Memories: He fondly remembers being caned at school

 Here’s an unusual piece in which Lincoln Allison an English academic argues in favour of the cane in schools. He was regularly caned himself – on average twice a week, he says – but it did him a lot of good.

Caning in schools in England wasn’t used much by the 1980s (although it was still legal until 1986). Headmasters didn’t use the cane largely because of educational fashion.

 

He writes:

The headmaster of a leading public school, when I was interviewing him about a completely different subject, told me in the 1980s that he had simply stopped doing it and that it was four years before anyone realised that the practice had been “abolished”. The power of fashion is greater than that of reform; teachers, as much as anyone else, dread being considered old-fashioned.

At around the same time as I interviewed that headmaster I published a book on political philosophy which included a short defence of corporal punishment – largely on the grounds that it inhibited the free development of the pupil much less than more insidious forms of punishment. The publisher pleaded with me to leave it out. He said that it made me sound like an old colonel standing at the end of the bar and braying that caning had never done him any harm.

I didn’t object much to the old colonel bit, even though I was quite young at the time. What I objected to was the defensive tone which I was assumed to be adopting when I was clearly arguing positively for caning as a contribution to human happiness.

I was caned regularly from 1957 to 1961, the latter year containing both my fifteenth birthday and the retirement of an elderly, traditionalist headmaster (whose liberal successor we loathed). When I say “regularly” I should think the average was about twice a week. Cheek. Insolence. Chucking things at the staff. Disobedience. I often think that debates about punishment are fundamentally flawed in the same way as debates about hooliganism because they are conducted by nice people who consider bad behaviour as “deviant” rather than by people like me who consider it to be entirely natural.

So what was good about it? The place was orderly, for a start, and gave you plenty of space to work and play. I received a very good education, far better than is even possible in most contemporary comprehensive schools. And nobody tried to reform you or get under your skin: I don't think I could have tolerated being reasoned with. If you don't chastise children you have to shame them, which is bad if it doesn’t work and worse if it does.

The underlying assumption was that, of course, a teenage boy faced with the phenomenon of chairs with rubber stoppers on the bottoms of their legs would naturally wish to remove them and hurl them at the nearest figure in authority. But the institution would collapse unless this practice was disincentivised and the cheapest, most effective way of achieving this was a sharp, burning sensation in the buttocks. No stigma attached to being beaten: it was deterrence at its purest.

The personal gain has been lifelong. It starts with pain management; most of us are going to be in pain at some stage and it is good to be able to recognise and deal with mere pain (as opposed to pain which signals something worse).

The trick is . . . not minding that it hurts, as T. E. Lawrence says in the movie; the line is not in Seven Pillars of Wisdom so I assume it must be attributed to Robert Bolt and/or Michael Wilson as scriptwriters. I used to repeat this line endlessly to my own sons, though, having said that I should make clear that I am recommending institutional rather than parental chastisement here: being beaten by someone with whom you have a deeply emotional relationship does not fit the argument I am putting.

From pain management develops a certain boldness for which I have always been grateful when dealing with censorious vice-chancellors or cocky policemen. What can they do, after all? – though serious criminals are a different matter. And from pain management develops stress management, including the ability to enjoy yourself even though you know unpleasant things are going to happen to you.

Spare the rod and spoil the child was a maxim in Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon and a hundred other languages. The abandonment of a principle which had served humanity well from pre-history until fairly recently should at least be subject to some rigorous, bottom-line, questioning. Why did we abandon it? Are we any better off for so doing? In fact, there never was such a debate and what happened falls, I believe, under the general heading given it by the sociologist Norbert Elias: the “civilising process”. Beating ceased to seem civilised.

…

All children should be beaten, though not necessarily as a punishment. The benefits can be extended to the goody-goodies by using beating as a ritual acceptance of authority. Unlike (say) Rugby Union or skiing it raises no health and safety issues.

At the time of writing Lincoln Allison was Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor of Sport and Leisure at the University of Brighton. This is an extract from a piece published on the Social Affairs Unit website. Thanks are due to the research site Corpun for preserving this article for posterity.

Picture credit: Unknown.

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