University students to be paddled for real
University students as well as school
pupils could be paddled for various misdemeanours under a local ruling in
Illinois, United States, in 1922. They included wearing the wrong kind of
galoshes, swearing, smoking cigarettes and ‘spooning.’ They faced between five
and twenty-five swats.
As published in the Sacramento
Union (California, United States), 14 February 1922.
Picture credit: Indiana State
University student handbook 1948
Traditional
School Discipline
Traditionalschooldiscipline@gmail.com
One wonders if those rules were actually implemented and ever acted upon.
ReplyDeleteI think it should be "Indiana State University" not "Indian State University". I'm also wondering why the official student handbook would include a pic apparently *promoting* fraternity hazings. Even last century.
ReplyDeleteThanks, I've corrected the inputting error ....
DeleteAbout whether it really happened. I think some of these types of "syndicated" stories are accurate about important information. Like legal changes. But also I think a lot of the information in some of them probably isn't very accurate. Evanston is the suburb of Chicago where Northwestern University is located. So an unnamed reporter in Chicago is reporting something that a Justice of the Peace in Evanston has apparently said. And then a newspaper thousands of miles away is re-printing the parts of the report that they find interesting. Including emphasis on girls getting spanked. And ice cream parlours? I'm not sure if justices of the peace in the USA in 1922 really had the power to make "decrees" about judicial spankings of kids high school age and younger. Except in individual cases I guess.
ReplyDeleteI had another thought about accuracy of syndicated newspaper stories last century. The corpun.com website several times points out obvious inaccuracies in either recreations of spankings or newspaper stories. Here are two examples:
ReplyDeleteAbout Eric Wildman the cane salesman. "17 November 1955: The Australasian Post, a sensationalist magazine in Melbourne, bizarrely uses a picture of Wildman in his office to illustrate a quite irrelevant article which, though headed "Corporal Punishment", is mainly about domestic violence. The caption alludes to the Horsley Hall affair, a story by this time seven years old, but makes no mention of Wildman's more recent difficulties. [criminal conviction for obscene publications] The photo, which itself is clearly some years out of date, shows EAW holding a birch and gazing pensively upon his stock of implements."
About a pic used as an illustration. "This posed newspaper photograph shows a young student touching his toes while a teacher wields a unfeasibly long cane. It appeared in the Wellington Evening Post on 2 March 1981 to illustrate, somewhat irrelevantly, a quite muddled "kids' page" article asking readers if they approved of judicial (not school) corporal punishment, headlined "Birching: where do you stand?"."
Eric Wildman probably never visited Australia, and birching mostly wasn't used in New Zealand. And the second pic shows a cane not a birch. Also a cane that was probably never actually used to cane kids. Or prisoners!
So it seems like these type of news stories got written in one country or region. Then were syndicated to a different country or region. Where another writer summarises or re-writes them. Making mistakes and misunderstandings while doing it. Then adds a random pic that might be unrelated to the story anyway. Then they add some other detail from their archive that they think might be related but is either unrelated or out of date. Or misleading. Then someone else writes a caption for the pic, sometimes also with a mistake in it. Then a fourth (or fifth?) person writes a headline that might also partly misunderstand what the story is about. (Most newspaper headlines aren't written by the article authors even today.)
This is why I think at least some syndicated news stories from last century potentially contain lots of mistakes or misunderstandings.