From "The Education Gazette and Teachers' Aid" 20th July 1910.
The Education Gazette and Teachers' Aid was put out regularly in the state of Victoria, Australia, from 1901. It came from the Government Department responsible for State run schools (the name of this Deparment changed from time to time) and its primary purpose was to ensure State school teachers and Principals were aware of Departmental policies. In addition, it published many articles of general advice to teachers on a wide range of subjects.
Corporal punishment appeared in the Gazette fairly regularly - both in explanations of official regulations, and the occasional piece of advice such as that which follows.
An observation of interest. At the time this piece was published, it was forbidden by regulation to use corporal punishment on girls in state schools. A year later, a teacher was actually fined for doing so, so at least some attention was paid to these regulations. Therefore, to me, it's of interest that this piece advising teachers as to how they should administer corporal punishment makes fairly clear reference to it being used on girls. The Gazette seems to have been sending a rather mixed message.
The strap was the only official method for corporal punishment in State schools in the state of Victoria. This came about because of the rather convoluted history of education in the colony of Victoria. When the University of Melbourne was first established, there was virtually no secondary education in the colony - and so the problem had to be faced of where University students were going to come from. The solution adopted was to give the various Churches money to establish the 'Public Schools' - these would be private tuition funded schools once they were running - but public money was used to help set them up. Until the early twentieth century, there were no state funded secondary schools at all - there were just the Six Great Public Schools of Victoria, and an assortment of smaller 'private schools' (funded by tuition, without any of the seed money the Public Schools got). There were state funded primary schools and the government funded scholarships that parents could use to send their children onto the Church secondary schools if their children were smart enough.
What this meant was that when the state primary schools were set up, it was intended that they would be feeder schools to the non-state secondary schools and because of this the Headmasters of the major schools were consulted as to how they should operate. One of the contentious issues at the time was whether or not state schools should have corporal punishment or not - even that far back, it was being questioned by some.
At that stage, the premier school was Scotch College, and their Headmaster was consulted on this issue. As it name suggests, Scotch had a substantial Scots influence, and this probably had an impact on his advice. According to Scotch's official history:
"As early as the 1870s, corporal punishment had its critics. The Government wanted to limit its use in the state system, but Scotch said this would weaken teachers' authority. As for alternative punishments, like detention after school hours, to deprive boys of outdoor exercise 'is far more injurious to health, and, consequently, more truly cruel than a few strokes of a strap or cane'. 'The fact is that the old Scottish tawse was most humane means ever used in school government.'"
I suspect that there are many who experience the tawse and the strap over the years who might have slightly different opinions.
But as a result of this advice, Victoria, unlike the other Australian colonies (later to become states) adopted the strap in clear preference to the cane as its official method of punishment in its government schools.
The 1910 article follows:
"CORPORAL PUNISHMENT
The appeal to the strap is the last resource of the fine teacher; it is, alas, the first for the weak one. And yet, when we consider the matter calmly and dispassionately, must we not confess that the appeal to force is a very natural procedure in the case of the brute?
But the teacher, from his very position, is expected to be not the exemplar of the brute force method, but the guide to the better way.
Note what a change has come to pass in regard to the standpoint from which a teacher is viewed. Formerly, he was regarded as a drudge necessary for teaching the young generation some drudge-like requirements so that they might the better perform the drudgery part of their lives. He was the instrument for developing the means towards what may be considered as comparatively rather an ignoble end - the making of a living. Now he is coming to be regarded as the means towards developing the supreme in a man - character itself.
And our opinions about, out attitude towards, this matter of corporal punishment still depend upon what stand point we take in regard to the
teacher's sphere of work.
If we regard him as a mean means towards what is meanly considered as the end of life, namely, the making of a living, we shall not be nice in estimating his methods; we shall not consider it degrading in him if he empoys the lowest methods to that end.
But, if we see in him a co-worker with the Divine in the noblest purpose that our minds can conceive, the unfolding of man's soul or self in all its potentialities and glory; if we contemplate him as a priest ministering at the altar of personal individuality calling down the divine and raising the human; if we see in his duties not the drudgery of labour necessary for a mean achievement, but the ritual and the rites of a sacred ceremonial in order to make meet the pupil for the downcoming of the Shekinah of radiant life, then we shall be scrupulous in our criticism of the introduction of anything into the service that would mar its sanctity or detract from its efficacy and efficiency.
What a confession of weakness, too, is this immediate resorting to the strap! The teacher stands before his class, confronted by twenty, thirty, forty, perhaps more, little human beings in the plastic, impressionable, recipient stage of their existence. Wayward they are, 'tis true, but, with the waywardness of the climbing vine. There they sit, forty little souls with a hundred responsive instincts, a hundred points of appeal. Yet, to this teacher (so called), the most powerful point of appeal is their natural shrinking apprehension of physical pain and on that he works. God help such a man!
Ignorance, it is true, is the cause of such a course of action. That teacher knows not his own power. He has it in him, did he but know and use his power, to make himself the hero of those forty little incipient hero worshippers. He has it in him to enchain their affections, to rivet to him their respect and esteem. He has it in him to lead them as eager disciples wherever he may choose. But he knows it not, for the only persistent appeal he has ever made has been, not to the best in them, but to their shuddering fear of bodily hurt. What a testimony of ignorance and weakness!
I have said "he," but I might, with as good reason, say she. For, unfortunately, our women teachers are often the most ardent believers in
the gospel of corporal punishment. The slum mother who is heard constantly threatening her offspring with dire bodily pains and penalties has her counterpart in the lady (?) teacher who is continuously over-awing tender little girls and chubby little boys with menaces of pain and punishment. So attached are some of these ladies to the use of the strap or the cane that it is kept going continually; not with much force, doubtless, but with a malicious little rap-a-tap the makes one think of the patent flogging machine that figured in the imaginations of our childhood.
Let us away with such wretched make-believes of training. It is not denied that there are children for whom the appeal to physical punishment may sometimes be necessary. It is not denied that having had no other appeal ever made to then there are some poor forlorn little human wretches who have been brought down to such a condition that all entries into the sensibilities are closed except this gradually indurated pathway of pain. But such cases are, fortunately, few and far between.
I have seen but few cases in my own experience. But for the majority of children there is a better way into the wills and inclinations, and for all teachers who truly and earnestly desire it there is the power of finding such a way.
I have referred incidentally to the indurating effect the continual inflicting of corporal punishment has upon the child, but I have not drawn attention to the even more baneful, deadening influence it has upon the teacher. It becomes to him the only road, and this he treads with heavier and still heavier tread until at last the brutal is, more and more, developed in him, and he has, at length, no conception of, or desire for, a nobler and a more beneficent sway over his little charges.
On the other hand, I have known of teachers who, resisting the temptation to this insidious means of discipline, have battled along through the thickets of inexperience and ignorance, and with faces upward turned, at last have issued forth on a path that has led them right into the hearts and lives of their scholars, with the result that their influence, and the memory of their lives, has been the most cherished possession of those boys and girls during all succeeding years.
But are there not occasions when corporal punishment must be administered by ordinary teachers open ordinary children. Unfortunately there are; and the more ordinary the teacher the more frequent seems to be the necessity for the infliction. This necessity, however, arises from the fact already referred to that the teacher has not exploited his possibilities as the master mind in the room. The readiest means of demonstrating mastery have been used and the development of higher powers has thereby been retarded.
For such a teacher, if he has reached the stage where such development is now no longer possible, there is no recourse on an emergency but the one he has let himself become accustomed to. Yet may there not yet be the possibility for him of developing those higher powers of domination? May not his case be one rather of arrested development than of incipient atrophy? Has he really exploited his powers of leadership, of command, of interest to their full?
On the answer to these questions depends the teacher's right to resort to physical force. And, of a teacher, it may be roughly asserted that his ability as a disciplinarian, and as person to be placed in authority over children, varies inversely with the frequency with which he uses corporal punishment, provided, of course, that he is not one of those individuals, occasionally seen, who have no sense of orderliness and discipline , and who muddle along with their work through confusion, uproar, and riot, without a word of reproof and with only an occasional impotent call for attention.
It may, then, be taken as a sound rule in regard to corporal punishment that it is necessary and permissible only when the teacher has the consciousness and assurance that he has exhausted all his other powers of mastery and leadership. But this consciousness and assurance must be the result of calm deliberation; therefore it is necessary that no appeal to physical force should be made without a due considering of the case.
It should be the rule that not even a single stroke should be given without pause for deliberation. And such pause, if it should be decided that corporal punishment is absolutely necessary, adds impressiveness to the infliction, and enhances, to if offender, the gravity of the occasion.
If these rules are followed - if the teacher waits to assure himself that he has indeed no other resource but the painful duty of inflicting pain, and deliberates for an interval before inflicting it, we should have much less of the mechanical punishing still too frequent, and would seldom or never hear of teachers being prosecuted for assault.
"The teacher stands before his class, confronted by twenty, thirty, forty, perhaps more, little human beings in the plastic, impressionable, recipient stage of their existence. Wayward they are, 'tis true, but, with the waywardness of the climbing vine. There they sit, forty little souls with a hundred responsive instincts, a hundred points of appeal. Yet, to this teacher (so called), the most powerful point of appeal is their natural shrinking apprehension of physical pain and on that he works. God help such a man!"
On the other hand . . .
The teacher stands before his class, confronted by twenty, thirty, forty, perhaps more, little bar stewards in the most selfish, egocentric, exploitative stage of their existence. There they sit, forty little demons each one testing testing testing the boundaries of permissible behaviour, continually searching for any sign of weakness and upon finding the smallest chink in the teacher's armour swarming upon him destroying him. Since the abolition of CP in schools, the teaching profession has more members off work due to stress-related conditions than any other job, trade or profession on Earth. God help such a man!
Bob T
Another Viewpoint
June 3 2004, 10:17 AM
A SALUTE TO SPANKOUT DAY APRIL 3OTH
FROM PREVENT CHILD ABUSE MD (PCAM)
Much has changed since the “good ol’ days.” Roads crossed over by horse and buggy are now traveled by car, log cabins are replaced with six bedroom homes built in a day, and televisions, cell phones, and computers are commonplace. Technology has taken us to a new level and we know it all as “normal.” Everyday life can be managed with a push of a button. Yet through it all, we still have not learned that it is physically harmful and psychologically damaging to spank our children. We dare not put a scratch on our car, but we spank our children. We will catch the heirloom vase before it hits the ground, but we throw our children to the floor. We are even careful not to break our techno toys, but we crack heads, shatter bones, and break the spirit of a child. Have we not yet learned the ramifications of spanking, whipping, smacking, shaking or abusing our precious children. So much damage has already been done. Our children are an extension of ourselves. Do we really want to hurt them? The idea that spanking is a form of discipline is antiquated and wrong. The public has grown wiser on many aspects of life, now is the time to grow wiser about the rearing of our children. That is why PCAM is speaking out in support of SpankOut Day USA. Spanking sends the wrong message to children. They grow up to believe that physical and aggressive behavior will solve all problems. Childhood spanking can also distort the mental development of a child, as well as, perpetuate violence in adulthood. Prevent child Abuse Maryland’s mission is to prevent and eliminate child abuse and neglect in the state of Maryland. Join us in support of SpankOut day USA on April 30, 2004. When your child misbehaves, talk with your child firmly and directly, allow the child to think about the behavior and the how to solve the problem. Utilize the “time out” theory, set limits and be consistent. Teach your child consequences. Unacceptable behavior equals loss of privileges such as, not playing with a favorite toy, not going to a party, or not getting the keys to the car. Above all, spend time with your child and give praise for good behavior. Remember, children are people too. PCAM supports SpankOut Day USA.