Watching TV tonight, I've come upon a repeat of a show - made late 1980s or early 1990s, I guess, set in contemporary Sydney (Police Rescue, for anyone who's keeping score).
Anyway - contained a scene early in the show that brought back memories of my schooldays. Older schoolboys terrorising a young one by telling him how bad the corporal punishment he could face at school would be.
"You're going to get the thong. Whack. Whack. Whack. It really hurts. He keeps a piece of metal in the middle of it."
Well, I'm sure other people on here know the drill - I expect it was something a lot of boys dealt with at times - or may have done themselves.
That wasn't exactly a nice tradition - but it was a tradition of sorts. And it's one that must have died away with the years. One with relevance to fewer and fewer kids.
And it's got me thinking - what effect has the common disappearance of corporal punishment in schools had for kids today - not just the obvious ones. But what traditions, good and bad, might have been lost.
I mean - consider the first of the histories I quoted -that of one of the schools I attended, Kostka Hall. It contained the following quote:
"You really weren't a Kostka boy, it used to be said, unless you'd been strapped by Brother McDonald."
I can testify to that fact - but I'd be one of the last at that school who had that shared experience, which really was a rite of passage of sorts. I feel kind of sorry for those who came after me - to lose that history, that tradition. Leaving aside the question of whether it was a justifiable form of punishment - what else has been lost by abolition?
|