‘Beneficial outcome of caning the buttocks’

The usual place of chastisement in State schools appears to be the palm of the hand. The traditional seat of punishment in “Public” schools is the buttocks. There is a strange snobbery about corporal punishment in public schools. To be caned on the hand was considered “cissy,” a punishment for the infants’ class – “Yorick” considers the right place to cane in a newspaper article in 1955.

THE TEACHER AND THE STICK

A scene from Spare The Rod

Corporal punishment in schools has figured a good deal in the news recently, with parents bringing unsuccessful summonses against teachers for refusing to spoil their children, and the film censor deciding that a bestselling novel called Spare The Rod would receive an “X” certificate, that is, be unfit for children to see. [We met the movie here].

Spare The Rod is much concerned with the problem of how to control a large class of hooligans without using the cane.

Reading it, I was struck by a strange social phenomenon. The usual place of chastisement in State schools appears to be the palm of the hand. The traditional seat of punishment in “Public” schools is the buttocks. The significance of this is that in one case the teacher is face to face with his victim and in the other he is not.

Judging by the emotional troubles of the teacher in Spare The Rod this is beneficial.

Not that there is any anonymity about corporal punishment as traditionally administered at public schools. This is reserved for prisons where the victim is never allowed to see the face of the man punishing him, for the same reason that the public executioner was formerly masked, lest his friends should be revenged on him

Snobbery

There is a strange snobbery about corporal punishment in public schools. To be caned on the hand was considered “cissy,” a punishment for the infants’ class. So was to cry out. To have complained to parents would have seemed absurd and probably have resulted in nothing more than some such comment as “bad luck, don’t get into trouble again.” To be beaten was part of the privilege of a paid education.

As the headmaster in Stalky and Co., I think put it, before he laid on: “If this were a State school I should be in danger of a summons for assault.”

I am in sympathy with the view of the author of Spare The Rod that, whether or not corporal punishment is good or not for a child, it is almost certainly bad for the master. But that, I fancy, is not what parents have in mind when they become worked up over their child being caned at school.

Only too often, one fancies, they are parents you so frequently hear admonishing their child with “Now you stop that, Alfie, or I’ll clip you one.”

The one certainty about corporal punishment seems to be that it feeds on itself – that the more it is administered, the more it has to be administered. I wonder how much the necessity of using it at schools arises from so many of the children having been brought up in pre-school years on smacks and slipperings?

And it seems strange that the fuss is always about the blow given in anger, which at least serves the purpose of saving the teacher from a nervous breakdown, and not about the ritual caning given, in cold blood, which probably does teacher and child the maximum harm.

Extracted from Lancashire Evening Post, 14 January 1955

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