No Single Rule Governed British Discipline
It is tempting, looking backwards, to speak of “the old school system” as though Britain once possessed a single national code governing corporal punishment.
The recollections suggest otherwise.
Practices differed substantially.
At one establishment a classroom teacher might use a plimsoll. At another, physical punishment was restricted to the headmaster. Some schools used the cane on the hand; others employed different methods. Some punished girls as well as boys, while elsewhere corporal punishment of girls was virtually unknown.
The severity also varied.
The Cornish private school described by one former pupil appears, even by contemporary standards, to have operated a particularly stern regime. Several punishments in a single term were possible, and the number of strokes could be increased according to the perceived seriousness of an offence.
Other contributors regarded this as unusually severe.
One correspondent who had read numerous accounts of school discipline but had never personally received the cane described the regime as decidedly draconian.
His comments raise another aspect frequently overlooked when discussing historical punishment: humiliation.
Corporal punishment was not merely physical. There was also the embarrassment of being sent from a classroom, waiting outside a headmaster’s office or returning afterwards in front of one’s companions.
Whether punishment was administered privately or before other pupils could therefore make a considerable psychological difference.
There were schools in which punishment was conducted quietly in the headmaster’s study. Elsewhere, public punishment survived, particularly when an offence was intended to serve as an example to the rest of the school.
The customs surrounding the procedure also varied considerably and were sometimes remarkably formal.
What appears clear is that pupils generally understood the hierarchy.
Minor misbehaviour might result in detention, lines or classroom punishment. More serious offences meant being “sent to the Head”.
That phrase alone could carry considerable weight.
By modern standards, the discretion placed in individual teachers and headmasters was extensive. What one school regarded as sufficiently serious to justify corporal punishment might elsewhere have resulted merely in detention.
Even former pupils who accepted corporal punishment at the time do not necessarily describe it with affection.
There is a recurring distinction between accepting the authority of the school and actually welcoming its methods.
Children could regard a punishment as an unpleasant but established consequence without spending their lives terrified of it.
For historians, these personal accounts therefore require some care.
They are memories rather than official records, and experiences differed enormously.
Nevertheless, taken together they provide a revealing picture of an educational culture in which physical discipline could be simultaneously feared, disliked and regarded as perfectly ordinary.
