For some time this estimable Forum's masthead announced "HELLO KINKY TEACHERS EVERYWHERE!". That banner has now departed, though if nostalgia prompts you can still see it in Google cached entries for the time being. Its departure is perhaps apposite, as I have come to the conclusion that, for whatever reason, we have not attracted the attention of any 'kinky' teachers, at least, not genuine ones. I wonder why this is?

Elsewhere in the Forum I have attributed my presence here to what I believed to be just such a teacher, and most people who think they have encountered a kinky teacher will have their own firm idea of what the condition involves. I'll say that for the purposes of this posting a kinky teacher in a teacher who derived pleasure (probably, but not necessarily, sexual pleasure) out of administering punishment. Were we mistaken though? Were kinky teachers actually such a very tiny proportion of those set in authority over us that the chances of one or more washing up here are non-existent?

There must still be plenty of teachers or ex-teachers out there who have, quite legally, and in accordance with the rules and customs of the establishments they were teaching in at the time, administered corporal punishment to pupils of the same and/or opposite sex. Should those teachers wish to recount their 'conquests' in a forum such as this they could quite legally and safely do so. Teachers don't have to sign the Official Secrets Act. Provided they didn't name pupils (local authority rules re time limit embargo on pupil names in punishment books) they would enjoy exactly the same freedom as the rest of us to recount their CP experiences, though from the other end of the cane, slipper, strap or whatever, so to speak.

I would expect the majority of teachers to keep their own counsel as regards punishments they had administered. However, I would think that a kinky teacher would most certainly wish share his or her exploits if the chance arose. Most people are only too happy to discuss things that give them pleasure with others of like mind. Here is a Forum where by definition those visiting have an interest in School Corporal Punishment. The kinky teacher is thus assured of an appreciative audience. He can recount with graphic detail how many teenage girls he caned or slippered on their knickered bottoms with skirt lifted, she can tell of how many big tough lads she reduced to tears in front of their female classmates. Indeed, I'll go so far as to say that they would probably rank highly in the most popular posters league table!

They haven't visited though, at least not while I've been here, nor are they in evidence when I delve into the wealth of past posting available to us all. Is this because they were actually a figment of our imagination? Were they in fact just a little more zealous than their colleagues when pupil chastisement was indicated, or was there some element of their character or appearance which was a little different to the generality of teachers? Children and young people can readily hang all sorts of attributes onto such minor departures from the norm.

I am, I know, being fairly controversial here, at least within the tenets of this Forum. I am most interested in what you all think!

And finally, two names are probably going to be cited to disprove my case by some of you who have been here for any length of time, George who lives by a lake not a thousand miles from me, and Doctor Dominum who lives in Australia. Indeed, those two are the only posters posting as teachers that I personally am prepared to accept as real teachers. Please bear in mind though that I haven't read every posting here, I shall be only too happy if anyone can point me at other direct postings from real teachers, kinky or otherwise! There are a number of second hand accounts but they are not what I'm discussing here.

First George. Was George a teacher? Probably yes. Was he a kinky teacher? Probably not! The descriptions he gives seem to me to be in accordance with the norms of his era as I understand them, and I suspect that George's pupils would not have regarded him as kinky, had the term been in use at the time, which I don't think it was. He is therefore disqualified from consideration as a kinky teacher, regardless of what he may have done since. My game, my rules! In any event I suspect that a fair proportion of you will think he wasn’t a real teacher, which would of course disqualify him anyway.

Doctor Dominum. Is he a teacher? Most definitely. Is he a kinky teacher? Certainly not! You only have to read his account of one of my favourite topics, a schoolgirl caning (or rather three of them) here to see that! Don’t be put off by the thread title, said caning certainly isn’t in that mode! This is a very large thread, so a search for ‘correct an irrelevancy’ using your browser’s current page search function will get you to the start of the action, which then continues over several posts and posters. In my opinion this sequence disqualifies Doctor Dominum from consideration as a kinky teacher, a verdict endorsed in the same thread by no less a Forum luminary than Sarajane, the Lotta Nonsense of her day.

Believe me, Another_Lurker, they’re all out there.

They are not, however, going to come on here and admit to being kinky teachers when they can drool over the contributions of others while masturbating in their lonely rooms.

Hi Big John - he's the man, I am deeply honoured. It is not often that my humble postings solicit direct input from the aristocracy of this estimable Forum.

I most certainly take your point. You will, I am sure have appreciated that I am ever so slightly playing the Devil's Advocate in my posting above. However, for the reasons I give I have to say that I cannot see why a 'kinky teacher', if aware of this estimable Forum, would not take the opportunity to post some of his or her experiences here.

My objective is to see if others have an opinion on this. In addition I cherish the hope that I might flush some of these elusive individuals out into the open to post some of their undoubtedly interesting exploits here, both to redress the balance within the present range of postings and, I freely admit, to engage my own interest and, I trust, that of at least some other regular visitors here.

Contributions from absolutely straight, totally non-kinky real teachers would, I think, be equally welcome, and the great thing is, teachers and ex-teachers, if you are out there, you don't have to say which side of the line you fall. Your readers are quite capable of deciding that for themselves!

I have often wondered where all my old teschers went to.
They seem unfindable? did they exist ? was it all in my mind?
My Ladyfriend a Kinky ex teacher of 35 years service never ever administered any CP. It was not part of her schools methods. In fact she says that giving CP to Kids is unexceptable, not desirable and of no benifit.
Mind you that was in the 70s-90s and in schools where reasonable teaching methods commanded respect.
Her harshest punishments were sending kids out of the class for being disruptive.
Mind you they were all in the 11-18 bracket. I wonder if they were younger instant CP would have been needed?

This is the best compilation of its kind. Although it relates to a particular boys school (CBHS) and time (1969) it is representative of something wider.

http://www.corpun.com/books2.htm#mercurio

Doctor Dominum is probably the best fake this forum has seen. He's always bordered on credibility and, at one time, it seemed possible he was on the right side of the border.

However, the more thought I give the matter, the less I believes him.

He's a fake and a fantasist.

Hi Lotta Nonsense, you've posed me a serious dilema here, because while we might differ over mathematical trivia regarding percentages of fantasy posts and some brief postings by long established contributors to this estimable Forum, I generally find myself in agreement with you over the big issues.

I'll have to reserve my judgement on this one pending further input, although the good Doctor must be close to retirement now, so may not continue to post here.

If I might be so bold as to inquire, would you think I am mistaken in postulating that if an appreciable proportion of real teachers were indeed 'kinky' as regards their application of completely legal school CP we might expect to see them relive their exploits here more frequently than appears to be the case?

There must be few ex teachers who are internet literate and who were teaching and wielding canes during the period when CP was common.

I still read this forum and I will post if there's anything that strikes me as worth posting about or worth responding to but I get more enjoyment out of posting to other forums, some of which, including my own, are related to corporal punishment and do a better job in my view of staying on that topic, some of which aren't.

I am genuine but have no real way of proving that to people that doesn't deprive myself and my school of the degree of privacy I consider appropriate, not to mention my students. I'm also not all that interested in arguing with others about this point. Believe me or not. It changes nothing, really. I do get irritated when I see people insisting certain things I know to be true, which have nothing to do with whether or not I'm genuine or a fraud, aren't true simply because they didn't experience it themselves but as for myself...

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too
If you can wait and not be tired of waiting
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies

Forgive me. I've spent much of the last few hours arguing for the inclusion of more traditional poetry in our English curriculum and being politely ignored on the basis that I teach Science subjects. But I believe in the sentiments and I've tried to impart them to thousands of boys, so I'd be a hypocrite if I worried too much about somebody on the internet calling me a fraud.

I am near retirement. Truth to tell, I'm already a few years beyond normal retirement age. But nobody has pressured me to retire, it's been made quite clear to me I can keep teaching as long as I want to and as long as I am able to. I think next year will probably be my last year of teaching, though. I've long had an ambition to reach my half century, fifty years as a teacher and while that will technically be achieved at the end of this year, 1959-2009 seems a better set of dates to round myself off on. I don't want to spend my retirement explaining why it was fifty years at the end of 2008 to the mathematically illiterate. Or perhaps, it's just this is the final decent excuse I can come up with to justify continuing and putting off the inevitable.

But for the moment, I'm a teacher. I'm a schoolmaster and it's what I've been all my adult life. And you can believe that or not. But it doesn't change the facts.

Well said, Doctor Dominum. If you get the chance to press the traditional poetry issue again, persist, especially Rudyard Kipling, which has to be good for lads! Every boy should know 'If' by heart, plus Macaulay's 'Horatius and Tennyson's 'The Charge Of The Light Brigade'. That'll do for starters!

Hi KK. I agree with you, teachers, kinky or otherwise, who were at the curved end of the cane or the heel end of the slipper must be out there somewhere, to say nothing of the vast number who must have wielded the tawse north of the border. And that's just the UK, as Falling Star has observed elsewhere this is an international forum.

What puzzles me is if 'kinky' teachers were indeed a significant percentage of those administering perfectly legal and to all intents and purposes above board school CP, as many contributors here apparently think, why are at least some of them not taking advantage of the captive audience in this estimable Forum to flaunt their exploits?

If you are referring to said missing posters I can't entirely agree with your 'Getting on a bit in age' as explaining their absence. I very briefly trained as a teacher many moons ago. Had I continued with that career I'd have been teaching in an environment where CP was legal (and sometimes used) in state schools for 22 years. I'm not too ancient to browse the web and use a keyboard. There must be vast numbers of people of my age around who actually did go into the profession, to say nothing of those up to 20 odd years younger, none of whom should be disqualified by 'getting on a bit in age' from posting here should they have a mind to!

I think most outright perves are unlikely to broadcast the fact, period.

At least, if Gary Glitter's recent exploits are anything to go by! I also don't recall any website set up after his initial conviction over here that glorified his exploits.

Seriously, how many court cases involving abuse allegations over the last 10 years can you remember there being a Not Guilty verdict returned? I'm pushed to think of one.

Now, admittedly, they all seem to've been public schools, children's homes etc & not state schools. But, the present ethos seems to be, enough pupils recall "abuse", even from 30-40 years ago, and you are dead in the water with any jury.

After all, how many other ex-Heads like George have we had, who simply caned, as it was the done thing and expected, on here? Not too many.

All it needs for a "simple" caning head is enough pupils to say it was delivered bare against LEA rules or that they were touched up before & after, and...........!


Steve M

Another_Lurker and Doctor Dominum,

There is an unusual story about the writer on this Forum. It is entitled ‘Sussex Story 5 (Nigel)’.

http://www.network54.com/Forum/198833/thread/1088366813/last-1213477337/Summer+in+Sussex

Ex-teachers publishing their memoirs on CP websites? I'm sure that happens frequently.

Currently-serving teachers who've previously wielded the cane running CP websites for the pleasure of one-handed typists all over the world? Nobody would be so foolish. If their identity were discovered by a tabloid newspaper, they'd be ruined - professionally and socially.

A former teacher who used corporal punishment during his career writes on the Internet under the name of Kilahara. For a short time he taught at the notorious William Penn School, where our honorary life member J.M.H. flagellated and sodomised dozens of little boys.

There is a lot of his stuff at www.spankingclassics.com

And he is a very nice man who is up front with his background. His origins are very near to la abode de moi.

Did the forum always function the way it does now. Perhaps my memory is faulty, but it seems to me that it might be harder now to follow precisely what post somebody is replying to, because all replies seem to go to the bottom of a thread, rather than being nested after the post you are replying to, which I thought was once the way things work. In any event, I suppose I need to make it clear who I am replying to - Another_Lurker on poetry.

All of the poems you mention are ones that I think the boys of today would do well to be exposed to. I also want them exposed to some of the Australian greats - The Man from Snowy River is a must for any Australian boy, as is My Country.

We've actually made a rather wonderful recent book The Dangerous Book for Boys one of our text books for our junior students over the last year or so, because it covers so much that old fogies like myself think has been lost for modern children. There's an Australian edition, which we use, that has so much great material from the original, but also a lot of good Australian editions.

One of its chapters is poetry every boys should know - and while it's hard to make a short list, I think they do a decent job. It includes Vitae Lampada, which along with If, which is also there, are my two absolute classics as to what, in general, boys should be taught (If), and specifically what a school seeks to teach (Vitae Lampada).

Why do I think Lotta's comments somehow refer to me.

Currently-serving teachers who've previously wielded the cane running CP websites for the pleasure of one-handed typists all over the world? Nobody would be so foolish. If their identity were discovered by a tabloid newspaper, they'd be ruined - professionally and socially.

Perhaps I am wrong if they don't, but if they do, I'd like to respond briefly to correct inaccuracy, and though I will make allowance for doubting, I don't think there's anything wrong with responding either.

The inaccuracy, if this does refer to me, is that I don't run a CP website and I never have. I run an e-mail discussion list that discusses school corporal punishment and that is not quite the same thing. There is a website associated with the list, but that's just because the list host chooses to provide one. Personally I'd be just as happy without it, although as it's there, I do take advantage of some of its other features occasionally.

Personally I could see a currently serving teacher legitimately operating a website devoted to this subject, I don't see it as foolish or strange. But I don't think I'd do it, because I don't think any website I would run would serve any useful purpose. I think there are enough websites of various sorts devoted to the subject that I can't see how I'd come up with something original enough to justify a website.

What I run is a discussion list concerning an educational issue that I consider important and I started that list because when I did so I couldn't find any such forum anywhere on the net. A forum intended for the serious discussion of the pedagogical issues associated with corporal punishment where those with a genuine interest from a teaching or other relevant perspective could seriously exchange thier views. That's what I tried to set up. I don't think I succeeded perfectly. In fact, the list has never matched my original vision for it, but I'm inclined to think it's as close as we're ever likely to get, so I stick with it.

My list does not exist for the "pleasure of one handed typists" any more than petroleum jelly does. Yes, it gets used for that purpose, probably quite a lot, but that's not why it exists.

As somebody who's been associated with the supervision of adolescent boys for decades, I can actually think of quite a few substances I know (or strongly suspect) have been used for that purpose over the years and very, very, few of them in fact were primarily intended to be used in that way. Perhaps this makes me rather tolerant of such things, but the fact I'll tolerate them doesn't meant it's what it's there for.

I also think that any 'scandal' that might develop from my actions would be minor. I don't think my professional or social reputation would be harmed. But if it would be, then, so be it. I've done very little I'm ashamed of in my career or my life and if need be I'll stand up and make my case. If I may go back to Kipling again - I'll bold the parts that sum up my attitude to the idea I need to worry about these things.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
'Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

There's very little in my life or career I'm ashamed of. I've made mistakes, but overall I believe I've done far more good than harm to the boys I've taught.

Doctor Dominum wrote:

‘Did the forum always function the way it does now? Perhaps my memory is faulty, but it seems to me that it might be harder now to follow precisely what post somebody is replying to, because all replies seem to go to the bottom of a thread, rather than being nested after the post you are replying to, which I thought was once the way things work.’


Network54 provides two sorts of thread format. Originally this Forum used the one known as “fully threaded” which allows a thread to have multiple levels of replies. With this type, however, problems arose when a certain number of messages were reached, giving this
sort of
thing making
the thread
difficult
to read.

Following a suggestion by Jetta/SpecialK, we changed the format to “linear”. Contributions now always extend across the entire screen, but all replies have to be added at the foot of the thread.

Hi Doctor Dominum, thank you for taking the trouble to comment on my very brief poetry selection above. Such qualifications as I have are in maths and science, and, after some initial false starts, I have spent my life in computer related jobs. However, I am very thankful that when young I was exposed to poetry of various sorts both at home and at school. Recalling old favourites can be a great comfort in times of stress and it keeps the mind active.

I shall look up the two Australian poems you mention. I am pleased to hear that The Dangerous Book for Boys is in use for your junior students. Computer games and the internet tend to figure far too largely in the lives of young males these days and the inclusion of that book in the curriculum should certainly provide some alternative outlets!

I'm not sure how the idea of Currently-serving teachers who've previously wielded the cane running CP websites for the pleasure of one-handed typists all over the world got into this thread. The question I posed when I started the thread was:

It is frequently said on this estimable Forum that many teachers using CP are or were (for want of a better term) 'kinky' teachers. If this is/was the case why do we not see more of these 'kinky' teachers exploiting what is in effect a dedicated audience to boast of their exploits in posts here?

Absolutely no mention of teachers of any sort running websites to publicise their use of CP!

As regards the changes to the thread format described by Research Assistant 2 above, I have to agree that this was a good thing. Both you and I tend towards fairly lengthy postings, perhaps because our training inclines us to try to avoid loose ends. Under the previous thread format our postings would have been almost unreadable and required scrolling vast distances down the page.

There is in fact a very easy way to for a poster to uniquely indentify his or her post, thus making it possible for someone posting a reply to provide a link direct to the post being replied to. You may already be aware of this as you are one of the few posters utilising the HTML facilities provided. Sadly I suspect most posters here would find this too much of an overhead.

I have always thought that Dr D and Headmaster George were more than genuine.
I see no problems in their "claims" All such things were quite normal in the days related about.
I think Georges BB canings were perhaps unnecesary but that was up to him at the time.
I am sure some teachers were turned on by administering CP or were at least happy to do it.
I do wonder though if the kinky ones were just into abusing kids or were actually real life adult spankos?
Doubt if we will ever know, but we live in hope eternal.

George genuine?

Excuse me while I sew my sides back together.

Why ever not pray tell?

Doctor Dominum is genuine...unfortunately. He is an educator who has joyously and with impunity beaten the bottoms of boys (and some girls with admitted uh...pointed results) for his entire professional life. Perhaps he is the epitome of kinky educator in denial. Hopefully he will finally retire soon and it will end his regime of whacking schoolboys' bums as most Independent Schools in Melbourne finally come to agree that beating the best and the brightest is folly albeit fetishistic delight for some.

The problem I have in deciding Dominum's genuineness is that I have almost no knowledge of Australia's cultural norms.

His story about his caning girls would send him straight into my 'fantasist book' if it had been set in England, but in Australia - who knows?

He's very credible and, if he were genuine, it wouldn't amaze me.


George, on the other hand, is the most blatant fantasist in the entire universe.

If George is a fantasiser then he is damn good at it.

Well said, Mimi! I am finding George more and more convincing.

I am a little surprised that anyone of George's age is both computer literate and still able to use a computer. However perhaps I shouldn't be. There are a few people over the century mark still driving cars on our overcrowded roads, an operation certainly equal in complexity to operating a PC, and the other day I read of a man in his late 80's attaining a Doctorate - and it wasn't in flower arranging from a former College of FE either!

What George is writing now accords with what I was told when young about school discipline and conditions in the war years. I was educated in the late 1940s and the 1950s, and the corporal punishment regimes even then are, I know, unbelievable to younger people. The fact remains though that it happened. Nobody shouted child abuse, because child abuse is a comparatively recent concept. Life was pretty tough for all but the comparatively wealthy right up to the 1960s, and the regimes in schools reflected society as a whole.

Were boys beaten on the bottom and sometimes on the bare in all sorts of schools in the 1940s and 1950s? Yes they were, though by the 1950s the 'on the bare' was mainly in private schools. Were girls caned on the bottom? Yes, they were, though not nearly as often as boys, and seldom if ever on the bare. Severe CP in schools happened. If you were there you know it happened, if you weren't you don't but that doesn't stop it being a fact!

George may of course be a much younger person who has invented a persona and is simply recounting what he has heard from others. That is a possibility, but if he was doing that I don't think the relatively frequent confusions in his narrative would creep in. If I was posting fiction on my favourite fantasies it would be a lot smoother performance than George is putting up. The i's would all be dotted and the t's would all be crossed! The fact that George's narrative has its flaws and discontinuities lends it authenticity in my eyes.

Lotta Nonsense, I would be genuinely interested in why you think Doctor Dominum's account of caning girls would expose him as a fantasist if set in England. For me it does just the opposite, wherever it is set. He introduces none of the elements a fantasist would be likely to weave into such an account and, further, he admits to having been very uneasy about the process. I fail to see what satisfaction a fantasist could gain from posting that particular account and I also fail to see why a fantasist would post in this estimable Forum unless to gain some sort of satisfaction. Any comments very much appreciated.

With great respect to the intelligence of our members, I must remind them that the fact that large numbers of people experienced something does not mean that anyone claiming to have experienced that something is necessarily telling the truth. I think we're all agreed on that.

If you're with me on the above, we must agree that the fact that events similar to those described by George are known to have happened in the places and at the times and in the manner he describes does not mean that George necessarily played the part he claims to have played in those events.

As for Dominum, I hesitate to base my reply on half-remembered facts but I seem to recall a story about his caning (on the bum) a group of girls who were not pupils at his school. If that's correct, such an action would have constituted a criminal offence in England and the consequences for any headmaster committing such a crime would have been dire indeed. The front page of the News of the World would have been the very least of his worries.

If I am asked about these things in a reasonable fashion, I'm quite prepared to address them (time permitting. I'm about to head off to England for a conference, so may not be online as much as I normally am for the next couple of weeks). When people start throwing accusations around, I may or may not wind up responding depending on my mood, but it does lessen my enthusiasm for responding.

It is correct that I did, on two occasions, in the early 1970s, have cause to cane three girls (one individual and one pair, hence the two occasions) who were, fairly obviously, not normally enrolled students of my all-boys school. I caned them in the same fashion as I caned boys, so yes, I did cane them on the bottom. I do not believe there was anything illegal in my actions, but I do, with the benefit of a considerable amount of hindsight, regret the mindset that created the situation that lead me to cane those girls and feel that while, arguably, the canings themselves are defensible, my attitude was not. If I was correct to use the cane in those cases, it's because I was lucky, not because I exercised particularly wise judgement.

I note your claim that such actions would have been illegal in the United Kingdom. I wonder if you would explain why you believe this to have been the case. I've interpreted what you have written as indicating the illegality would result from the fact that the students were not students at the school at which the teacher was employed, and I'm answering this post partly based on that interpretation, but if the interpretation is in error, please let us know, because it means what I am saying here is not addressing the point you were raising.

If I am correct, there are two points I think I need to address.

The first is that it was commonly accepted practice among certain of the associations of independent schools in Australia (and only among certain of those associations) up until reasonably recently that staff of any individual school had varying degrees of authority over students from all schools in those associations, and there are considerable remnants of that practice still operating in those schools today. When I was a schoolboy in the 1950s at Geelong Grammar School, I certainly accepted as a basic fact of life that any Master from Geelong College, Scotch College, Xavier College, Melbourne Grammar, or Wesley College had the power to cane me if he chose to do so. Because they were APS schools and so was my school. It would have required reasonably unusual circumstances for that to have ever happened and it never did happen to me, but if I'd been visiting their school for a sporting contest, or some other activity, I'd have had no argument whatsoever with the idea that they were empowered to punish me. And I would say that attitude remained commonplace among boys from schools like ours until at least the 1970s and probably into the 1980s, it probably only started to break down when the schools discipline policies started to differ, so there was no longer a consistent approach. Even today, though, if I see a boy from any of my schools associated schools misbehaving, I feel quite comfortable reprimanding him and I would expect him to accept that reprimand as readily as one of my own students (assuming he knows who I am and doesn't think I'm just some random person telling him off), there are still remnants of the old ideas still around.

In essence, what I am saying is that at the time I caned these girls, it was still commonly accepted practice among the 'elite' boys schools that if a boy from another 'elite' school wound up under your authority you had every right to discipline him. I'm not sure how a court would have viewed the practice if it had ever come to court, but as far as I know it never did. If it had, I'm inclined to think the teacher involved would have been in some degree of trouble, as the right of a teacher in an independent school to administer corporal punishment was rooted in the doctrine of in loco parentis and that of delegation of parental authority, but, I think, even if there was no other reason to defend the actions I took in caning those girls, there'd be an arguable defence that it was simply applying established and accepted practice among the elite boys schools more broadly in an environment where female students were demanding similar treatment to their brothers. I don't know if that argument would have worked or not but it could have been made, I think.

More importantly, though, is the fact that my 'authority' to punish the girls was nowhere that ad hoc. It is true that they were not normally enrolled students at my school, but the arrangement by which they came under my authority as a teacher was much more formal than that.

They were students at our sister school. In the early 1970s, a new matriculation system was introduced for all Victorian schools as the accepted path to university, the HSC, Higher School Certificate. More girls than ever before were wanting to go to university, and therefore there were significant numbers of girls who wanted the same HSC opportunities as boys. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, some girls' schools were unable to offer the same range of HSC opportunity as boys' schools could, particularly in areas like mathematics and science. Especially in science, actually, because as well as needing teachers a school also needed decent labs.

To solve this problem, quite a few girls' schools came to arrangements with nearby boys' schools (or in some cases, co-educational schools) that senior girls - Form V and VI, Years 11 and 12 - who wanted to study subjects like Physics or Chemistry would attend the boys' school for those subjects, and in some cases, distance considerations meant they attended for far more than that (if the schools were more than a couple of minutes apart, it wasn't always practical for the girls to get back to their own school for their other classes, and so they would stay on for all or most of their subjects). They remained enrolled in their own school, and the boys' school they were attending was still considered to be a boys' school, despite having a few female 'guests' in the upper classes, but discipline required that while they were at the boys' school they were expected to follow its rules, and disciplinary arrangements had to be made to deal with situations when they did not.

I taught my school's senior science classes at the time (and arguably was head of the science department), and when our sister school requested this type of arrangement, I was quite resistant to the idea, I'm afraid to say. I didn't want the girls in my classes. Not particularly because of sexism, although I was something of a sexist back then, I'm afraid, but because I knew the standard of science teaching at their school up until Form IV was not as good as ours and I was worried these Form V and VI girls would drag my boys down. I was informed that I had to take them, the decision was taken at a higher level than my own, and I agreed to do so only on the condition that they would be expected to meet the same standards as the boys and I would not change any of my teaching practices because there were girls in the class. That was accepted and it was understood by the girls, by their school, and by their parents that this was how it was going to be.

One of my ironclad rules back then (and it's only become slightly less ironclad over the years) is that safety rules in my lab are inviolable. If you break any of my safety rules, you will be severely punished. What that meant back then, was that any violation of a safety rule, no matter how minor lead to a caning. If you didn't wear goggles when told to, you were caned. If you didn't wear a labcoat when told to, you were caned. Fail to turn a bunsen burner to yellow flame when you moved away from it for a moment, you were caned. Absolute rules. And the girls were told they had to follow them. And they agreed. Their school agreed. And their parents agreed.

Now, as it happens, the girls were wonderful students. Those who were motivated enough to be going to this much trouble to study science tended to work very hard, and even though they were behind when they started, they caught up very quickly. And they very rarely caused any trouble. And they very rarely broke the safety rules. But three girls did. And when those three girls did, I caned them.

Legally, I think it's pretty clear I had parental delegation, and also had authority delegated to me through their headmistress, and in loco parentis applied. So I don't think I had a legal problem. The fact that the punishments were for safety violations, probably made me doubly safe because it also brought the (then new and developing) doctrine of duty of care into the picture.

I even think (although I was more junior then and so didn't have to worry about these types of details so I can't be sure) that you could argue that the girls were dual enrolled students if it had ever come down to that. I know of at least one boys' school at the time that even went so far as to appoint one of its female guests a prefect, because as far as possible it became practice to integrate them into the school to the extent you reasonably could. It even helped a few of the schools on the path to co-education.

Thank you Doctor Dominum. I greatly regret that I have inadvertently involved you in a further lengthy posting to repeat information you had already provided in a previous thread to which I provided a link in my initial posting in this thread.

When I asked Lotta Nonsense to expand on what I considered her rather strange interpretation of your previous posting I presumed that she had recently read the account on which she was commenting and therefore was familiar with its contents. Clearly this was not the case, which I judge a breach of her normally high standards in this respect.

Again, please accept my apologies for the extra work. In future I shall bear in mind that even Lotta may let me down on occasion!

Bye all.

It's been . . . entertaining.

Lotta, please take no precipitate decisions regarding your future presence in this estimable Forum as a result of my minor criticism in the post above. Should you cease to grace us with your presence not only will Steve M never forgive me, but I shall never forgive myself!

Don't worry-I'm sure Lotta is not going away again.

She may tease and tantilize at times, but that's women for you.

At least it is pleasing to note Lotta clearly can't use the blasted forum search engine any more effectively than the rest of us, otherwise she wouldn't have dragged the Whore's Gazette into commenting on what the Sydney Sun or Melbourne Age might have been interested in.


Steve M

Steve, as regards Lotta I very much hope you are correct!

As regards the Forum search engine I've commented elsewhere on the fact that it only seems to function once a year, on American Independence Day! Sadly the powers that be within this estimable Forum have already said that the matter is outside their remit, being entirely under the control of Network54.

A_L,

Please do not worry that your message might have lead to me spending a little time responding to the comments of another person. I had the time to spare as it happened, sitting around waiting for a couple of senior students to return to the boarding house before I could go to bed.

I also have absolutely no objection to responding to the questions raised by Lotta Nonsense in this instance. While I have had some degree of confrontation with Lotta Nonsense and her predecessors (such as Sarajane) on this forum, I think that the significant majority of the questions they raise are ones that are perfectly reasonable ones to raise. The circumstances surrounding my caning of the girls in question were somewhat unusual and I'm not at all surprised that the basic idea raises some eyebrows. And so, I certainly have no objection to going beyond those basic facts and elaborating on the situation in the hope of making it more understandable to others. It wasn't an entirely normal situation and explaining why it wasn't entirely normal doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me.

Even if I have explained it before, I don't expect everybody reading here to have read every previous message posted. I certainly haven't.

DD I still don't understand how or why you thought it neccesary to cane these girls.
As for safety violations. They were minors, if they made mistakes it was because they were not correctly supervised.
Sory to be disagreeable but it seems so OTT.

Mimi, as I've said there are aspects of those canings that, in retrospect, with the benefit of decades of hindsight, I regret. I didn't need to cane those girls, and if, somehow, I wound up in a similar situation today, I very much doubt I would take the same approach.

But back then, I was a much less experienced teacher and I was much more rigid in my approach to teaching. I wasn't as willing to be flexible, and almost as importantly, because I was much more junior in my school's heirarchy, I wasn't trusted enough to be all that flexible even in situations where I wanted to. Today, I'm perfectly comfortable making an exception to any rule if I feel it's appropriate based on my decades of experience, and I can do secure in the knowledge that only a few of my colleagues are likely to question my decision and even they will trust my judgement in general, even if they disagree on a specific case. It wasn't like that at the time I caned these girls. I had strict policies in my classroom that I only very rarely deviated from, and doing so simply because they were girls would not have been a position I'd have wanted to defend, and it would have made me look inconsistent to more senior staff.

To an extent, I painted myself into a corner to begin with. By protesting that the girls would lower standards in my class, by adopting a policy that I would not allow that to happen by not modifying how I taught in any way, and by having an ironclad policy that I would always cane for safety violations, I didn't leave myself a lot of room to manoeuvre.

It wasn't necessary for me to cane those girls, no. But at the time I felt it was.

I must say though, I reject your assertion that when students make mistakes in a classroom, it's because of inadequate supervision. Teachers can sometimes be negligent and fail to supervise students adquately and that can lead to problems, but even if a teacher is exercising all care and diligence in their supervision, mistakes will sometimes happen, and so can accidents.

My classrooms are very safe environments. I've had very, very few accidents over fifty years of teaching that were even close to being serious. Of that very small number, I freely admit that one of them involved me failing to supervise a student as closely as I could have, although the inquiry that resulted cleared me on the basis that that students previous behaviour meant I was reasonably entitled to assume I could trust him with limited supervision. But the others didn't. I supervised those students perfectly well, any greater supervision would have resulted in a less effective learning environment for them. In today's overly-litigous society, all too many schools have taken the approach of trying to eliminate even the tiniest risks from a classroom to the extent that students are no longer able to learn effectively. Well, I won't do that. I'll let my students take carefully measured risks so they can learn. I won't, of course, let it go too far, but a student learns more about lab safety by spilling dilute H2SO4 on a labcoat than he'll ever learn from a safety lecture.

I often get comments from other science teachers that I still use experiments in my classroom that they stopped using ten or even twenty years ago, or that they only ever do themselves as demonstrations where my boys are doing them at their own tables. I can do that because I teach my students to follow my lab safety rules to such a great extent that I can reasonably trust them to handle chemicals and most teachers no longer dare to.

I'm not talking about exposing students to serious risk, I'm talking about experiments that were standard into the 1970s, 1980s, and sometimes even 1990s, which a large number of teachers no longer use.

The two girls I caned together for safety violations were not in danger from the offence I caned them for. They forgot to put on labcoats and that put their school uniform at risk, because we working with chemicals that stained rather than chemicals that harmed. But they never forget to wear their labcoats again.

The most recent boy I caned for a safety violation was a boy who took his safety goggles off and rubbed his eyes. I was supervising him, in fact, that's why I saw him do it. But I was at the back of the lab, and he was near the front, and his mistake took him two seconds to make.

I don't think he'll make it again. And his classmates are less likely to as well.

Was he in serious danger? No. He's twelve years old, in his first year at the school, and all he was working with was lemon juice. But in a couple of years, I'll have him working with the teacher-killer and before that happens, I want to know he takes safety rules seriously.

I've just been going through my photobucket account in preparation for my overseas trip and I found the following images. I thought I'd share them here so people can, perhaps, get a sense of where I am coming from. I don't find these images 'kinky' because that isn't my interest, but perhaps some people would.

The first is a photo taken by a boy at my school. It was taken for a competition the student magazine had a while back revolving around The Dangerous Book for Boys. Boys had to take a picture of the book in a dangerous environment and he snuck into my office and came up with this. The book is my own copy, which he photographed in situ, just as it was at the time.

I try to keep the books in my office organised by subject, as I have a considerable library in there, but books do get moved around over the course of the year. This includes part of my section devoted to school discipline which is fairly considerable and doesn't always involve the physical form. The cane is not normally kept there, but will wind up on a shelf there sometimes as it did on this occasion if I'm in a hurry.



The other two images are scans from the most recent edition of the Victorian Law Handbook which outlines the current legal situation concerning corporal punishment in this state, and I scanned them to deal with one of those people who constantly tries to insist he knows the law on this better than I do, and that it has been banned.

Whilst I firmly believe in the sanction of CP as a last resort.
I cannot see how you thought it reasonable for any minor to handle H2SO4.It just is not acceptable.
Surely propper dress would have been obvious before they were anywhere near the stuff.
A lab coat would make very little difference safety wise with such a substance.
As for caning a boy in the 21st century for the goggles offence, surely an adequate caution would be more than enough.
Sorry, but I think you were very lax in your attitude and punished them to make up for that.
Not wishing to start a flameing session, just my opinion.

Hi Mimi. You've got me worried with your comments above. You say to Doctor Dominum "I cannot see how you thought it reasonable for any minor to handle H2SO4". Are we talking about the same stuff? H₂SO₄, Sulphuric Acid? I did O and A level chemistry and as a student I handled it in various dilutions through to concentrated from the age of 12. So did everyone else doing chemistry. You couldn't have completed the syllabus and done the required laboratory work otherwise! Same thing applied to a lot of other dangerous chemicals.

Still a minor, age 18 at university, I was handling enough KCN, Potassium Cyanide, to poison a large village. It was essential to some of the required work in the metallurgical laboratory.

You can't train students in practical scientific techniques by just letting them watch a demonstration. They have to know how to deal with dangerous substances and take the right precauions themselves. My chemistry masters at school took very much the same line as Doctor Dominum. Ignore the precautions you'd been shown and told to take and and the consequences were severe. None of them used CP, curiously few science teachers did at that school, but in extreme cases offenders would be sent to the headmaster, who certainly didn't hesitate to cane in such a case. For less serious breaches detentions and interminable lines did the trick. At university they simply threw people out as unsuitable if they couldn't behave safely in laboratories.

At my school dangerous chemicals were only handled by the science teachers.
As for caning girls. I have seen 16 year old girls in tears and distraught at even seing the slipper. Not one I ever saw whacked failed to cry before even just one whack.
I can only think that the cane would have produced extreeme tears/distress and I fail to see how they could take it without being restrained.

Hi Mimi. Re the handling of dangerous chemicals. I was 10 years in front of you schoolwise, and probably the way that chemistry classes were conducted altered in the interim period as parents and society generally became increasingly litigious. Doctor Dominum does discuss this with reference to Australia in one of his posts above.

Re girls and CP. I was never a direct observer of anyone being caned at school, boy or girl, nor was I ever caned myself. However my understanding is that the pain can vary considerably depending on the cane used, the application technique used and the clothing (or lack of it) of the recipient. You say in one of George's threads that you saw big lads in tears after one stroke. Maybe canings at your school were at the very severe end of the scale.

In junior school I did see girls slippered. They certainly weren't 'in tears and distraught at even seing the slipper' as you mention above. They bent over and took their whack or whacks just as lads did, though a few did cry during or after the punishment, which boys for the most part didn't. These of course were pre-teen youngsters. It may be that for the older girls you mention the humiliation of being punished with a mixed class aware of (or possibly witnessing) the punishment would produce the tears, rather than the punishment itself.

I don't think there is any doubt that girls were caned on the bottom at some schools in the UK post the second world war until CP became illegal. I think that, like the girls caned by Doctor Dominum, the vast majority were caned over their ordinary school uniform, though a few were undoubtedly caned with less protection. I doubt if many of them were restrained, as you suggest would be required. Indeed, other than in a few well publicised court cases, I've never seen restraint of any sort mentioned in what I regard as a credible account of a girl being caned at school.

In his account Doctor Dominum says of the initial reaction of the girls he caned, when told they were to be caned:

"Resignation, I think, was the strongest part of their reaction when they realised they were going to get it - I had made it very clear at the start of the year what the penalty was for dangerous behaviour in my classes, so they knew what they'd be facing - but I suppose they had to be hoping that I wouldn't actually go through with it. When they realised I was, they just seemed to accept it."

Of the reaction to their punishment shown by the two girls given two strokes of the cane in private, over their school uniform kilts, he says:

"It wasn't incredibly dramatic - but both did react vocally to each stroke, and both were... well, not crying after two strokes but not far short of it. And both were scrupulous in following the safety rules from then on."

This is certainly what I'd expect, which is why I find his account absolutely convincing. Doctor Dominum does not, I think, mention the reaction of the girl who committed the much more serious offence and received three strokes over a thin summer dress. Should he be prepared to do so I would be surprised if she did not evince rather greater distress during the punishment.

Mimi,

I'm not sure what your level of scientific knowledge is, but you certainly seem to have rather an exagerated idea of how dangerous H2SO4 (which is sulfuric acid, also known in my labs, at least, as the teacher-killer because of the rhyme I use to teach boys to remember its formula) is. In its dilute form - say 1M -, while it needs to be handled with care, it's not that dangerous. If you spill it on yourself, you have more than enough time to wash it off before it will injure you.

I wouldn't use greather than 5M in a classroom without an exceptionally good reason (and I, personally, would dislike handing 6M or higher).

You are quite correct that proper dress is a necessity before students use such substances and if I observed a student approaching a bench with sulfuric acid on it without a labcoat, I would most certainly pull them up and remind them to put one on and that would avert danger to themselves from the chemical and would also spare them the risk of the cane. But even though I do keep a close eye on my students, and 999 times out of 1000, that probably means I can stop them making a dangerous mistake, by my observation, I have to also ensure they are ready for the 1 time in 1000 when I miss what they are doing. I'm not perfect, just pretty close to it.

I would never allow a student to expose themselves to a significant risk if a word from me, would stop them. But if there isn't a great risk, and there's a real learning opportunity in allowing a student to make a mistake and face the consequences of that mistake, it's another matter.

These two girls had been repeatedly lax about my safety rules, to an extent I didn't tolerate in my classes. I had had to remind both of them to put on gloves, goggles, or coats on a number of occasions and they continued to make the same mistake. In this particular lesson, the stakes were not as high as they had been, and perhaps, because the situation was not as dangerous, I wasn't quite as diligent as I was when we were dealing with highly volatile material. And they made the same mistake, and this time I didn't save them from that mistake at the last minute.

They were caned and I didn't have any more carelessness from them.

As for the boy I caned recently, no, an adequate caution would not have been enough. He's been reminded on numerous occasions and it hasn't sunk in. Verbal reprimands are enough for some boys, but they are not for others and in his case, punishing him also served as a reminder to the other boys in his class that these rules are not to be ignored.

He got two strokes of the cane, and he cried for about three minutes and the bad part was over that quickly. The good part - the lesson he learned - will hopefully stay with him much, much longer.

Concentrated H2SO4 is a fun substance. Pour some onto sugar or drop a small piece of meat into it and you learn it needs to be handled careful. Rile Dominum - ditto, I suspect.

I see what you mean now about repeated warnings. It was hardly given in an off hand way then.
Personally they would have been off the course and out of the lab.
Done about 30 years petro chem on and off. Its all treated far safer industrially. Anyone being dangerous would have been off any of my sites.
Strangely enough some dangerous ones are quite safe because they are treated with caution its the ones that don't bite or burn that can do the harm.

One of the factors which keep me visiting this estimable Forum is the variety of interesting topics which can grow from threads originating in the main business of the forum. For instance, here we are in School Chemistry, well off-topic but obviously of interest to at least three of us!

Doctor Dominum, you mention that Sulfuric Acid (I see that ISO standards now require that I call it Sulfuric rather than Sulphuric) is known in your labs as 'the teacher-killer' because of the rhyme you use to teach boys to remember its formula. Would this by any chance be:

Poor old Cy is dead and gone, we shan't see him no more.
For what he thought was H₂0 was H₂SO₄!

Substitute teacher's name as appropriate for Cy. Cy was Doctor C N Jackson, a bit of a tyrant, but a most excellent teacher. In view of his initials his nickname was Cyanide, inevitably shortened to Cy. At some stage in his career he'd been in an accident involving Chlorine and I'm afraid a few of my classmates played on this if they got a bit bored by uttering the magic words 'Sir, I think I've produced Chlorine' which, if the experiment in progress provided even a remote possibility of this happening, would lead to evacuation of the lab.

And back on topic. In your original postings on the subject of the girls you had to cane for breaches of laboratory discipline you responded to a query regarding their reactions by commenting on the two girls who received the lesser punishment of two strokes for the lab coat offences.

I disagree with Mimi's assumtion above that girls would not be able to tolerate the cane at all. However, I think that given the combination of uniform and number of strokes the third girl, who had indeed committed a more serious offence, received a substantially more painful punishment. My assumption is that both during and after the punishment she would have been rather more distressed than the boy you describe above, who cried for three minutes after two strokes.

I appreciate that you may not wish to comment on this. Your interest in CP is a professional one, whereas mine, and, I suspect, that of most people here, is not. I have previously hesitated to put this question directly. However, you were extremely frank in responding to queries in the original thread, and the fact that accurate information on this topic is so seldom available has tipped the balance for me.

Mimi,

Even in the earliest days when I used the cane routinely as my first and virtually only response to misbehaviour among my pupils, I was never offhand in how I used it. And by the time I came to punish these girls I already had about a decade of experience behind me as a teacher and had been gently guided into a much more controlled and restrained use of corporal punishment, which involved a lot more thinking, by other more experienced colleagues.

Kicking the girls off the course would have caused them considerable negative effects. It would have more or less resulted in them automatically failing their HSC, denying them any opportunity to go to university - and bear in mind, that was the reason they were doing this in the first place. I really think that would have been far too high a penalty to impose on them for what they had done. One of the major reasons, I remain opposed to the abolition of corporal punishment is that I have seen, time after time, over and over again, that where corporal punishment has been abolished, normally supposedly in order to protect children, or prevent harm to them, that it is commonly replaced with other methods of punishment that in my view are far, far more likely to have long term negative effects on the child. I don't deny that corporal punishment carries the risk of causing long term damage to a child, but that risk is slight and can be managed, and it's a far lower risk than things like long term suspensions or exclusion/expulsion, which are typically used much more following abolition. My big problem with abolitionists is that so few of them (not all) seem to have a plan in mind for replacing corporal punishment with something that is unlikely to have worse risks associated with it.

I also agree, by the way, with your observation that accidents far more often occur with relatively benign substances simply because we don't have the same safety procedures in place when dealing with them that we insist on when dealing with more dangerous substances. That's one reason why I make my lab safety rules so absolute. And, incidentally, that applies to me as well - the boys all know that if they catch me breaking one of my own safety rules, every boy in the class is going to get a Mars Bar and they watch me like hawks - and are far stricter with me than I ever am with them. The last set of Mars Bars I had to hand out was because I didn't wash my hands after handling vinegar! My protestations that I was having fish and chips for lunch and so would be ingesting vinegar cut no ice - "Always wash your hands after handling chemicals."

AL,

Please don't worry about asking me any questions. I have long held the belief that for corporal punishment to be used safely and appropriately, the process and practices need to be as transparent as they reasonably can be. Total openness is problematic, but I try to be as open as I think I can be. It is a simple fact that some people have a prurient interest in corporal punishment and acting like that isn't true won't do any good at all. The only time I have a real problem with people whose interests fall into that category is when they pretend they don't and allow their fantasies to pollute the facts. Can you imagine what it would be like to be a woman who as a girl was caned by a male teacher on their bare bottom, and to be on this forum? The amount of fantasies of that type lead to an automatic assumption by many people that any and all such accounts must be fantasies and that isn't necessarily the case. I would believe such cases would be extremely rare, and would almost certainly involve a teacher having acted inappropriately, but sometimes teachers have acted inappropriately, and a person who was the victim of that - well, it must add insult to injury for them not to be believed simply because so many fantasists have muddied the waters.

I try to be open about the reality, because I think that's important.

Now to address the rest of your post. Yes, it's basically the same poem that I use in my science classes, although the version I use goes:

Our science teacher has gone to Heaven,
We won't see him no more.
For what he thought was H2O
Was H2SO4.

(I don't know how to to subscripts in html off the top of my head, and I can't be bothered looking right now.)

I note that those in charge of this site have dug up and posted (with my permission, of course) and older message which gives a little more detail about the caning you asked about. I can add a little bit to that and elaborate.

Dredging through my memories, I think the girl in question was messing around with the gas taps and a balloon trying to fill the balloon with gas in the apparent belief she'd wind up with a lighter than air balloon (and she would have given the gas mix we had - mostly methane - it just would have been a rather flammable lighter than air balloon - as I have said, these girls came into my classes with a fairly low level of scientific knowledge, including the difference between helium and methane, it seems). What she was doing was dangerous, pure and simple.

It was a pretty serious offence and I intended to hand out a pretty serious penalty, four strokes. A boy in the same class would have got four or six depending on his previous record, so she was basically facing the same penalty I'd have given a boy who had never been caned or for whom it had been a rare experience. When it came down to it, and I had her bending over, I became acutely aware of how thin her dress seemed and decided it provided her less protection than most boys trousers, so I decided to lessen her punishment to three strokes.

She stood up after the first stroke which I think hurt her more than she'd expected it to. She was already fairly upset before I caned her - she'd tried to talk me out of it - and she was fairly distressed by this first stroke. She also apparently thought her punishment was over - that one stroke was all she was going to get and she tried to argue with me when I told her she had two more to come and only bent over again when I told her it could be five more if I wanted it to be. She stayed down for the next two strokes, but she obviously found them hard to take and when she was allowed to stand up again, she was crying quite hard. And, yes, she was crying harder than the boy I recently caned, though not by that great a margin, I don't think. And it took her a little longer to recover - five to ten minutes instead of three or so. She was also more physically demonstrative - kept rubbing her bottom, something that I was somewhat uncomfortable to observe (trying to find the balance between appropriate observation and not wanting to dwell on that portion of her body) whereas he just stood there and cried a bit, until I convinced him that contrary to the stories, he really wouldn't feel any worse if he sat down.

She got a moderately severe caning, and she reacted to it with a fair degree of distress. Probably a bit more than eighty percent of boys would have, but still not an unusual or excessive reaction - I wouldn't have been surprised or concerned if a boy of the same age had reacted that way, especially to his first caning, although it would have been on the higher end of the reaction scale.

Doctor Dominum, thank you for your very comprehensive and helpful response to my query, especially as you had already answered my questions elsewhere. Had I realised this I would not of course have troubled you for further details! I am a relatively recent recruit to this estimable Forum, and whilst I have delved into the 'back issues' fairly extensively there is an enormous amount I have not covered, including your posting now quoted by Subscriptions Manager in the 'Those Australian Girl Canings in Full' thread. Subscription Manager's encyclopaedic knowledge of the by now fairly considerable contents of the forum never ceases to amaze me!

The point you make in your response to Mimi above regarding corporal punishment abolitionists and their failure to suggest a satisfactory replacement is a very valid one. I frequently encounter groups of children who have been excluded or suspended from school at a sports facility I visit. These youngsters do not, in general, appear to me to be either bad or stupid. They are simply the sort of youngsters who, when I was at school, would have encountered rather more than average of the mainly corporal punishment based sanctions available to teachers then. In the vast majority of cases this would have been sufficient to keep their behaviour within bounds and enable their education to continue.

Today, in the absence of those now illegal sanctions, their education is permanently damaged by suspending or excluding them from conventional schooling, since other sanctions, detentions, behaviour agreements etc., are ineffective in controlling their behaviour. These children may briefly have a great time attending sports facilities and other enjoyable and not very taxing activities instead of sitting in classrooms doing academic work, but that isn't going to get them the right collection of qualifications to obtain and hold down a well paying job. By sparing them a certain amount of physical pain and enforced obedience in their youth, the current disciplinary regime in UK schools frequently condemns them to a lifetime of relative poverty and often worse, criminal proceedings, prison etc.

I personally do not think that corporal punishment is an inherently 'good' thing. I would much prefer that all human beings, including myself, were perfectly behaved. Sadly this is not the case, nor will it ever be. In my case I was a relatively good little lad when young. However, in my early days at school I did transgress, and when I transgressed I was subject to corporal punishment. I rapidly decided I didn't like this at all, and did my best to avoid it thereafter. Some of my more spirited and rebellious classmates were not so easily discouraged, and encountered rather more corporal punishment than I did. In all cases though the overall effect of what is now regarded by many as a cruel and sadistic regime was to enable us all to get a damn good education under conditions of large class numbers and minimal physical resources which today would result in total anarchy, if indeed any teachers could be persuaded to work under them. Very occasionally the teachers in my day overstepped the mark. Even more occasionally someone, like me, was possibly left with a prurient interest in CP. I say 'possibly' because there now seems to be evidence that there may well be a genetic predisposition to this in some cases. Either way, a small price to pay for the benefits which resulted from quick and effective classroom disciplinary methods.

And finally, those subscripts! I am afraid I am a pedantic so and so, as my friends never cease to remind me! I thus waste much time and effort in attending to trivial matters of appearance. There is absolutely no reason why you, or indeed anyone else, should wish to do so! However, if for any reason you wished to put subscripts in then  will do the trick. Thus:

H₂SO₄

in the 'Message Text' box will result in

H₂SO₄

being displayed when the post is displayed in a conventional browser.

In the same area  produces superscripts. Thus:

2³ + 3² = 17

in the 'Message Text' box gives

2³ + 3² = 17

when the post is displayed.

I agree entirely with A L .

Thanks Mimi. I appreciate your agreement all the more because I know from your previous postings that you have perhaps seen rather more of schools tending to overly severe corporal punishment than I have.

I certainly wouldn't want to see today's youngsters living under the (by modern standards) near poverty that existed in my youth and possibly in yours, nor would I want them to encounter some of the more rigorous aspects of disciple in society generally and schools in particular that I and probably you grew up with. However I remain convinced that there are a lot of supposed 'improvements' such as school suspensions and exclusions which are far worse in their overall effect than occasional well justified and properly controlled corporal punishment, and far less effective to boot!

I agree again.
I think that 3 strikes and your struck would be reasonable!

Having just joined the site its interesting to see how quickly people depart from the subject, in this case kinky teachers.

Its certain that there were such people in the system and I have memories (rusty as they are) of two teachers who seemed to have the gleam in the eye and the methodical approach that may indicate a prurient interest.

But the more important consideration is: did the teacher act professionally - that is to say, was CP used appropriately, was it at an appropriate level, and did it achieve the desired correction. If it did, then their private thoughts are irrelevant.

All of us are sexual beings and bringing any two people together to interact raises the possibility of a sexual trigger occurring. For example, people with a dominant streak may feel aroused just by delivering a stern lecture or exercising some power over another.

I don't see any of this as a problem of itself and if it is to be so regarded then society could not function. It only becomes a problem when behaviour is inappropriate.

I have to say that in my schooldays I saw and heard of a lot of CP but the number of instances that might be considered borderline or over the top was very small and these were corrected by the system.

Thank you for your splendid contributions, Ryan, and welcome to our happy, Happy Circle!

The picture of the cane residing in a bookcase, Doctor, raises the question: where do today's private schools obtain their cane supplies?

In my impoverished, working class government high school of the sixties I recall someone donating an old cane lounge. The thing sat on a verandah for some weeks but was finally broken up to produce canes for staff authorised to use CP. As a result there was a range of thick, thin, short, long and sometimes bent and quite ugly canes all around the school.

I'm sure the differing dimensions must have delivered a more or less painful experience as the case may be which would have been somewhat inequitable. I must have received about four of them, but with gaps between that rendered comparisons impossible. They all hurt like hell!

I have since had conversation with a retired South African teacher who said such material would be unsuitable and that SA schools had an official supplier of the right sort of rattan - ex India I believe she said - and these were sold in school supplies shops.

Given the scarcity of caning schools these days I presume there are no official school suppliers and yours clearly doesn't come from an old cane lounge. How then do you manage to obtain such a well crafted instrument?

And a secondary question - do your canes break and have to be replaced?

In Victoria, most independent schools that still need to obtain canes, purchase them from the same supplier. This is, of all things, a Melbourne milliners - a hat makers. Because the state government mandated the use of the strap in all of its schools prior to abolition in the government system, and the Catholic system adopted the same general approach, relatively few schools were ever in the market for school canes so there was never any really official supplier. This company was one of a number that filled the niche and has been supplying schools for quite a long time. As far as I know, they are the only current supplier.

They will only supply to schools and only after we supply them with legal advice indicating corporal punishment is still legal. Because they need to produce a reasonably large volume to make it worthwhile, it's become common practice in recent years for schools to group together to make purchases. We generally purchase a new supply each year, whether we need to or not, in order to make it worth their while to continue supplying us.

Partly because of this, it is very rare for a cane to break during use. We wind up replacing them far more often than we really need to, simply because we have so many spares. At the first sign of any cracking, we get a replacement.

Our supplier does an excellent job and I generally get the first chance to select from the supply. Because we know we're unlikely to even come close to using half of what we purchased we can afford to be selective and pick the best canes - strength and flexibility being what you primarily look for.

Since joining the site (although I still can't seem to get my link verfied and therefore cannot post new threads) I have appreciated your very thorough and precise answers, Doctor.

To have a practising caning Headmaster on such a discussion site is rare and your presence seems to clear up a lot of potential speculation and misinformation.

I'm surprised that your canes are made by a milliners and can understand their difficulty in finding sufficient buyers for the enterprise to remain viable. Should they be prepared to cater for a non-school market, my information is that their market would expand enormously.

By the same token, such a move may present an opening for malicious citics to attack your discipline practices and that would be a pity. An island of sanity in today's world of education should be preserved.

Just to correct a slight misconception, I am a Deputy Headmaster, not a Headmaster. I have been an acting Headmaster on a number of occasions (and in honour of my long service, my school has chosen to retroactively designate my longest period in that role as a Headship, meaning I appear in the records as a Head and get a portrait on the walls, etc). There are people who jump on what they see as inconsistencies as a way of attacking me, and I prefer not to let them pass if I can avoid it just to try and avoid wasting time on them.

Yes, if our supplier chose to supply to the fetish market, I'm sure they could sell more canes. They'd lose our business though, primarily for the reason you've described - we would not want to be associated with such things in that way. Fortunately they value our business and treat us with respect. I don't think they make much money out of this, if any, but I think they do need to consider that it's ex-pupils from schools like ours, and parents with children at schools like ours - that represent a large number of the customers for their normal products.

(That could go both ways - the owner of the firm has jokingly commented to me that he wonders how his Melbourne Cup hat sales (his major source of income each year) would go if his customers became aware he'd made the canes they'd felt at school).

I see. The lot of the Deputy in my schools was never an easy one. It was his task to take on the discipline problems of other teachers and sometimes right in the middle of teaching a class.

The information at his disposal was minimal, usually consisting of what the offender had to say for himself, and he had to deal with the matter quickly and get back to his class.

For his troubles he was often spoken about behind his back with something less than affection. It was he, after all, who inflicted pain and embarrassment on an unwilling victim....and people rarely admit their need for correction. Those incumbents who stuck to their task and maintained their professionalism over many years are to be commended.

I attended primary and high schools in lower socio-economic areas with both social and crime issues. The fact that they ran smoothly, with few discernable disruptions, providing a good and equal education to their students with very limited resources, is largely attributable to the culture of discipline of which the Deputy was the centre. I wonder how well such schools are running today?

It was the Deputy who supported student teachers in their first attempts to control a class, lady teachers faced with big lads with an overdose of testosterone, teachers on yard duty breaking up fights, weaker students harrassed by bullies, parents wanting to avoid their kids getting sexually active too soon, and concsiencious students who wanted to learn without disruption.

Such figures deserve commendation and not the villification of a generation sufficiently arrogant to throw out a method used by mankind for the previous several thousand years without a suitable replacement.

>>>>>Because the state government mandated the use of the strap in all of its schools prior to abolition in the government system, and the Catholic system adopted the same general approach, relatively few schools were ever in the market for school canes so there was never any really official supplier.>>>>

Just wondering, Doctor, why some schools chose to retain the cane rather than switch to the strap with the Govt schools?

I may have missed earlier posts on this, but what levels of teacher are authorised to cane? Are they heads of departments for example?

Are teachers given any training in the use of the cane, as they do tend to whip around and inaccuracies could occur?

Do authorised teachers sometimes have difficulties bringing themselves to cane? I recall at my school, long ago, all senior masters (there were no senior mistresses then) were authorised but some didnt use the power.

Whilst I have in the past advocated the sanction of corporal punishment I now find that D Ds posts whilst informativ and articulate are a good reason for its demise.
As I have always suspected those in education are on some distant planet.
Perhaps its something to do with most of them having never been outside the world of acedemia.
School, Uni and school again with the occsional stint at Mc Donalds during the extended holidays.
No wonder kids have such low regard for their mentors and supposed role models.

Well, Mimi, I, for one would be interested to know what I've said that has changed your mind.

You've just assumed in another thread that because I described the law as it applies to education in this country that I agree with that law. I agree with some of the education law that applies in Australia, I don't agree with all of it - but agree with it or not, I'm obliged to know what it is, and I'm supposed to do what it says.

I wonder if part of the reason why you seem to think I'm 'on another planet' might be because of similar misconceptions. Just because I know how something works, doesn't mean I necessarily support it. A lot of what goes on in schools isn't supported by large numbers of teachers.

It's true I've worked most of my life in schooling. But I'm the son of a Changi POW, who spent his childhood living in pretty lousy conditions - the war and its aftermath with a father who couldn't do much work. As an adult I've also been a soldier (we didn't get a choice back then) - I served in Konfrontasi, coming home on a stretcher, and I've been in the reserves most of my life and have deployed overseas on a few occasions and to isolated areas of Australia as well. Long school holidays are good for that. I'm also a volunteer firefighter and still active in that area.

Being a soldier and a fireman is great for cred with kids, especially boys - and my students seem to regard me well.

It may be that you have good reason to be worried about what I've said - but I do wonder if you're assuming I hold beliefs I don't.

Thanks for your detailed and informative answers once again, Doctor Dominium. They are of a standard far above the norm on internet sites.

What is not above the norm is the attitude of those here who don't exercise common courtesies and make it their job to attack and deter the contributions of others...and that spoils the discussion for all.

For a time I belonged to a debate club whose priciple was that you can express an opinion but must respect the right of others to hold theirs. Debate was never to become personal. The culture caught on.

A fond wish is that somehow the unregulated internet could breed a similar outlook in its users....but that seems unlikely.

My experience is that when "flamers" are enticed out of the shadows of anonymity to greet others in the light of day, they become entirely different people. Perhaps, then, we should blame the technology?

D D one of the things that you have written which suggests to me that CP is not appropriate is that you use it so few times.
If it is used so little then why use it at all?
I can see smacking and classroom slippering being usefull in primary schools where younger pupils respond to such instant punishment.
But to ceremonialy flog teenagers with a cane in a heads study is just plain abusive.
I still find it hard to conceive that you found it neccasary to can three girls on a health and safety breach ( as on another thread).
The breach was due to inadequate supervision and the schools attitude to the duty of care which the law requires of minors by those supervising them.
The only persons at fault were the relevent school staff IMHO .

D D one of the things that you have written which suggests to me that CP is not appropriate is that you use it so few times.

Mimi, we used the cane 381 times last year. I administered about half of those canings. I don't think that's using it 'so few times'. I think you might have the impression we use it far less than we do.

If it is used so little then why use it at all?

Well, as I've said I don't think it is used so little. But this idea - that something shouldn't be used just because it's rarely needed is one that absolutely plagues modern education. It's always been with us to an extent, but over the last thirty years or so, it's become a dogma that pervades teaching to the detriment of children everywhere. Those of us opposed to it often call it 'teaching to the middle'. Targeting educational practice at most common characteristics of children, and ignoring the rarer characteristics.

At my school we use the cane reasonably often. We use it when we feel it is useful, less likely to cause harm that alternative measures, more likely to work better than alternative measures. Most of the boys we cane could be disciplined in other ways effectively - but not as efficiently or as appropriately. There's a small number of boys however - I'd say it's about 2% of boys - for whom other methods of discipline simply don't seem to work, and for whom the cane does.

(There are also boys who the cane doesn't work for - you need a range of different methods to find the ones that work for particular boys).

That 2% of boys - say 20 or 30 boys in a school the size of most boys school here - are the ones who lead me to be a defender of caning. They are the ones we need the cane for. There's a larger number with whom we use it, but losing it wouldn't be disastrous for them. We'd be able to find another way of dealing with their misbehaviour. It might take longer. It might not work quite as effectively. It might be more likely to have negative side effects. But we'd be able to find a way. But this small group for whom the cane works, and nothing else seems to - well, if we lose the cane, we wind up with no way of dealing with their misbehaviour. In my view, these are the boys who make up the increasing number of boys who are subjected to long term and repeated suspension, and ultimately expulsion or exclusion from the ever-growing number of schools who have stopped using corporal punishment, and who find themselves making much greater use of methods of getting rid of students they find they can't deal with.

This may only be a small number of children - but it's a small number of children who have exactly the same right to an education that meets their needs as every other child does. It's a small number of children who desevre to have methods in place in their school that work for them, rather than the school (or school system) having decided that because they have alternative methods that work well for 98% of children, that it's OK to forget about the other 2%.

Sometimes things that are only used rarely in a school are among that school's most important features. They are what turn a school from being an OK place for most children, into being a great place for all children.

We don't use the cane that rarely. But we do have programs and procedures in place in this school that we only use rarely or with a small number of children. Our program for boys who have suffered the recent loss of a parent rarely has more than four boys in it. The program we have in place for boys who have relatives on active military service overseas had seven boys in it last year. Our drug rehabilitation program hasn't had anyone in it for over two years. Our program for exceptionally gifted children has five members (that's a joint program with our sister school). Should we get rid of all of these because we use them so seldom with so few pupils? The reason they don't get used that often is that so few kids need them - but those kids who do need them, really do.

Parents don't spend $20,000 a year sending their child to a school that only tries to cater for most children. They do it because we have the resources, and the willingness, to try and give their child what they need, no matter how uncommon it is. In a sense, this is what sets independent schools apart from most of our state schools - many, many state schools here are excellent schools as long as you fit the type of student they aim themselves at. Most try to cater to difference to some extent, but not to the same extent we do. They can't - and we have to, or we'd lose students and go broke.

I can see smacking and classroom slippering being usefull in primary schools where younger pupils respond to such instant punishment.
But to ceremonialy flog teenagers with a cane in a heads study is just plain abusive.

I don't believe that it is, and perhaps more importantly nor do my students. Our use of corporal punishment is supported by an overwhelming majority of our students. I also believe that there's a growing body of research that shows appropriate corporal punishment is very unlikely to be negative for boys (the result is not the same for girls) especially if it's handled in a formal and organised fashion.

To an extent, I do think our current corporal punishment practices are a little too formalised. I think that in some cases, that's highly appropriate, but in more cases than not, we shouldn't need to be as formal as we are. Unfortunately, it's not entirely our decision. For our own legal protection as a school - and supposedly for the protection of the students - we have to have a very formal process in place. We can't just smack or slipper a student in the classroom. Not anymore. It wouldn't pass legal muster. Until ten years ago, things were different. But we have to do what legal advice tells us we need to do. And our practices are based on that legal advice.

I still find it hard to conceive that you found it neccasary to can three girls on a health and safety breach ( as on another thread).
The breach was due to inadequate supervision and the schools attitude to the duty of care which the law requires of minors by those supervising them.
The only persons at fault were the relevent school staff IMHO.

Mimi - first of all, let me point out that those incidents were around thirty five years ago, and I agree that I didn't handle those matters entirely appropriately. Today I wouldn't take the approach I took then. For a number of different reasons.

Secondly, you talk about duty of care - in Australia, teachers don't have a duty of care - they have a duty of care and control. That comes from a court case, and it's a legal duty. It's actually of only limited relevance in independent schools because we are still governed by the doctrine of in loco parentis which is a higher standard than duty of care and control, but it's critical to state schools where in loco parentis is considered to be extinguished. It often gets abbreviated to duty of care, but that's because modern pedagogy tries to play down the control aspect - it's not because it isn't there. It is, and legally, it's every bit as important as the care part, because it gives teachers power to take action to protect children from their own actions.

Whichever doctrine governs us though, these duties do not require teachers to prevent all injury or risk or injury to students. They require us to take reasonable steps to prevent reasonably foreseeable injury. Precisely what that means depends on the situation.

I maintain a very safe classroom environment - last time it was audited, incidents of danger in my lab were at less than 20% of the average, and less than 10% of what is considered to be acceptable. So were incidents of injury. Part of the reason my classroom environment is so safe is because I have rather draconian safety rules including the fact that if you break one of my rules, there's a good probability I'll cane you. Back in the early 1970s, it was a virtual certainty.

That's part of the control part of duty of care and control.

In the case of the girls I've talked about, none of them were injured. I stepped in before they were injured. In two of the three cases, they couldn't have been injured anyway, they could have damaged their clothing, in one of the cases, if I had allowed the situation to continue, there could have been a risk of injury. But I didn't. If there are ten steps along the road to danger, my duty of care is more than discharged if I stop the student at step number nine. Commonsense means I shouldn't wait that long - but I certainly do not have to step in at step number one. And doing so is a bad idea in many ways. Children learn by making mistakes. Teachers have to let them do so. Children need to learn how to manage risk, and danger, by being allowed to experience it. Yes, only within sensible limits. You don't let them put themselves in real danger. But these girls were about seventeen years old, and I stopped them well before they were in any danger, but after they'd crossed the line. I let them make a mistake. And that taught them far more about safety than stepping in right at the start would have done. And then I took steps to ensure they didn't do it again.

As I've said, I wouldn't handle it exactly the same way today. I wouldn't cane them. But I'd still leave them to put the lab coats on themselves, and give them the chance to realise they'd forgotten, before I stepped in.

I don't believe I was at fault. I know what is required of me. And my commitment to running a safe lab is evident to everybody who knows me. I set far higher standards than most teachers in this area, far higher standards than I need to if all I worried about was the strict legal minimum.

Ryan and Mimi,

Just for the record I want to make it clear I have no problem with Mimi's questions and statements and don't consider them to be flames of any sort. I believe it's possible Mimi may have misinterpreted some things I've said and thus her opinions may be influenced by misunderstandings, but if so, I think they're honest misunderstandings, but it's why I've felt the need to clarify. It's also possible she's understood me perfectly well, and simply disagrees with me which is also fine.

I'm pointing this out, because (time permitting - I've just realised it's later than I thought and I have meetings this afternoon) I'm about to write a longer message to this forum talking about my concerns as to some things people have said here, and I don't want anybody thinking they are directed at somebody who as far as I can tell, is trying to be reasonable in discussion.

Just for the record, I have always been most impressed by D Ds posts and in no way wish to be inflamatory.
I am usually very direct in life, this sometimes comes across as aggression. In fact its more for clarity.
I got the impression that D D (from an earlier post) only used the cane 1000 times in his career
At the risk of sounding obtuse to now find that his school uses it so much seems to indicate either a draconian regime or particularly badly behaved youngsters.
CP obviously is not working is it?
As for the girls, well 35 years ago was a different world and had different standards. I won't nit pick about it.

I got the impression that D D (from an earlier post) only used the cane 1000 times in his career

The time I mentioned having handed out 1000 canings in my career was because at that time I hadn't really made any effort to count them, I knew it was a large number, and so I pulled 1000 out of the air. When I came to think about it, I realised that was a serious underestimate but it had made the point I was trying to make at the time - that I was experienced in these matters. I can't really give an exact number, but 10,000 is probably closer to the real mark over my entire career.

At the risk of sounding obtuse to now find that his school uses it so much seems to indicate either a draconian regime or particularly badly behaved youngsters.
CP obviously is not working is it?

It's not obtuse - it's a reflection of how the real world works. There's no magic number on something like this - too low a figure might represent problems, too high a figure almost certainly would.

The question is, is our figure too high? Yes, nearly 400 canings sounds like a lot - but it represents on average about two canings every schoolday (actually a little less than that because it includes punishments handed out in the boarding house) in a school with considerably over 1000 students. On average, most boys at this school would expect one or two canings in their entire six year time with us - it doesn't work out exactly that way, because some never get it and others get it a few times - and I don't think that that's all that high a rate.

Our regime is strict, certainly, but I don't think it's anywhere near draconian. On any given day, a typical boy has about a 0.2% chance of getting the cane.

Are our boys particularly badly behaved? No. We have approximately 1000 significant disciplinary incidents recorded in the school in a typical year - less than one per boy. In other words, our boys get into significant trouble less than once a year on average. There's minor stuff on top of that - the type of behaviour that normally leads to a quick reprimand like talking in class, but for the most part we have a very well behaved body of boys.

"Doctor Dominum. Is he a teacher? Most definitely. Is he a kinky teacher? Certainly not! "

I find your evidence flimsy. If spending the amount of time he does providing information, graphics, charts, quotes and descriptions about the minute details of beating boys on the bum on his Yahoo Group as well as hanging out on various kinky forums isn't strong evidence of a kinky teacher, then I cannot image what is? Simply denying that one has a kink for caning doesn't make the denial correct. Most educators, even those who might support CP in school, have not written the hundreds of thousands of words on the subject nor spent the inordinate amount of time discussing the topic and setting themselves up as experts on the topic that this individual has. Most educators would find othereducational issue far more important, especially if they worked in a privately owned school where the inclusion of students can be carefully screened and behavioral issues could easily be handled without ever using a cane. Evidence points to a kink and an anonymous teacher who uses his position to satisfy that kink.

For the life of me I cannot understand how the type of parents that pay for a private education would want their offspring to be in the type of school that cannot handle them without CP. Except on vary rare and serious occasions.
The usual result of bad behaviour in a British private school is expulsion. This is because high standards attract the right kind of pupil ( client ) in the first place.
Nearly all youngsters in private education behave themselves because they realise the importance of a perfect record in future life.
Whilst I am in no way having a go at D D it is a fact that the evidence he provides would, in court or a police interview result in total loss of case. One really cannot say 1,000 and then say 10,000 and appear plausable.
Appologies in advance D D and no flaming intended.

I find your evidence flimsy. If spending the amount of time he does providing information, graphics, charts, quotes and descriptions about the minute details of beating boys on the bum on his Yahoo Group as well as hanging out on various kinky forums isn't strong evidence of a kinky teacher, then I cannot image what is? Simply denying that one has a kink for caning doesn't make the denial correct. Most educators, even those who might support CP in school, have not written the hundreds of thousands of words on the subject nor spent the inordinate amount of time discussing the topic and setting themselves up as experts on the topic that this individual has. Most educators would find othereducational issue far more important, especially if they worked in a privately owned school where the inclusion of students can be carefully screened and behavioral issues could easily be handled without ever using a cane. Evidence points to a kink and an anonymous teacher who uses his position to satisfy that kink.

I really don't normally spend a huge amount of time on this issue online. Most weeks less than an hour or so. At the moment, we're in the middle of Australia's summer school holidays and I'm bored witless to be honest, and am spending a lot more time online. Most of the forums I would normally spend more time on are Australian based and hence pretty inactive at the moment, so I'm spending a lot more time here than I normally would. The graphics and charts I sometimes share are generally ones I had to create for presentation purposes to school council, so while they do take some time, it's time I've already spent so why not share them?

This is one issue I find interesting, certainly, but it's one of several and it's not the one that takes up the most time. You have no idea how much time I spend online discussing other educational issues, but it's substantial. This is not the only issue I'm interested in. It's not even the most important one. I'm active on over a dozen different educational forums, and another dozen or so 'pseudo-educational' forums (I'd count this as one of the latter).

As for the idea you express at the end of your paragraph - a privately owned school where the inclusion of students can be carefully screened and behavioral issues could easily be handled without ever using a cane, I don't think you understand the culture of Australian independent schools. Very few of us 'carefully screen students'. It's not something that we do. We take most of our students on a first come, first serve basis - quite literally, the idea of putting your child down on the entry list at birth to make sure they have a place has become something of a joke. The only students who are really exposed to any type of detailed screening are boys going for scholarships, or those seeking a special entry (which means 'queue jumping'). We don't carefully screen and we certainly don't screen based on behaviour. It's our job to take the students we get and mould them into decent men regardless of how they start out.

Could we handle behavioural issues without the cane - yes, in most cases we could. And in most cases, we actually do - we handle most issues without resorting to punishment at all and even in cases where we do use punishment, we use non-corporal punishment more often than we use corporal punishment? But there are a small number of cases where I don't think we could deal with them without the cane - the cases where schools that no longer use corporal punishment tend to resolve through expulsion. And there's a larger number of cases, where while we could deal with the behaviour in other ways, the cane is more efficient, quicker, and less likely to have negative side effects than those alternative ways.

For the life of me I cannot understand how the type of parents that pay for a private education would want their offspring to be in the type of school that cannot handle them without CP. Except on vary rare and serious occasions.

Mimi, most Victorian independent schools no longer use corporal punishment. Those of us who do are a minority. Yes, there are significant numbers of parents who don't want their child exposed to corporal punishment. They are unlikely to choose my school to send their sons to. They've got plenty of other excellent choices (and even more than aren't so excellent) that will match their philosophy more closely.

But there are a significant number of parents who do believe reasonable corporal punishment is appropriate and who do choose our school knowing that we use it. The vast majority of our parents are in favour of corporal punishment - if they weren't, they'd have chosen a different school.

It's not that we can't handle our students without corporal punishment either. In the vast majority of cases we could. There's a small number of boys for whom I think it would be very difficult to find an alternative that works for them (short of expulsion), but in most cases we could find an alternative. The question is, would the alternative be better?

People act as if corporal punishment is the worst form of discipline for children. It isn't. There are plenty of other forms of discipline that are worse. To an extent, this depends on the child - different children are affected differently by different forms of punishment. It can also depend on circumstances.

Which is better for a boy? Six strokes of the cane, two three hour Saturday detentions or a days internal suspension? I'd consider those three roughly equivalent for most boys - but precisely which one is most appropriate - most likely to be successful, and least likely to cause negative side effects - depends on the boy and the circumstances. Take away the cane and I still have the other two options, so I can probably still find an effective way of dealing with his behaviour - but it's not necessarily the best way.

The usual result of bad behaviour in a British private school is expulsion. This is because high standards attract the right kind of pupil ( client ) in the first place.

What is the 'right kind of pupil', Mimi? I think our definitions on that might be considerably different?

Some of the best men I've taught - the most decent, the most diligent, the most caring, the best of them - were rather naughty schoolboys. It's my job to try and turn them out into the world at 18 as good men, not to worry too much about what they are like at 12 or 13.

I've been looking at our prefect appointments for this coming year and one boy who's name keeps coming up - four years ago, he was the worst behaved boy we've had at this school for years. When he was in the second form, I actually started writing out the necessary paperwork to refer him for expulsion after he quite seriously assaulted a teacher.

We turned him around - well, we helped him to turn himself around. So as he's about to enter Sixth form, he's one of those we are seriously considering making him a prefect. Even if we don't, he shows every sign that he will leave us in a year as the type of young man we can be proud of.

He's actually a boy for whom the cane seems to have been very important. His near expulsion came at a time where he had avoided being caned (through the appeals process) on a number of previous occasions and we'd been trying all sorts of other methods to try and deal with his behaviour and they weren't working. They were methods that have worked with a lot of other boys but they weren't working for him. It's also interesting that his assault on the teacher came about largely because he perceived a non-physical punishment that she'd imposed (as an alternative to a vetoed caning) as unfair.

He needed a lot more than the cane. He also wound up going through intensive counselling, he had an individualised discipline plan we worked out together which involved me taking on a special role in his school life. But the cane was part of what worked for him.

If we'd screened for behaviour, we'd never have taken him. But the end result of taking him is a decent boy (if still somewhat prone to misadventure) who shows every sign of becoming a decent man.

You say the usual result of bad behaviour in a British private school is expulsion. I can't tell you how sad I find that, and how awful I think it is, if it's true. Yes, I've occasionally had to refer boys for expulsion, sometimes you're left with no choice - but it's a profound failure on the part of a school to have to get rid of a student. And it's not normally in the child's best interest. One reason I oppose the abolition of corporal punishment is because it tends to lead to greater use of methods of punishment I feel are worse in most cases. Increased use of expulsion is an example of that.

Nearly all youngsters in private education behave themselves because they realise the importance of a perfect record in future life.

If that's so, then British boys are very different creatures from Australian boys. Perhaps over half of my 17 year old students understand this, but it's a pretty rare twelve year old who does. Yes, there are some who behave because they understand the value in doing so in terms of their future, but it's really not that many.

Whilst I am in no way having a go at D D it is a fact that the evidence he provides would, in court or a police interview result in total loss of case. One really cannot say 1,000 and then say 10,000 and appear plausable.

If I'd been asked that question in court or a police interview, I'd have been considerably more careful as to how I answered it. This isn't a court or a police interview and frankly, I think it's ridiculous for anybody to suggest that anybody should be held to that type of standard.

I've also used the now working search function to find out exactly what I said.

"Now - I have been teaching over 40 years. Conservatively, I have probably administered over 1000 canings."

I said it was a conservative estimate, and I said that it was a minimum estimate.

D D you have an answer for everything it seems.
If a boy said to you that he had eaten 1,000 sweets and then said it was probably 10,000 then surely you would consider him to be well in error.
The right type of student in a UK private school is one that wants to learn and excel. Parents will just not pay for poor results. Students realise that to be better educated than in the state system that they have to do as they are told without fear or favour.
Perhaps parents in Oz don't care that much, they just pay and expect the school to pick up the pieces.
I would personally feel that if I had used the cane 10,000 times in 40 years that I was doing something wrong. It just does not seem to work does it. It did not work 40 years ago and it seems not to be working now.
By my reckoning you are using the thing on average three times a day. Seems a bit like cannon fodder to me.
I believe in the sanction but with minimum use.

D D you have an answer for everything it seems.

Mimi, I've been teaching fifty years and debating this for about forty nine of those years. I hold the views I do because I've considered this issue in detail, many, many times, and if it didn't seem justified I'd have changed my mind. It's uncommon at this point for somebody to raise an issue I haven't considered numerous times before, and so normally I do have an answer.

If a boy said to you that he had eaten 1,000 sweets and then said it was probably 10,000 then surely you would consider him to be well in error.

It depends. But, generally, no, I'd just assume he initially said a big number and then thought about it some more, as I did.

The right type of student in a UK private school is one that wants to learn and excel. Parents will just not pay for poor results. Students realise that to be better educated than in the state system that they have to do as they are told without fear or favour.

It's our job to turn our students into ones who want to learn and excel. Yes, some of them do come to us like that already, but we don't just want them. Inherent self motivation at an early age is a great thing to have, but we wouldn't want to give up on kids just because they don't have that to start with. We work to develop it in them.

Most of our boys don't choose our school for themselves. It's chosen for them by their parents. Few boys at age 12 are thinking all that much about the fact that they'll get a better education here than at the local secondary school. They're probably not even aware of that fact. Some are, but most aren't.

Perhaps parents in Oz don't care that much, they just pay and expect the school to pick up the pieces.

There's some truth in that, but I don't think it's normally because they don't care. Rather it's because schools like ours are seen as social ladders - you send your child to such a school because you want them to have a better life than you did. Seventy percent of parents who choose an elite school didn't have such an education themselves - but they've had to compete in life with those who did, and they've seen how much easier it can make things so they want that for their kids. But because they didn't have that type of education themselves, they don't always fully understand it, and so they put a great deal of trust in us to do what is needed.

I would personally feel that if I had used the cane 10,000 times in 40 years that I was doing something wrong. It just does not seem to work does it. It did not work 40 years ago and it seems not to be working now.

Mimi, it does work. I see the boys behaviour change. Yes, I've caned a lot of boys - but I've rarely caned any individual boy more than a few times. I've caned 10,000 times but in the time I've been at this school at least 10,000 boys have probably passed through it. And because of the positions I've held in this school - time as a boarding master or deputy, time as a form master, and half my career as Deputy Headmaster, I've had to deal with a lot of them.

By my reckoning you are using the thing on average three times a day. Seems a bit like cannon fodder to me.

Mimi, I've been teaching fifty years. It's changed a bit over time, but over those fifty years, there's been about an average of 200 school days each year - so again, I've been teaching about 10,000 days (and that doesn't take into account thirteen years or so in the boarding house, working on weekends as well). On average, I've caned less than once a day.

It's also differed depending on the period. In the early 1980s I was caning a lot more than I do now. There were periods in the mid-1980s when we trialled abolition or near abolition when I caned far, far less. Overall, it averages out to less than one a day, but it's been variable.

I believe in the sanction but with minimum use.

I believe you use it to the extent you need it. It's not the nuclear deterrent - it doesn't need to be the last resort. And acting like it is, makes it pretty useless, because by the time you come to use it, you're dealing with a boy with serious behavioural problems, rather than one whose just a bit naughty.

>>>>I believe you use it to the extent you need it. It's not the nuclear deterrent - it doesn't need to be the last resort. And acting like it is, makes it pretty useless, because by the time you come to use it, you're dealing with a boy with serious behavioural problems, rather than one whose just a bit naughty.>>>>

Doctor, I attempted to post a new thread on schoolyard fights but it disappeared into oblivion. I believe it was relevant to your comment here.

There is a mobile phone video on an Aus news site today of a schoolyard fight with a male teacher standing back watching. The female administrator from the Dept said his actions were correct - he must not intervene without the backup of another teacher and only if they feel its safe!!

By this time little Johnny may well have a broken nose and concussion - or worse if he has medical issues.

My memory of schoolyard fights is that any passing teacher would instantly break them up, usually with voice alone - because kids respected teachers - and a caning followed soon afterwards.

Where would parents rather have their kids - at risk of being unjured by schoolyard anarchy while teachers stand impotently by OR in an enironment where they may get a few corrective whacks but are essentially safe from harm?

You are right, caning is not death. Its not even injury. Its not that big a deal - oh that we all could get out of sitations that easily! The alternative, however, could be injury and potentially (as the American scene illustrates) even death.

Soft soapers think they're being kind to kids but perhaps theirs is the ultimate unkindness.

Pleas sir May I have another (sic) your initial quote is from one of my posts so I assume your remarks about Doctor Dominum are addressed to me.

You are entitled to your opinion, I'm entitled to mine. I have read a lot of posts and other material by Doctor Dominum, a lot more now than when I opened this thread. In addition I've had several very interesting exchanges with him on this estimable Forum since then, none of which have changed my opinion of him. I also happen to find myself in agreement with him on just about everything that we've touched on.

What I discern is a man who takes his profession and his duties very seriously indeed, something I used to pride myself on before I retired, so I know the symptoms. I'm not going to embark on any debate with you since we both know it would be pointless, we'll just have to agree to differ. Doctor Dominum is in any case more than capable of defending himself, which I think he has already done very effectively in his response to you.

Another Lurker - who were you responding to in your last post here? Doesn't seem to fit...

Well ryan1, you've impressed me so far, but you've let yourself down with a bang here! If you scroll up this thread to January 8 2009 at 19:00 you will find a post from someone calling himself (or possibly herself) Pleas sir May I have another (sic).

The post opens with a quote from my foundation posting in this thread and continues with a statement to the effect that my views on Doctor Dominum are based on flimsy evidence. Whilst as stated in my post above I have no intention of entering into protracted discussion with the said poster, I felt a brief statement of my views was in order.

I trust this answers your question.

It does, Another Lurker, but that post was several posts ago and there was a lot of reading between.

Hi, Ryan et al
Are teachers involved in school corporal punishment kinky?

The danger is transposing our current, highly sexualized attitudes onto previous generations of both pupils and staff in schools, when clearly the environment has changed. In the mid- and late- 1950s I was sent to a country boarding Prep School, in a big house surrounded by several hundred acres of grounds. . At eight years, old I found myself amongst boys and some girls, whose homes were between a hour or two away to several thousand miles away, but who were living together for twelve weeks at a time. The staff then were predominately ex-Service officers, rather older than their wives, who often also worked at the school.

Perhaps only 2 % or 3 % of my age-cohort experienced this kind of school in those days, necessary for the professional lives of many of their parents and as a logical stepping stone to what were then big name Public Schools, post 13-years old. It would not be true to say that it was always one big happy family, but the relationships were closer to those of real siblings than in a purely day school, certainly a State School. The facilities were very good for all sorts of sport and horse riding and the academic standards were very high. Corporal punishment was taken for granted by all involved - pupils / staff / parents - as part of the regime. I cant say that it hung over us exactly, but most of the boys and not a few of the girls ran into the sort of trouble which led to bending over at some stage or other.

Said starkly it can sound very kinky today. Pupils were given the strap (actually a short length of saddle girth from the stables!) or, more rarely, the cane but always on the bare bottom. The Head, his immediate Deputy and half a dozen Housemasters / Assistant Housemasters exercised themselves with corporal punishment. It was never, in my experience, a spontaneous classroom event in the hands of the teachers, but the result of a report using a chit system to the Head or a Housemaster. It was never a public affair, but equally rarely entirely private in so far as there was often another member of staff present and perhaps, too, others involved in the same incident.

Was there discrimination between boys and girls? Well, now I would suspect that girls were clever at not getting involved in incidents serious enough to involve a Chit, so they were not the target all that often. But for myself, aged about 10, a girl and I were involved in one of those series of white lies about bringing in books out of a rainstorm, which grew into something bigger and actually got a young and inexperienced member of staff into trouble. As so often, the truth came out, and I watched nervously as the Head draw four thin red lines across her bare backside before she saw the same thing happen to me.

Did the bare bit bother us at the time? No, not at all. Whilst most of us came from the sort of rural environment where we were well aware of the reproductive processes and equipment amongst domesticated animals, we, in our innocence then, did not associate nudity amongst those we knew well at home or at boarding school as anything to do with the strange word sex! As Cleanliness is next to Godliness seemed to be a sub-theme of the school, all the pupils were naked in front of men and women on the staff and their own peers of both sexes for warm showers first thing every morning, changing and showers involving PE and afternoon games and in the bath rooms in the evening, as well as swimming indoor in winter and outdoor in summer naked. If a kinky teacher enjoyed watching naked children, then there was plenty of opportunity every day. However, I do not remember anyone making us feel uncomfortable and, so far as I know, there was never any question of inappropriate touching or so forth..

Hi Severnboy. A most interesting posting, and later I'll take the liberty of asking about one or two things consequent upon it if I may. I hope you won't object to this. My observation is that most people like yourself who post articulate and literary accounts here do so after due thought because they feel they have something to say on the subject and are only too willing to answer questions. However, I shan't be in the slightest offended if you simply ignore them.

First though, a few observations. You are not the first male to post on witnessing a female schoolmate punished bare bottom since I've been here. A frequent and distinguished contributor has that honour, though his incident took place in Infant school and he wasn't punished, bare bottom or otherwise, at the same time, though he probably should have been, he was just just lucky the teacher came along at the right time, for him if not for the unfortunate girl. You know who you are!

You may encounter some scepticism, but it won't be from me. I've absolutely no doubt that bare bottom caning as a norm was not uncommon in boys only versions of the type of preparatory school you describe at that period. A lad from such a school joined my secondary school with me in the same class. Our form master wielded a large leather sandal with great vigour for misbehavior, over the short trousers we all wore in the first year. I was never the victim, but the other lad was, frequently! Whereas other lads were often reduced to tears (and making a 12 year old cry in front of his classmates takes some doing) the lad from the prep school was completely oblivious to it. When questioned on this by admiring enquirers he always said that when you'd regularly had six with the cane on the bare the sandal didn't hurt much.

As regards mixed sex preparatory schools and bb caning, well I've heard rumours of exactly the type of mixed sex punishment you describe, a year or two earlier probably, involving children around the same age, and sometimes involving more than two miscreants. I had an interest in a particular school of that type. I'm not going to say why, or identify the school, though I have mentioned it here in the past. As a consequence of that interest I've heard various things from various sources. Before anyone asks, no, I'm not going to post details. Apart from accounts from the media which I've quoted I've only posted one second hand account of a school CP incident here, and in that case I could verify at least one significant aspect of it from my own experience.

Now the questions:

Myself and a fellow contributor, far more distinguished and longstanding than myself (that'll cost you a pint if we ever meet Alan ) are on record here as attributing our interest in the subject of this estimable Forum to seeing at close quarters a female classmate in Junior school made to bend over by a teacher and slippered over her knickers in front of the class. It seems to have made a big impression on both of us, and we've both returned to the incident more than once.

I think your experience was likely to have been somewhat more memorable than ours. I'd certainly seen a girl slippered before the incident in question, though not in quite the same circumstances. However from your postings here I assume you hadn't seen a girl caned before, let alone in bb mode! When you look back, do you think the incident contributed to your subsequent interest in school CP?

Both the aforementioned fellow contributor and myself were very impressed by the ritual involved and the exercise of power by the teacher. My fellow contributor actually describes this aspect far better than I do, but out of courtesy, least he objects to my quoting him, I'll give my version:

The ritual, the tension, the enforced humiliation of the victim, all these played their part. I remember feeling very sorry for Jennifer, but I was still hooked!

Neither of us expected to be punished ourselves at the time the slippers landed, although I feared I might be at the start of my incident. In your case you presumably knew that you were going to be caned as well. The effects of this knowledge could, I guess, have gone both ways, either blotting out everything except anticipation of your own fate or heightening your awareness of the proceedings. I know you've said the bare bit didn't bother you at all, and I find that perhaps a little surprising in a mixed punishment context, but do you think the ritual (there are usually rituals involved in severe school CP) exercise of the head's power on the girl made any great impression on you?

And in closure a miscellany of shorter queries, though I appreciate that if you chose to answer them your responses might have to be longer than the questions! Do you recall if the girl was caned first on a 'ladies first' basis, or did it just happen that way? Did the head specifically instruct you to position yourself to watch the girl caned and then instruct the girl after her punishment to observe yours or did the observation arise simply because you were both in the room? Four strokes is quite severe, especially at 10, were you both reduced to tears? And finally, I note that you say:

as there was often another member of staff present and perhaps, too, others involved in the same incident

Was another adult present in this case and though from your remark above joint punishments occurred, presumably mostly of boys, was your girl and boy together punishment unusual?

Happy to oblige, Another_Lurker, if we ever meet in the flesh!

Hi, A_L,
Yes, it was all pretty unusual. From the most trivial of incidents, she and I had spun a fabric of disobedience and outright lies which initially landed a new teacher in the soup! There were bags of mens rea and commission rather than omission.

Yes, we realized at about 8.30am the next day that it had backfired and we spotted the likely consequences, which arrived within the hour!

A senior teacher brought the Heads summons to the Classroom and took us to the Heads Study, but did not, I think, stay.

The joint interview with the Head was short: he knew the truth, we surrendered. We were made to feel remorse for letting the side down badly. Loosing the approbation of the Head and other senior teachers did matter to us in that closed society.

Standing in front of his desk, we had to turn around to face the club fender in front of the fire place, over which we bent and hung on. I think my partner-in-crime was first because she was on the side of the desk which the Head came around to get his cane; perhaps as simple as that! There was no real sense of ritual which I remember.

The Head made his mark(s !) effectively but not with excessive, brutal force: yes, we both cried and felt awful from the whole experience. But we got over it; we did not blame the other, remained friends and even apologized to the young teacher without being told to do so!

Thank you, Severnboy. That's an unexpected use for a club fender, but on reflection I can see that, other than in winter with a blazing fire, it would in fact be ideal for the purpose when dealing with youngsters. Doubtless it brings back memories when you encounter one!

An inquiry, Severnboy. You've said

I watched nervously as the Head draw four thin red lines across her bare backside before she saw the same thing happen to me.

and

Standing in front of his desk, we had to turn around to face the club fender in front of the fire place, over which we bent and hung on. I think my partner-in-crime was first because she was on the side of the desk which the Head came around to get his cane; perhaps as simple as that! There was no real sense of ritual which I remember.

Although you don't feel that there was any ritual involved, there must presumably have been some time taken for the adjustment of clothing. Do you recall how that happened in each case?

AL: Middle of the Summer Term, so that sort of blazing fire was not a problem!

AT: Testing of the memory. I think the Head just told her when she was standing in front of the low fender to take down her underpants (I dont recall any other word being used), pull up her dress and bend over and then later to me to take down shorts and underpants, pull up my shirt and bend over. The head himself did not adjust our clothing at all. I do recall that he left us both in turn bending over just after he had caned us whilst he returned to the desk to write something briefly on our index card, before telling us to get up and get dressed. I have always thought this gap was a bit of recovery time before we had to face him or the other one.

I do not recall, A_L, whether the Head told the girl to stay or not: but she did return to stand by the desk. We were dismissed together without any more lecturing other than being told to wash our faces before returning to our classroom, which we did.

The index cards were not especially corporal punishment thing: he kept these cards on his desk to record all incidents, good and weak grades, teams played for etc., for each pupil mainly for end-ot-term reports and the like.

Hi Severnboy. Thank you for your additional response to my previous questions, I had been a little puzzled on the point, but I'd resolved not to press you further on it. Some people do not remember, or quite reasonably do not wish to discuss, the minutia of their school corporal punishment experiences, and I had assumed that this was so in your case. However in view of your response to Alan Turing I suspect that I was wrong and if I may I'll ask some more questions.

You said in an earlier posting in another thread that you'd been caned at pre-prep school. Prior to this incident had you been caned at the current school, and if so was it by the Headmaster so that you were aware of his routine? Similarly, do you know if the girl involved had been caned before and if she was familiar with the Headmaster's routine?

When you were taken to the Headmaster's office together, did you realise that you would be caned, and did you expect that you would be caned together?

I presume the Head told you at the end of his lecture that he was gong to cane you both. Did he specify how many strokes or were you left in suspense on this?

The answers to the above questions may well have influenced what I'm really getting at here! You must have stood for some time awaiting your punishment, while the girl prepared for her caning, while she was caned and while she recovered and the Head filled in the record card before telling her to straighten up. By the end of this time you'd watched, presumably for the first time, a girl being caned, and being caned bare bottom at that. You'd seen the damage the cane had inflicted, and the girl was now in tears. You were only 10, but you describe your sentiment as you waited as only nervous! You also say that you didn't have any particular sense of ritual or awe about the proceedings.

I'm quite surprised at this, and you must have been an extremely cool and collected boy for your age. I think I'd have been a lot more than nervous, and I'm quite sure I'd have been considerably impressed by the proceedings, as I think would others who've posted on their significant school CP experiences here. I note that overall you were subject to quite a lot of school CP, and that you also administered canings as a prefect. Do you think this overall amount of school CP is the reason this particular incident doesn't have any great significance for you?

And lastly, did you ever encounter the girl again in later life, and if so was this incident mentioned?

Sorry, that's rather a lot of questions! I'm afraid that as someone who more or less escaped school CP, very unusual for anyone of my age, male or female, I find myself fascinated by what others say about it, and your view of this incident is, I think, quite unusual.

Regards,

Another_Lurker

Hi, A_L
Yes, I was caned once in about 4 years at the day pre-prep; In 5 years at the boarding Prep School, I had already been caned once by the Head (3) about nine months before this incident alone and again about two years later (another 4, which was a relief as we thought we might get more at the time.) with another boy. The procedure for me was the same. That seemed at the time about average for my cohort, tho the variance was wide.

The girl was indeed the daughter of close family friends: I had known her all my life. She and her younger brother often stayed at my home in those days when their parents travelled on business. I know she had not been caned before or again. Something of what was considered a spirited tomboy at the time, I am sure that she had had the strap now and again from the Housemaster or Matron and she may have heard of the nature of a caning, I do not know. Our families were close until we were about fifteen when they moved overseas on business. I had fleeting contacts in adult life until she was, very sadly, killed in car accident in France in 1990 on the way to a ski holiday. On reflection now, it is quite probable that the Head was also aware that she & I knew each other very well at home and that may have influenced his decision to get with it with us both in the room together. Put simply, neither of us saw anything of each other which we had not seen many times before! I do not know whether this was a factor in his mind.

Yes, the way events of the previous day unwound that morning, I believe we both knew that we were going to get the cane from the Head as we walked the length of the building to his study. Anxious & dread come to mind. I do not remember precise dialogue, more the stages of the events. I am sure he told us that we were to be caned, I am not certain he said specifically how many. I think he may have used a word like hard.....I do not recall the feeling that I waited around a lot: in fact I have more a sense of pace to bring the matter to a close.

Yes, nervous is probably a weak word > bloody scared may be more appropriate, I do not recall crying until about the third stroke, however. I am not sure awe is quite right; certainly we respected our head and we knew why he was so cross with us! The ethos of stiff upper lip and get on with it was a sub-theme of that and many similar schools at the time.

The girl and I had, I do remember, quite a heart to heart about it all with the wife of the housemaster the following evening: about what we had done wrong, not the specifics of the punishment. Our parents were told, too, by the head himself: we had decided we had to tell them ourselves, as she and her brother were come to my home the following Sunday. We had a pool in those far off days and it was very unlikely that the adults would not have noticed! My parents and aunt were, I do remember, supportive of the school but did not, as it were, rub it in. My cousin was fascinated. We all moved on, as they would say today!

Hi Severnboy. Thank you for a most comprehensive and frank reply. I am very sorry to note the death of your friend. I regret probing you so closely for information, but your account struck certain chords with me, occasioned by recent thoughts. Prior to gaining a scholarship at the secondary day school I attended there was a possibility that I might have gone to another school, a mixed boarding school whose ethos was, from various accounts I have heard, not dissimilar to your preparatory school. It was a small school and certainly it seems to have had considerably more resort to corporal punishment, for both boys and girls, than any school I actually attended, or indeed any of which I had any direct knowledge .

I had recently commented on this in passing in this forum and when I read your account I found myself wondering just how I would have reacted to an incident similar to that you described. As I said in my last post I'm quite certain that I'd have been vastly more affected than just being nervous, and I'm quite sure to that I'd have been considerably more impressed and awed by the proceedings than you appeared to have been. Your response throws considerable light on why you reacted as you did and why the incident has not assumed the proportions that might have been expected in your mind.

Regards

Another_Lurker

Thank you for your comments, A_L, particularly in your first paragraph.

As you note, certainly by more recent standards, I was subject to quite a lot of school CP. At the time it did not seem a lot - certainly not above average amongst others from my background.

To keep on topic, was my experience because the teachers were kinky? I am inclined to think that they were not, at least consciously so. There was essentially symmetry of mores between the home backgrounds of most of the pupils and those in whose care they were entrusted. Without the tyranny of Mission Statements, all the stakeholders agreed in the broad aims of our education, and, actually, the routes to achieve it. How far can that be said to be true today?

My most intimate school was certainly the boarding Prep School: relatively small and isolated, certainly a narrow, privileged environment. That Housemaster, for instance, was an 8th Army officer from Africa to Italy, who ended the War in Austria. His wife had been an Army Nurse. Another teacher had been captured in the Far East. I know that all three administered corporal punishment when they felt it was justified.

This perspective, I would even use the word calibre of teacher, seemed to raise them from becoming too obsessed by the essentially petty nature of much which goes on in school. I and others certainly liked and trusted that housemaster and his wife as we did the Head and his wife. We moved pretty seamlessly from home to school and back again: of course, we enjoyed the holidays more, but I do not remember worrying about going back to Prep School, because, when you got it right, most of it was fun!

Did being subjected to real School CP do me harm or good? Now's there the rub! I am inclined to believe that the lesson which the girl and I learned that day evolved into life skills about the consequences of deceit for ourselves and others which was quite an important lesson. There may have been other ways to achieve that end, but I believe it worked!

Hi again, A_L,
The earlier posting set me thinking about the earlier event.

That Prep School had a system of Merit & Demerit points ( I mentioned petty in a previous post ). The latter were about behaviour and co-operation rather than simple performance. They were brought together for an after-lunch Assembly on a Friday. Up to three Demerit points in a week was at the Housemaster s discretion. Four or more generally led to the Heads study and sometimes, but by no means inevitably, the cane.

For several months as a nine year old I had battled with my teacher of Latin and Greek. I could do these subjects, but I did not really want to. This had in due course led to feeling the strap from my earlier Housemaster which stung briefly and made a lot of noise. But the message did not last, and at the beginning of the following year I managed to get six Demerits in a week, effectively for taking no notice at all of the Classics master or the written work he set. Whilst no record, it was the top score for that week.

The message from the stage was simple: report to the study immediately after the Assembly. I got there before the Head, who arrived, talking to the Classics master. When we went into the study, the two men sat down behind the desk and the Head led a discussion about whether I was just bad at Latin and Greek or whether I had the talent but was being unco-operative. They quickly decided the latter as the Classics teacher had examples of my work when I had tried, which were, unfortunately, pretty good.

The Head told me that a fresh start was called for. He was going to give me the cane (an interesting turn of phrase which I do remember) but also ask (he meant tell) the Classics teacher to cancel all my unfinished written work for both subjects. Yes, A_L, I was probably more than just nervous but I do think that I thought it was not all that unfair an outcome. I really had not expected the fresh start bit, which was clever the Head, as it got me on side rather than broodingly resentful.

Again I am not good on recall of precise dialogue, but I was told to go and stand by the fender (no fire!). The Classics master was collecting up his papers but he made no move to leave. (Thinking about it now, it would have been quite difficult for him to leave at that stage without it being rather clumsy, simply because of the geography of the room. I do not think him staying was particularly by design one way or another. Either seeing justice done or voyeuristically looking at bare bottom but I do not know.) The Head had got up, collected a cane from a long draw on the left of the desk and walked over to where I was standing. I was told to take down my shorts and underpants and bend over the fender. Three strokes later I was told to get up, get dressed and go to change for my rugby practice! I left the Head and the Classics teacher talking about something quite different. (Maybe that is why he stayed?)

The outcome: late for a rugby practice but no one made a fuss probably felt lucky to be on the wing, not in the scrum. The staff made sure I was not a bit of a hero in the changing room after games and my Classics? Umm. Yes, I did get the point and found myself happily in the top half of the class for the rest of the year and it did make as they said it would quite a lot of difference to where I was eventually placed on entry to my Public School.

Hi Severnboy. I am sorry for the delay in responding to your posts, but as you may have observed this estimable Forum has been shaken to its very foundations today by the revelation that one of our most distinguished and longstanding contributors has been deceiving us all. Even me to some extent, despite my having expressed some doubts about his creation earlier. Who would have thought it, Steve M perpetrating a practical joke, the very last person I'd have expected to do such a thing - not!

You make interesting observations regarding whether the teachers you encountered at your prep school were 'kinky'. You conclude that despite administering bare bottom canings and strappings to both boys and girls, and occasionally to boys and girls together, they were not. You may have difficulty convincing others here of this, but you do not need to convince me.

My definition of kinky (not a word I like, but one in such common use that it cannot be ignored) would be:

Displaying an interest beyond the average or 'normal' in some entity or type of behaviour which can be considered to have sexual aspects or overtones

Not exactly what my rather ancient dictionary says, but I'm with Humpty Dumpty, when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.

By that definition I am prepared to concede, if pushed very hard, that I am kinky. Only very slightly, and with all sorts of excuses and justifications, but nonetheless kinky.

However I do not think that your prep school teachers were kinky. They behaved by the normal standards of their social class and of their time. The parents who sent children to the school would have expected them to be punished in that manner, indeed, they probably used the same methods themselves at home and in another thread you have indicated that this was so for you. As you very aptly put it in that thread:

The danger is transposing our current, highly sexualized attitudes onto previous generations of both pupils and staff in schools, when clearly the environment has changed.

I have though some difficulties in arriving at a firm conclusion regarding my own experience of a kinky teacher, or at least what for much of my lfe I have taken as a kinky teacher. He took one of the two lead roles in the incident to which I have always ascribed my interest in the subject of this forum. The other part was played by an unfortunate female classmate.

Though the year was about the time you started at prep school the circumstances were very different. Not an affluent prep school, but a junior school in a fairly poor working class town, and the punishment administered was certainly not typical of that junior school, although a more severe regime existed in the associated senior school. Was the teacher 'kinky' though, and was this the source of my own 'kinkiness'? Discussions in this forum have caused me to question both these assumptions since my original post on the subject, which is to be found, complete with a corrupted link which is corrected immediately following the post, at 12:02 on April 11 2008 in the very large thread here

Judge for yourself, I'm definitely undecided.

You also recount various events which seem to indicate that for you at least, corporal punishment did no harm and indeed did some good. I think that corporal punishment probably did do some good for me. My one real, though very trivial, experience on the receiving end is recounted in the third post in the 'The embarrassment factor' thread here. (Please Network54, fix that search engine so that we can link direct to posts again!) It persuaded me that I didn't want to be corporeally punished again, so I worked very hard, was a good little lad and had an easy passage through the remainder of my education, and, as a result of that education, a relatively easy passage through life, so far anyway!

As to whether it did me any harm, that is much more difficult to determine, for me at least. It really comes down firstly to whether my interest in school CP was influenced by my school experinces, or if it is in some way inherent or genetic. Secondly, has that interest done me any harm? I'd probably say not, but the people who'd rather I was doing the sort of things they think I should be doing, instead of happily idling my time away in this estimable Forum might disagree!

SEVERN-BOY

I worked with someone who was familiar with bare-bottomed canings at his prep school in the late 1950's, so this was indeed par for the course.

It doesn't surprise me that it was also given to girls in that context. If you have a community/school ethos you are trying to build, then you could probably ill afford to instill said ethos by one method to one type of defaulters and use another method to instill it to the other type.

Colin Farrell's Corpun site has details of a real couple of perves who were doing this in the 80's. They made the mistake of practising it on girls only, possibly because it was girls-only prep schools!

Steve M

Hi Doctor Dominium,

I just noticed that the cane in your photo is dark brown. Is this a special type of rattan that schools use? Is there a dedicated supplier that supplies all schools in Australia? (so that there is some kind of standardisation for the type of cane used)

The reason I ask is that the cane in our school in Perth was much the same colour (dark brown) except the tip was a faded golden colour, no doubt because of its use.

Boy did it ever leave a lasting impression!

Blah

I just noticed that the cane in your photo is dark brown. Is this a special type of rattan that schools use? Is there a dedicated supplier that supplies all schools in Australia? (so that there is some kind of standardisation for the type of cane used)

The reason I ask is that the cane in our school in Perth was much the same colour (dark brown) except the tip was a faded golden colour, no doubt because of its use.

I don't know that all schools in Australia use the same supplier. I do know our supplier supplies most, if not all, schools that use canes in Victoria and also handles interstate orders, so it's perfectly possible your school used the same supplier.

They do use a particular variety of rattan - it's a fairtrade product obtained from Indonesia whose sale benefits some of the indigenous tribes. It almost makes the cane politically correct!

Thank you, A_L. My recent posts set me thinking, of course.
Nineteen years of education! The high points were post graduate amongst the dreaming spires; Public School was, frankly, boring. The five years at that Prep School were always interesting; always something different: my first trips overseas, team sports, music, school plays, camping weekends. It was a carrot and literally stick environment. Get it right, heres something exciting; get it wrong, heres something you will not like. The sad thing is that the triumph of the anti-school corporal punishment lobby has knocked down something that could work without finding something as effective to replace it.