Why the cane is not coming back
It is thought of as progressive, today, that teachers are no longer permitted to thrash pupils, and I agree. But in other respects our state education system is fundamentally regressive, because classroom anarchy has been permitted routinely to wreck the potential of many a bright child. The balance of power in the classroom, particularly in state schools, has shifted to such a gross degree that children now find themselves at the mercy of bullies and disruptive time-wasters who themselves half-yearn to be restrained by some adult authority – Jenny McCartney in the Daily Telegraph in 2011 discusses the return of the cane to schoolrooms.
Half of parents, and nearly
a quarter of pupils, would support the return of the cane or smacking for the
most disruptive schoolchildren, according to a YouGov survey last week. I
suppose that when people respond to such questions, one must believe that they
mean what they say. But I can’t help feeling that the answer is born out of
sheer desperation to see the teacher in control of the class again – rather
than an aggressive teenager with five o’clock shadow and a buzzing mobile, or
worse, in his hand. Short of Superman, they can’t think of anything that will
swish through the air with sufficient force to rearrange the power balance but
the cane.
That instrument of
instruction is not coming back, of course – in part because the half of parents
that don’t want it are even more vociferous than the half that do; and I’m sure
that after one or two experimental thrashings the whole project in
retro-discipline would be outlawed by the European Court of Human Rights. I
can’t really say I’m sorry, because – although I would back teachers in
exerting almost any other form of traditional discipline, including forcible
restraint – there’s still something about the pious delivery of calculated
violence upon a child that turns my stomach.
When we talk of “bringing
back the cane” it is often imagined that it would be dispensed, with pained,
judicious wisdom, for only the very gravest crimes. But the truth is that for
every Dr Arnold, there was a cane-happy Wackford Squeers.
My grandfather was beaten
every single morning at his Belfast school for being late. He ran a couple of
errands before school for a small fee, and considered the reward worth the
punishment. But, in his nineties, he still keenly remembered how he fell asleep
at his desk one day, aged eight, and was woken by the searing impact of the
schoolmistress’s cane on his open palm. For a split-second, in telling the
story, his expression would relive the elemental rage he felt upon awakening,
and then relax again with the merciful words: “But she had to keep order”. The
order delivered some benefits, certainly: my grandfather left school in 1920,
aged 14, able to write and spell beautifully, and read voraciously throughout
his life.
The children of that
generation understood the need for order, and differentiated sharply between
those adults who beat them specifically to retain it, and those who were simply
cruel. Beyond order lay chaos, which waited to engulf them and their slender
prospects of success in life, and they knew it. David Niven, in his wonderful
memoir The Moon’s A Balloon, describes how J F Roxburgh, the headmaster of
Stowe, caught him cheating in a Latin public examination, and offered 12
strokes of the cane in place of expulsion. Thereafter, in purest agony, Niven
determined “that somehow I would repay J F”. He meant it in a spirit of
gratitude, not revenge. Yet he also called the masters at Worthing, his
previous school, “sadistic perverts who had been dredged up from the bottom of
the educational barrel at a time of acute manpower shortage”. Let us not
forget the many establishments at which similar sadists used the cover of
corporal punishment to scar children, mentally and physically, for life.
It is thought of as
progressive, today, that teachers are no longer permitted to thrash pupils, and
I agree. But in other respects our state education system is fundamentally
regressive, because classroom anarchy has been permitted routinely to wreck the
potential of many a bright child. The balance of power in the classroom,
particularly in state schools, has shifted to such a gross degree that children
now find themselves at the mercy of bullies and disruptive time-wasters who
themselves half-yearn to be restrained by some adult authority.
If the first duty of the
state is to protect its citizens, then the first duty of a teacher is to impose
order, and for that they need the sustained support of the school hierarchy and
the wider society. Let’s stop obsessing about the cane, and work on the
thousand smaller ways that schools can demonstrate they are robust about
discipline from the moment a pupil joins the school. To let things carry on as
they are is just a more insidious form of cruelty.
Extracted from
the Daily
Telegraph, 17 September 2011.
Picture credit: Unknown
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