Memory, Evidence and Changing Attitudes
What are we to make of these recollections today?
The first requirement is caution.
Personal memories are valuable historical sources, but they are not statistics. One person’s exceptionally strict school cannot tell us what occurred throughout Britain.
Nor should fictional accounts be treated as evidence that particular practices were universal.
Nevertheless, when personal recollections and contemporary literature are considered together, a recognisable picture emerges.
Corporal punishment formed part of the disciplinary culture of many British schools during the middle decades of the twentieth century.
Its use varied enormously.
There were strict schools and comparatively lenient schools. There were headmasters who employed the cane readily and others who reserved it for exceptional circumstances. Classroom teachers might use a slipper in one establishment while being forbidden from administering any physical punishment in another.
Boys generally appear to have encountered corporal punishment more frequently, particularly at secondary level, though girls were certainly punished in some establishments.
Parental attitudes were equally important.
Many mothers and fathers accepted physical punishment as a legitimate means of correcting behaviour. Some actively chose schools known for firm discipline.
Others increasingly questioned whether fear and physical punishment had any proper place in education.
That disagreement became steadily more important as the twentieth century progressed.
What these memories perhaps convey most effectively is the atmosphere surrounding school authority.
There was the apprehension of being sent to the headmaster, the whispered intelligence passed between pupils concerning which masters were strict, the inevitable curiosity when somebody returned from the head’s study, and the elaborate unwritten rules governing schoolboy behaviour.
There were also contradictions.
A pupil might dislike being punished while continuing to respect the teacher responsible. A parent might sympathise privately with a child while publicly supporting the school. A strict master might nevertheless be remembered decades later with considerable affection.
British education has changed profoundly since the world described in these accounts.
Methods once regarded as commonplace have disappeared, while ideas concerning children’s rights, safeguarding and the proper limits of a teacher’s authority have altered beyond recognition.
Whether remembered with disapproval, nostalgia or merely curiosity, the old disciplinary system belongs increasingly to history.
But for the generations who passed through British schools in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, it was not history at all.
It was simply school.
