At this point the Corporal Punishment Survey has examined one hundred aspects of school discipline.
The evidence has ranged from ordinary classroom talking to serious misconduct, from primary school to grammar school and boarding school, and from the classroom teacher to the headmaster.
A number of conclusions can now be stated with reasonable confidence.
Corporal Punishment Was Not One Practice
The term covers several methods and many circumstances.
The cane, slipper, strap and Scottish belt belonged to different school traditions.
Punishment might be formal or informal, public or private, immediate or delayed.
Minor Offences Were Often More Complicated Than They Appeared
Talking might mean persistent talking after warnings.
Poor work might mean repeated carelessness.
Running might involve deliberate disregard of a safety rule.
The short description of an offence rarely tells the whole story.
Seriousness Often Depended Upon Repetition
Schools distinguished between mistakes and persistence.
A first offence might bring a warning.
Repeated behaviour could bring formal punishment.
Thus the disciplinary history preceding an incident is essential to understanding it.
Seniority Mattered
The person administering punishment also tells us something.
Classroom teachers dealt with many ordinary offences.
Senior mistresses, deputies, housemasters and heads of department dealt with more substantial matters.
The headmaster or headmistress represented the final authority in many schools.
Punishment Books Tell Only Part of the Story
Formal records remain valuable historical evidence.
But they cannot reveal every classroom punishment.
Nor do brief entries necessarily explain warnings, disputes, apologies or the pupil’s own account.
Personal recollection therefore remains important, though it too must be treated cautiously.
Effectiveness Cannot Be Reduced to Yes or No
Some pupils never repeated an offence.
Some repeated it later.
Some stopped one form of misconduct while continuing others.
Some became accustomed to punishment.
Some believed the punishment had been wholly effective.
Others believed it had achieved nothing.
Fairness Remains Central
Perhaps the strongest theme of all is fairness.
Former pupils frequently accepted punishment when they believed themselves guilty and the response proportionate.
The most persistent resentment appears where guilt was disputed or punishment was considered excessive.
The Historical Picture
The school disciplinary system of the 1950s, 1960s and opening years of the 1970s cannot therefore be adequately described by saying simply that “children were caned.”
The reality was a complex structure of rules, warnings, teacher discretion, senior authority, formal records, pupil reputation, parental reaction and school tradition.
Corporal punishment existed within that structure.
Sometimes it appears to have worked exactly as its supporters intended.
Sometimes it worked only temporarily.
Sometimes it plainly failed.
And sometimes the central question was not effectiveness at all, but whether the punishment should have been imposed in the first place.
After one hundred chapters, that may be the clearest conclusion available:
To understand punishment, one must first understand the school, the offence, the teacher and the pupil.
Without those things, the number of strokes tells only a very small part of the story.
Show less
