset as the inability to use the cane has done.” – a small-town debate on corporal punishment from 1955.

Use cane

more in

schools,

he says

CALL for an increased use of corporal punishment in schools was made by Mr. Harry Midgley, son of the Northern Ireland Minister of Education, when he spoke at Tonbridge [Kent] on Wednesday [9 March 1955].

He was one of a team of four speakers brought to the town by Tonbridge Association of the National Union of Teachers to answer questions on education put by local residents and organisations.

“SANE AND NORMAL”

Asked by Mr. J. M. Winchester of Cage Green County Primary School Parent-Teacher Association, what “significant change in the education system” he would introduce if he could, in the next five years, Mr. Midgley replied:

“The reintroduction of a more liberal dosage of corporal punishment would be a very healthy return to some sane and normal practice.”

The next question, put by Mr. B. R. Bentall for Tonbridge Chamber of Trade, asked: “Would members of the panel be in favour of the complete abolition of corporal punishment in state schools?”

WOULD SOLVE PROBLEMS

Mr. Midgley recommended “the use of corporal punishment on a much more lavish scale than many people are prepared to countenance today as a way of solving many minor problems of the classroom.

“The use of the cane,” he said, “has not done half as much harm nor caused half as much upset as the inability to use the cane has done.”

“I do not think caning has much effect,” Mr. Otto Shaw, member of Kent Education Committee and prospective Labour candidate for Maidstone Division, told him.

“Wholesale corporal punishment has very little educational value,” said Mr. Ronald Gould, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers. As a headmaster he had never used it.

“There is far less corporal punishment in the schools than there used to be, and I predict it will decline even further,” he said. “But I would never say to the teacher, ‘You may not use it.’ That would put him in an impossible position.”

 Extracted from the Kent & Sussex Courier, 11 March 1955.

Picture credit: Sting Pictures

 

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