There has been a lot of chat in
the media recently on new initiatives to maintain or improve discipline in
schools. This issue raises its head intermittently and, inevitably, the
elephant in the room eventually pops up. Bring back the cane. Kept us old uns
in line when we were at school goes the cry. Worst decision ever made when they
totally abolished it. Should have been kept as the ultimate deterrent. A few
whacks across the backside would solve most problems. The ultimate sanction.
Easy solution really. Well, at the risk of being provocative, is it? Would we
cure all the ills of the modern generation if we went back to the fifties and
sixties?
I doubt it. You cannot turn back
the clock. In the immediate post war period life did not have many luxuries but
it had a structure. In the family, from upper class to working class, the
father was the authoritative head. His word, and slipper or belt or whatever,
was law. You did not argue. That deference naturally followed through to
school. Children, especially boisterous and growing boys, needed keeping in
line. In classes of up to forty, yes forty in those days, teachers kept order
with the threat of corporal punishment. And it was not an idle threat. Canes,
straps, plimsolls, even rubber tubing (chemistry master) were regularly applied
to the backsides of the wayward.
What seems so amazing from a
twenty first century perspective is that all deferred to the ritual. Teachers
wielded instruments of punishment, parents supported their use, and schoolboys
meekly bent over. Even, on rare occasions, dropping shorts or underpants before
the dreaded infliction. In my day I saw big fifteen year old bullies bend over
for strokes of a cane from a master who physically was less than their equal.
You could say that such boys were conditioned by their upbringing. You fought
or bullied kids, you did not take on adults. Generally speaking, as there were
always exceptions. But they were the exceptions. Most boys when in trouble took
their whackings. Refuse and you might get worse at home.
Today it is all so different.
Bring back the cane or any other form of corporal punishment and you would have
a legion of angry parents defending their brood. And that is only for the few
who submitted to such attacks on their backsides. Those of teenage years, or
the majority of them, would not submit. Certainly not the ones who most
deserved it. They would be more likely to resist in various degrees of
hostility. Anarchy would prevail.
And that is why I think that the
elephant in the room, even if sanctioned, would never work in the twenty first
century. You need deference, co-operation, a sense that what is being done is
right. Even if it hurt. Deep down, 1950’s schoolboys sensed the rightness of it
all. It was the natural order of things. Boy misbehaves. Teacher produces cane.
Boy bends down. Teacher whacks bottom. Boy is redeemed. Easy. We are too far
along the current educational road to go back to those days. Yes they were hard
and the nastier aspects of the nastier teachers, and there were some, should
firmly remain in history. But the more civilised aspects had a structure and
order which benefited both teachers and schoolboys. (I cannot and will not talk
for girls). The sensible and moderate use of corporal punishment underpinned
that structure. But we can never bring it back.
Except of course in stories, for
those who have a taste for writing about or reading such tales. Gleaned from
our schoolboy experiences. The sensation of a wooden stick
across our tender backsides wired in a thrill we could never shake off. Even as
adults. Another good reason, some would say, for leaving those scholastic disciplinary
implements to gather even more dust. Alfred
Roy
To come later this month. A new
story – Telling Lies
An old fashioned schoolboy caning
story (M/m) in an old fashioned boy’s school.