The days when ‘idiotic behaviour’ would get you the cane
Young people between the ages of eight and 11 were punished with between one and four strokes of the cane between the years 1929-57 for offences including inattention, bad work and “inbred tiredness”. The highest number of strokes of the cane (four) was reserved for truanting, but a boy could get two strokes for “inertia”, “not trying”, “idiotic behaviour” or “stealing and lying” – Sam Merry looks in the pages of a school punishment book.
Education: The good old
days, eh?
Rummaging around under the stage of Portsmouth College, I stumbled across an old volume of the Portsmouth School Board, entitled Punishment Book for Reginald Road Boys School. It records “every case of corporal punishment” under regulations from the New Code of 1900, and covers the years 1930- 56 for seven- to 12-year-olds.
The
number of canings over the years is clearly related to the character and style
of the headmaster in office, but, interestingly, caning was most frequent in
the Thirties, then dropped from a high of 300 in 1934 to single figures during
the Second World War, only to reach a new high of 76 in the mid-Fifties,
suggesting that it was not the permissive Sixties that saw the retreat from
discipline at Reginald Road, but the “Elvis years”.
One
cannot talk of school discipline in a vacuum separated from society. If
Reginald Road was reflecting society, then the society of the pre-war years was
punitive and repressive, the society of war years was permissive and the
society of the Fifties returned once more to the punitive. Another way of
expressing this, however, is to say that students were less disciplined before
the war, very disciplined during the war, and much less disciplined after the
war, until 1955. Furthermore, to judge by the ages of those punished, it is not
fair to say that today small children are less disciplined than they were half
a century ago.
Young
people between the ages of eight and 11 were punished with between one and four
strokes of the cane between the years 1929-57 for offences including
inattention, bad work and “inbred tiredness”. The highest number of strokes of
the cane (four) was reserved for truanting, but a boy could get two strokes for
“inertia”, “not trying”, “idiotic behaviour” or “stealing and lying”.
The most
frequently occurring offences were “talking”, “laughing”, “disobedience” (“gross”,
“extreme”, or “atrocious”) and “continuous laxity”. These trivial offences may
indicate the poor quality of the teaching, as well as the overweening power of
teachers, though there is evidence that they suffered from exasperation (“this
boy has been caned for refusing to take the slightest interest in badly needed
instructions”). Another teacher wrote: “Careless inattention – this boy is a ‘howler’,
starting when spoken to”.
Reginald
Road appears to have been much more repressive in the Twenties than in the
Forties, when fewer punishments are recorded, especially during the war years.
From the nature and frequency of the punishments it may be true to say that
schools were harsh, but we should not confuse repression with discipline. In
fact, the high level of canings may reflect – among other things – the high
level of indiscipline in the “good old days”.
Teachers
seemed to reflect society’s more authoritarian nature; they undoubtedly
punished for offences that would not be punished today. Was this a good thing?
There is another interpretation: perhaps they were under stress because they
were failing to interest their pupils. Some of the misdemeanours now appear
trivial, such as “carelessness” or “turning on electric lights”. In the
Thirties a boy could be caned for “wilfully breaking his pencil to get to a
sharpening machine”, “deliberately dropping his pen five times on the floor”, “damaging
school desks”, “playing cigarette cards”, “playing in the girls' playground”, “playing
with a drawing model” or “climbing on windows”. It may be that pupils were just
plain bored with their education.
The
writer is a former head of history and philosophy at a further education
college.
Extracted
from the Independent (UK), 2 October 1996, available here.
Picture credit:
Darrien
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