The evidence in this survey has one unavoidable limitation.
Much of it consists of adults remembering events from childhood.
Some incidents occurred decades before they were recorded.
Memory must therefore be treated with caution.
What People Remember
It is striking how detailed some recollections remain.
A contributor may be uncertain of the exact year yet remember the teacher, the room, the offence and the number of strokes.
Another remembers waiting outside an office.
Another recalls returning to class afterwards.
Emotionally significant events often remain vivid.
Nevertheless, vividness does not guarantee perfect accuracy.
Dates and Numbers
Dates are particularly vulnerable.
A respondent may remember that an incident occurred at the age of thirteen but be uncertain whether the year was 1968 or 1969.
The number of strokes may also become confused where a pupil experienced several punishments.
For this reason approximate dates should be treated as approximate.
It would be unwise to create precise national statistics from recollections alone.
Selection of Memories
There is another difficulty.
People are more likely to remember unusual events.
A particularly severe punishment may remain vivid while several ordinary punishments disappear from memory.
The resulting collection can therefore make exceptional incidents appear more common than they actually were.
The same problem occurs with newspapers and official reports, although for different reasons.
The Volunteer Problem
Those who choose to contribute to a survey are not necessarily representative of everyone who attended school.
A person with a strong memory of corporal punishment may be more likely to respond than somebody for whom it was insignificant.
Likewise, those with particularly positive or negative opinions may be more inclined to tell their stories.
This prevents the survey from being treated as a scientific sample of the entire school population.
Corroboration
Confidence increases where different sources agree.
If punishment books, school rules and independent recollections all describe similar practices, the broad picture becomes stronger.
Likewise, when numerous unrelated pupils recall the slipper being used informally while formal canings were recorded by senior staff, a recognisable pattern begins to emerge.
The individual details may remain uncertain.
The broader practice becomes harder to doubt.
Testimony, Not Statistics
The greatest value of these recollections therefore lies not in producing exact percentages.
Their value lies in showing what school discipline looked and felt like to those who experienced it.
Official records tell us that a punishment occurred.
Personal testimony tells us about waiting outside the office, returning to class, the reaction of friends, the attitude of parents and whether the pupil believed the punishment fair.
Both kinds of evidence have weaknesses.
Together they provide a fuller picture.
The sensible historian neither accepts every recollection unquestioningly nor dismisses personal memory altogether.
The task is to compare, question and place each account in context.
Only then can the scattered memories of individual schoolchildren become useful historical evidence.
