‘Young Teachers as ill-disciplined as their pupils’

Teaching staff should be emphatically ordered to impose strict discipline on their pupils, says this newspaper reader in 1972.

SIR – I wish heartily to endorse the desire of headmistress Mrs. F. Traynor (Letters, May 15) for a return to discipline in the school classroom and magistrates’ courts. Such a development is much overdue.

However, it would be a retrograde step to bring back the birch. Surely the cane is sufficient punishment for juveniles. What is necessary is the will to discipline them, not the means. That will seems conspicuous by its absence among the weak-kneed magistrates that seem to abound nowadays.

Not all teachers are “long-suffering” as Mrs. Traynor describes them. Many younger teachers seem as ill-disciplined, if not more so, than their pupils – and I write as someone who left school only ten years ago.

Magistrates and teaching staff should be emphatically ordered to impose strict discipline on juveniles – schoolboy strikes and the like should never be tolerated – but let the punishment given be carefully considered.

R. E. Williams

Crosby

Reader’s letter as published in Liverpool Echo, 19 May 1972.

Picture credit: The Magnet

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