We now arrive at the central question of the survey.
Did corporal punishment work?
At first sight, the answer appears easy to obtain.
The questionnaire asks two direct questions:
Were you ever punished again for the same offence?
and:
Do you consider the punishment effective?
Yet the answers reveal that “effective” can mean several different things.
Immediate Obedience
In the simplest sense, corporal punishment could be highly effective.
A pupil misbehaved.
The teacher punished him.
The pupil stopped.
A thirteen-year-old boy caned for poor work in 1959 reported that he was careful with his work for the remainder of the year.
Another pupil punished for talking did not repeat the offence.
A boy punished for taking crisps from a faulty vending machine similarly reported that he did not do so again.
Measured in this narrow way, the punishment achieved its purpose.
The Same Offence, Different Offence
The difficulty arises when the pupil avoided one offence but later committed another.
Suppose a boy was caned for fighting and never fought again, but was later caned for truancy.
Was the first punishment effective?
According to the survey’s wording, yes.
According to a broader definition of discipline, the answer is less certain.
The punishment changed one behaviour but did not necessarily alter the pupil’s general attitude.
When It Failed
There are also direct examples of failure.
One boarding-school pupil caned for talking after lights-out stated that he was punished repeatedly for dormitory offences.
He did not consider corporal punishment effective.
Another contributor described receiving a punishment for an offence he believed he had not committed.
Unsurprisingly, he rejected the idea that it had taught him anything useful.
These examples show that physical severity alone did not guarantee success.
Deterrence Through Fear
Corporal punishment could also work without ever being administered.
A pupil who watched a classmate being caned might decide that he wanted no part of the experience.
In such a case the punished child became an example to others.
This was one justification for public punishment.
Its audience was not merely the offender.
It was the class.
Yet this effect is almost impossible to measure from punishment records because the successfully deterred pupil leaves no entry in the book.
Unintended Consequences
There was also the possibility of the opposite effect.
One contributor remembered that after his first substantial punishment he became a more regular offender.
Beforehand, fear of corporal punishment had helped maintain his good behaviour.
Afterwards, he knew that he could endure it.
The punishment had therefore removed part of its own deterrent power.
This is an especially important observation.
No Simple Verdict
The evidence collected in this survey does not justify the statement that corporal punishment always worked.
Neither does it justify the statement that it never worked.
The historical reality was more complicated.
For some pupils, one encounter was sufficient.
For others, repeated punishment produced little lasting improvement.
For still others, the principal deterrent was not pain but embarrassment, parental reaction or fear of the unknown.
Effectiveness depended upon the pupil, the offence, the teacher, the severity, the perceived fairness of the punishment and the culture of the school.
The question therefore cannot simply be:
“Did the cane work?”
A better question is:
“For whom, under what circumstances, and for how long?”
That is the question to which the remainder of this survey must attempt to provide an answer.
