Bare bottom caning angers parents
Parents of a 10-year-old boy complained to
a school in Ireland in 1975 after he and four other boys received a caning on
the bare bottom. The school manager told a local newspaper said, ‘If it did
happen and they deserved it, I would not be a bit sorry.’
As published in the Evening Herald
(Dublin, Republic of Ireland), 19 December 1975.
Picture credit: The Magnet
Traditional
School Discipline
Traditionalschooldiscipline@gmail.com
I agree with the comment above - there is something seriously wrong with the hands.
ReplyDeleteDoh! Commented on wrong article! See the one below.
DeleteFor those interested, a "National School" in Ireland is the equivalent of a Primary School in the UK. So this would be an ordinary state-funded school and the kids might be aged around 7 to 11 years old. This means the "senior children" watching through the window can't have been very much more senior.
ReplyDeleteWikipedia says that "Today national schools are both de jure and de facto multi-denominational" but that would have been less so in 1975. The school managers "PP" title is not for "pastor pastorum" but instead means "Parochus", he's the parish priest. So this is, unsurprisingly for Ireland, a "Catholic school" although that's not the same as private Catholic schools operating in the USA, and even in 1975 it would technically and legally be a "multi-denominational school".
It's interesting that there are no musings on whether the punishment was legal or not. As there often seem to be in similar reports in England. Maybe there was less emphasis on that sort of question in Ireland.
It seems to me that in lots of places younger kids like this (10 years old) are. Or were. More likely to end up getting informal school spankings that might be bare bottom. Also seems to be true of school spankings in a few places in the USA even now. In this case it definitely doesn't seem to have been a formal punishment recorded in a punishment book and entered into statistics and all that. And parents weren't told either.