Ancient British obsession resurfaces
We must not bring back the cane - Telegraph
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Half of parents, and nearly a quarter of pupils, would support the return of the cane or smacking for the most disruptive schoolchildren, according to a YouGov survey last week. I suppose that when people respond to such questions, one must believe that they mean what they say. But I can’t help feeling that the answer is born out of sheer desperation to see the teacher in control of the class again – rather than an aggressive teenager with five o’clock shadow and a buzzing mobile, or worse, in his hand. Short of Superman, they can’t think of anything that will swish through the air with sufficient force to rearrange the power balance but the cane.
That instrument of instruction is not coming back, of course – in part because the half of parents that don’t want it are even more vociferous than the half that do; and I’m sure that after one or two experimental thrashings the whole project in retro-discipline would be outlawed by the European Court of Human Rights. I can’t really say I’m sorry, because – although I would back teachers in exerting almost any other form of traditional discipline, including forcible restraint – there’s still something about the pious delivery of calculated violence upon a child that turns my stomach.
When we talk of “bringing back the cane” it is often imagined that it would be dispensed, with pained, judicious wisdom, for only the very gravest crimes. But the truth is that for every Dr Arnold, there was a cane-happy Wackford Squeers.
My grandfather was beaten every single morning at his Belfast school for being late. He ran a couple of errands before school for a small fee, and considered the reward worth the punishment. But, in his nineties, he still keenly remembered how he fell asleep at his desk one day, aged eight, and was woken by the searing impact of the schoolmistress’s cane on his open palm. For a split-second, in telling the story, his expression would relive the elemental rage he felt upon awakening, and then relax again with the merciful words: “But she had to keep order”. The order delivered some benefits, certainly: my grandfather left school in 1920, aged 14, able to write and spell beautifully, and read voraciously throughout his life.
The children of that generation understood the need for order, and differentiated sharply between those adults who beat them specifically to retain it, and those who were simply cruel. Beyond order lay chaos, which waited to engulf them and their slender prospects of success in life, and they knew it. David Niven, in his wonderful memoir The Moon’s A Balloon, describes how J F Roxburgh, the headmaster of Stowe, caught him cheating in a Latin public examination, and offered 12 strokes of the cane in place of expulsion. Thereafter, in purest agony, Niven determined “that somehow I would repay J F”. He meant it in a spirit of gratitude, not revenge. Yet he also called the masters at Worthing, his previous school, “sadistic perverts who had been dredged up from the bottom of the educational barrel at a time of acute manpower shortage”. Let us not forget the many establishments at which similar sadists used the cover of corporal punishment to scar children, mentally and physically, for life.
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It is thought of as progressive, today, that teachers are no longer permitted to thrash pupils, and I agree. But in other respects our state education system is fundamentally regressive, because classroom anarchy has been permitted routinely to wreck the potential of many a bright child. The balance of power in the classroom, particularly in state schools, has shifted to such a gross degree that children now find themselves at the mercy of bullies and disruptive time-wasters who themselves half-yearn to be restrained by some adult authority.
If the first duty of the state is to protect its citizens, then the first duty of a teacher is to impose order, and for that they need the sustained support of the school hierarchy and the wider society. Let’s stop obsessing about the cane, and work on the thousand smaller ways that schools can demonstrate they are robust about discipline from the moment a pupil joins the school. To let things carry on as they are is just a more insidious form of cruelty
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A quarter of pupils? What is this I don't even... I mean, I'm in favour of pretty much any form of baroque horror that you care to name, but it still comes as something of a shock to find out that somewhere between 25% and 1/2 of the rest of the population will, when asked over the phone by a stranger, likewise respond "Um... Yeah. I suppose so."
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