More than a couple of inaccuracies in this.

Good find !!

Good find but whats the title?
Some of the information a bit dubious/exagerated?
Must be very confusing to a child and the attempt at humorous presentation in bad taste.
Would one on the Slave Trade for example or the Holocaust
have little pictogramms of Concentration Camp inmates or chained slaves?
Auschwitz A,B,C, Bad conditions 3 stars,Food yuk.
Its this sort of off hand TRIVIALISING of horrible cruelty that creates psyhcopathic morons who seem to regard asault as a comic book lark or Dennis The Menace computer game joke.
It also fails to mention that the schoolmaster and one or two others who ended up murdering pupils may were and in one case were hung.

Good find but whats the title?

'Foul Facts: School: The Best/Worst Days of Your Life' by Steve Skidmore and Steve Barlow. Published 1995 by Watts Books of London

Some of the information a bit dubious/exagerated?

I can certainly see some inaccuracies, and also some of it is quite subjective.

Must be very confusing to a child and the attempt at humorous presentation in bad taste.
Would one on the Slave Trade for example or the Holocaust
have little pictogramms of Concentration Camp inmates or chained slaves?
Auschwitz A,B,C, Bad conditions 3 stars,Food yuk.
Its this sort of off hand TRIVIALISING of horrible cruelty that creates psyhcopathic morons who seem to regard asault as a comic book lark or Dennis The Menace computer game joke.
It also fails to mention that the schoolmaster and one or two others who ended up murdering pupils may were and in one case were hung.

I'm a professional historian - and from my perspective, there's nothing particularly wrong with this book. It's part of one of a number of series of history books for children that have been released in recent years that focus on the gruesome aspects of history - the most famous and most successful of these series are the 'Horrible Histories'. And the idea of the books is to get children interested in history.

Many children love the gruesome and macabre and engaging that interest will lead some of them into a more refined interest in history. If we try to start with the refined aspect first, we'll never capture the interests of a lot of those kids.

Sometimes these books can be in bad taste, but generally speaking they don't go too far - there is a Horrible Histories on World War II - 'The Woeful Second World War' - I've only glanced through it but from what I recall it's treatment of the holocaust was fairly sensitive - generally it is understood that some things need to be treated with special care.

I suppose the question I would ask is do you want kids to be made aware of these things in a way that they will pay attention to? Or would you prefer them to remain ignorant, because they don't pay attention to the way they are presented in many history books? Of course, for those who are already engaged and interested in history, the presentation doesn't matter as much - but a great many children have no interest in history, and no interest in acquiring an interest.

This is a very interesting question. Is it a good or bad thing to teach children (and the 'Horrible History' series is for fairly young children) a crude account of historical facts? They may well be more interested in the gorey details than they would for reasoned argument but does that close their minds later on to the real issues of these things?

This forum is a typical example - a large proportion of those contributing here have never actually experienced CP and have to base their views on accounts written, in the main, by those who think all such punishment was terrible and wicked. Only those who have lived through the time when CP was an everyday phenomenon can know that it was physically painful but less damaging than many other forms of discipline our children are subject to in today's world.

People like me say "It never did me any harm" but that is ridiculed for some reason (I know the reason, obviously) by the opponents of CP. When I look at the way behaviour in this country has deteriorated, with so many youngsters harming and disrespecting others, I wonder if it will be able to be said with any truth in the future "I never had CP and it did me no harm"
I think eventually that statement will be the one which is questioned and perhaps ridiculed, instead of the former.

No, I am not convinced that teaching kids in a way which distorts the facts to gain their interest is always a good thing.

DEAN

Tudor pupils had school caps?

No doubt they'll be telling us next that girls wore berets or bonnets in those days.

They also forgot abour Dr Heath,Eton Head in 1793-the cricket team defied him by playing a match. Despite their victory, he flogged the entire XI on their return.

Bet that never happened in Aus!


Steve M

I absolutely agree. As it is now 20 years since the abolition of corporal punishment in UK schools (and therefore the abolition of proper discipline, as far as I am concerned), school children of all ages and both sexes should have this topic on their history curriculum. Most children will have no knowledge at all about the subject, it being totally outside of their experience, and there is nowadays almost a taboo in society about even mentioning it. It should be covered in detail, in all it’s aspects including it’s use from earliest times, up until abolition, if only to let today’s children realise how easy they have it compared to their forbears. Corporal punishment in other institutions should also be covered – Reformatories/borstals/approved schools/naval cadets etc.

It is a vast subject. Perhaps lessons on it could be made more interesting with illustrative examples. I don’t mean for real, but for example, replica canes and birches could be handed out for the children to pass round, and to feel and handle for themselves. Perhaps a recreation of a public school birching could be staged, using a lifelike dummy of, say, a 12 or 13 year old boy (correct in every anatomical detail), kneeling and bent over a birching block, or bench, with his breeches pulled down or removed, and three dozen strokes of a replica Eton birch being applied, by the teacher, to the boy’s (dummy’s) exposed buttocks and upper thighs. These areas of the dummy’s anatomy could be “made up” with a lurid, blazing red colour, and be completely covered with a mass of weals and welts, with streams of blood trickling down from them. This would certainly bring home to the children the reality of what it was like. History lessons are supposed to make the topic “real” in the imaginations of the students, are they not?

Its mainly the bare bottom symbols that disturb me!

Whether disturbing or not, the bare bottom was a historical fact in public school birchings up until the turn of the 20th century. As a fact, it must be taught, if the subject of school CP history is to be taught to school children accurately.

Following on from the illustrative re-enactment scenario I suggested, it occurs to me that there is no reason why the pupils should not be involved as well, rather than just passive onlookers at the lesson. The role of the schoolmaster is played by the teacher conducting the lesson. The role of the birched boy is played by the lifelike dummy. At Eton birchings, however, there were three other individuals involved. The "untrusser" was a prefect charged with the responsibility of ensuring that the boy's breeches were properly pulled down, or removed, as the master required. The "holders down" (also prefects) had the responsibility of securing the boy firmly to the flogging block, in the required position, so that his bare bottom was correctly presented for the birching. The children could each have a turn at performing these roles. There is no reason why girl pupils should not be included, and given the opportunity of performing either of these roles, if they want to.

The girls would definitely want to - they would have to draw lots I expect !!

Disciplinarian

You have an over-eager and very vivid imagination but I think any teacher engaging on such a lesson would be immediately arrested - and rightly so!

Oh, how I'm beginning to miss Lotta! She did at least keep this forum free from OTT contributers.

I do not belive that exagerated and inaccurate books such as the ones quoted are the proper way to teach children about corporal punishment or any other aspect of history. I am old enough to have spoken to a great-grandfather who was born in 1872, my grandmother was born in the workhouse and started working full time in a textile mill at the age of 12. As a young boy in the early 1960's I was regularly taken to see an elderly great-aunt whose house was unchanged from the 1840's, apart from two electric lightbulbs and a double burner gas ring. The rebuilt miner's cottages at Beamish Museum are warm and comfortable by comparison. It seems that no history programe on TV is considered valid unless presented by an out of work comedian, yet I was picking the bones of a Romano-Britain out of a trench in Castleford more than 20 years before "Time Team" reached the same site. These and other experiences have given me a sense of historical perspective and it saddens me to see the Orwellian distortions presented to today's children and young people.
I was once working as a volunteer in a small local museum which had school cane as part of an education display. A boy visitor of about 10 came in who belived that the cane in British schools was applied to the soles of the feet. He was white, British, nominally Christian in origin. Had he been of Middle-Eastern or Asian descent such a belief would have been understandable. Clearly, his education had prepared him for the time when Al-Qaida is victorious and the Caliphate rules the World from the White House in Washington.
There are some museums which have attempted accurate depiction of child punisment in the past. A few years ago Kirkstall Abbey Museum in Leeds rebuilt it's childhood gallery and displayed a deportment chair on which was placed a pair of leather soled slipers (for spanking,it was made clear) and small whip similar to a martinet but without so many tails. An interactive game set in the 1880's was included in the gallery. The premise was that Tom had broken his mother's best vase and tried to blame the breakage on his sister. Children were given choices as to what they would do in Tom's situation and could see the result by lifting a wooden flap. In allmost every case it was "Tom was birched and put on bread and water for a week". A major flaw in this game was that there was nothing to explain to a modern child what being birched was although the museum has two birch rods on display elsewhere, one on the wall of a reconstructed cottage and the other in a police station.
Clarke Hall near Wakefield is a 17th Century house not open to the public which for many years has offered a 17th Century experience to groups of West Yorkshire school children. They dress up in period clothes for a day and undertake various tasks. They have, or used to have, a birch rod whose use was no doubt explained even if it could not be demonstrated.

Ah, therein lies the problem, Jimny, how we explain the difference to kids and even adults who have never experienced corporal punishment what it actually meant in the couple of decades before being banned completely.
When I went to school, in the 40's and early 50's, very many boys opted for CP (a slippering or a couple of whacks with a light cane) in place of having to write a 200/300 word essay or being kept from watching a School cricket match! Can you envisage a boy today - imagining the horrors of such accounts as the above booklet - doing likewise?
I oppose Capital Punishment with all my heart but to be executed by a lethal injection now in the Southern United States is an entirely different thing from being 'Hung, Drawn and Quartered' in England 400 years ago!
In today's world where you can't walk down the High Street without four cameras videoing you, all abusive use of CP could be eliminated very easily by every whack capable of being watched by the police and subsequently by a magistrate in Court.
It really is high time it was looked on as a very useful, quick and inexpensive tool in dealing with the problems many schools have with that tiny minority of pupils who disrupt classes and interfere with the education of the majority - your sons and daughters, folks!

I think school parties would be better to visit the play dungeon at Torture Garden at 3am on a Saturday Evening!They would learn a heck of a lot more about life than museums and displays.
And the life long lasting "side effects"of an early exposure to a C.P .environment!

The "instructions" on how to administer the cane look pretty far fetched to me. I bet the "author" of the book did a search for "caning" google and printed the result, not spotting that it was from a spanko fantasy website.

It is not realistic to expect school parties to visit adult clubs such as Torture Garden and it is wrong to assume that early exposure to CP creates the people who frequent such places. At least two well known submisives on the Web, Liela-Ann Woods and Zoeymantis were not spanked as children. Abolishing CP in schools will not finish off the S&M scene as sexuality is as much inherited as aquired.

Well I think at the very least kids ought to be given "Fetish Education Classes".
They already receive contraceptive and homo ones dont they????
Perhaps during the class a adult volunteer representative of each major Fetish could be introduced dressed up in their respective garb?
A Tranny in Maids outfit,
A submissive girls in shiny PVC,
A Dominant woman in buisness dress with cane,
A Dominant man in Headmasters dress
As fantasy blended with reality they looked from one to the other,and then one to another and back again and then again....and the animals looked like men and the men animals and it was impossible to tell the difference...
(Animal Farm G,Orwell)