To modern readers, perhaps the strangest aspect of these recollections is their sheer ordinariness.
A teacher keeping a shoe specifically for hitting children now sounds extraordinary.
Yet within the educational culture of earlier decades, corporal punishment was widely accepted.
That does not mean everybody approved of it.
Parents disagreed about it.
Teachers disagreed about it.
Pupils certainly had their own opinions about it.
And experiences varied enormously—from relatively mild punishments remembered with amusement to incidents that former pupils regarded as excessive, humiliating or plainly unjust.
What changed most dramatically was society’s understanding of what constituted acceptable discipline.
