Discipline Committee Schoolgirl Punish

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THE CORPORAL PUNISHMENT
OF SCHOOLGIRLS

Other Books Published by the Wildfire Club

The Female Disciplinary Manual

A Complete Encyclopaedia of the Correction of the Fair Sex

The Feminine Regime

A Novel by Miss Regina Snow

Children of the Void

A Real-life Disciplinary Novel by Miss Regina Snow

The District Governess & Other Stories

by Miss Regina Snow

Happy Tears

A 1930s Classic of Female Discipline

The CORPORAL
PUNISHMENT
o/SCHOOLGIRLS

A Documentary Survey
by Margaret Stone

© MCMXCV Miss Margaret Stone

Foreword and Chapter 4 © Miss Marianne Martindale

Published by the Wildfire Club
B.M. Elegance, London, W.C.l.

All rights reserved.

No paragraph of this book may
be reproduced without written
permission from the publishers.

Set in Monotype Baskerville
at the Imperial Press

Second revised edition

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd., Chippenham, Wiltshire
on 21-lb Felsted White Wove : Demy Octavo ( 8 ’A" x 5 V 2 ")

CONTENTS

Foreword.

by Miss Marianne Martindale . 7

Introduction . 20

Facts and Figures . 27

Boys and Girls . 38

Girls’ Punishments . 43

A Caning School

by Miss Marianne Martindale . 54

The Bible Belt . 66

The Problem of Over-Use . 74

Excessive Severity

and Other Complications . 81

The Question of Bias . 96

The Problem with Abolition . 103

The Return of Corporal Punishment . 109

A Future for Corporal Punishment . 120

A Framework for the Future . 127

Foreword

By Miss Marianne Martindale

I T IS often supposed that schoolgirls have never, or only very
rarely been subject to corporal punishment. Here, at last is a
book that puts the record straight with precise facts and figures.
A survey carried out by the Inner London Education Authority’s
inspectors as late as 1976-77, shows that one girl was caned, on aver¬
age, each day of the school year in that authority’s schools alone,
and 18.4%—almost one in five—of the girls were caned at least
once. Before abolition nearly six out of every ten Scottish schoolgirls
were strapped. In certain states of America the paddling of school¬
girls—even as old as seventeen and eighteen—is still commonplace,
and in some areas it is on the increase.

Girls, it is true, are treated more leniendy on the whole than
boys, being caned less often, sometimes with fighter implements
and usually on the hands rather than the seat: though as one who
has considerable experience of the corporal punishment of con¬
senting older females I can testify that punishments on the hand are
hardly an instance of lenity. They are generally considered, by
those who have experience of both, much more severe than pun¬
ishments on the seat and most girls, given a choice of, say, two on
the hands or four on the seat would gratefully opt for the latter.

The question of discipline in schools is, of course, much broader
than the question of corporal punishment. The current fashion
among educational ‘experts’ and the chattering classes in general is
to disparage all forms of discipline, mental and moral as well as
physical (though curiously, physical discipline—often severe—in
the form of dieting, exercise and general health-faddery is the only
kind that retains any credit among some such people). The objec¬
tion to corporal punishment is merely a particular (and especially
intense) instance of this general objection to discipline.

In the 1950s a friend of mine read a Victorian novel in which a
letter was written to a lady by her housekeeper. The housekeeper
was obviously an intelligent woman for her class, but the letter was
littered with spelling mistakes and grammatical solecisms of a sort

7

that would shame any eleven-plus candidate. The letter read
quaintly in the 1950s because it was very much a period-piece. No
one of that intelligence, in those times of good-quality universal
education, whatever her social background, would write a letter of
that sort. People were educated now.

Forty years later the wheel has come full circle. People of that
class and intelligence, despite—or perhaps partly because of—ten
years of compulsory child-centred education, write letters of pre¬
cisely that sort. They cannot spell, they cannot construct a sentence,
they have only the most rudimentary, and often wildly inaccurate,
notions of the function of punctuation marks, the grammar of their
native language and the distinction between those words and phras¬
es which belong to formal written English and those which are only
appropriate to casual conversation. They have been instructed—or
rather not instructed—by teachers who have themselves been
taught that punctuation, grammar and spelling do not matter and
that the only important thing is that children learn to ‘express them¬
selves’—or not learn, since ‘self-expression’ is supposed to come
‘naturally’. The result is that ‘express themselves’ is precisely what
they cannot do—at least on paper. Talk to any one of them and she
may seem quite intelligent; receive a letter from her and it is difficult
to believe that it has emanated from the same person. It appears to
be from a near-idiot. We do not exaggerate. We have seen count¬
less letters of this sort, and so has any one who receives correspon¬
dence from people under thirty below university level.

The sad truth is that, whereas in the 1950s almost any reasonably
intelligent person could write creditable English, in the 1990s that
ability has reverted back to being the privilege of a small elite—the
few, mosdy middle-class (but by no means including all the middle
class), who are intelligent enough to educate themselves despite the
system, or who are sent to private schools run on more traditional
lines, or whose family environment, rather than school, provides
the main backbone of their education. The masses have reverted to
semi-literacy.

Nevertheless, there is a great difference between the cultural
state of the semi-literate Victorian housekeeper and that of the
semi-literate Comprehensive School victim. Early in this century

8

W.B. Yeats conducted a survey into the popular performance of
Shakespeare in the British Isles. In the 19th century and before,
Shakespeare had been avidly followed by people of all classes—one
will remember Sibyl Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray who played,
in a terrible flea-pit theatre to the most plebeian of audiences, a
mixture of cheap melodrama and Shakespeare, both of which
packed them in. This was entirely true to life. Shakespeare appealed
deeply to the romantic imagination of the English of every class.
However, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, popular per¬
formance of Shakespeare declined sharply, and what Yeats discov¬
ered was that this decline followed exactly the introduction of com¬
pulsory board-school education. Where the board schools were
introduced, the repertory companies found within a decade or two
that they could no longer profitably perform Shakespeare. Where it
was introduced later, Shakespeare performance declined that much
later, and where it had not yet been introduced at all, Shakespeare
performance was still alive and healthy.

The prosaic, factual, materialistic preoccupations of modern
education are in a great measure inimical to the romantic imaginat¬
ion and to depth of soul. The person who has been compulsorily
educated for many years may gain much, but she will also lose
much*. We should never lose sight of the fact that in subjecting a
child to compulsory education—even the very best compulsory
education—we are not giving a pure gift. We are giving something
and taking something; and it behoves us to be very sure that what
we are giving is greater and more valuable than what we are taking.

What, then, are the lasting benefits of education? What does a
person who has been formally educated feel she has gained in com¬
parison to one who has not? Nancy Mitford in her semi-autobio-

* “Universal compulsory education, of the type introduced at the end of the last
century, has not fulfilled expectations by producing happier and more effective cit¬
izens; on the contrary, it has created readers of the yellow press and cinema-goers’'.
Karl Otten quoted in Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Bugbear of Literacy, Perennial
books. Mr. Otten, writing in the 1940s, could hardly have envisaged the depth of
cultural degeneration that was to take place in the following half-century. Beside
the 1990s Comprehensive product, his cinema-goers and yellow press readers
would seem gendemen scholars of the old school.

9

graphical novel The Pursuit of Love sets the experience of a girl who
has been to school against that of her close friends who have not.
Here we are enabled to consider the simple value of schooling itself
by comparing children with every educational advantage except that
of formal schooling with a girl whose background in every way sim¬
ilar except that she has been to school:

The Radlett children read enormously by fits and starts in the
library at Alconleigh, a good, representative, nineteenth-century
library, which had been made by their grandfather, a most cultivat¬
ed man. But, while they picked up a great deal of heterogeneous
information and gilded it with their own originality, while they
bridged gulfs of ignorance with their charm and high spirits, they
never acquired any habit of concentration, they were incapable of
solid hard work. One result, in later life, was that they could not
stand boredom. Storms and difficulties left them unmoved, but day
after day of ordinary existence produced an unbearable torture of
ennui, because they completely lacked any form of mental discipline.

The very foundation of late-20th-century 'child-centred 5 educa¬
tion is to exclude any form of mental discipline. Children are to be
coaxed, wheedled and passively* 'interested 5 in their work. The
symptoms of the Radlett children will be recognised as exactly those
of the modem Comprehensive child. Boredom, lack of concentra¬
tion, a craving for easy stimulation (to which the ever-cruder out¬
pourings of the mass-media shamelessly pander). In other words,
the effect of modern schooling on the moral and mental constitu¬
tion is precisely the same as the effect of no schooling at all. The
average modern school-child, in return for all that school robs her

The term ‘passive’ here is used in the light of the traditional conception of the
Passive Life. The two legitimate modes of life accepted by traditional societies
everywhere are the Contemplative Life and the Active Life. The Contemplative
Life, or bios theoretikon is the higher and more arduous of the two. The Active Life,
of which the Bhagavad Gita is perhaps the most thoroughgoing classical apologia
and exposition, is the life of those who perform the world’s work in the light of spir¬
itual and intellectual principles. The Passive life is the existence of the ignorant
who are merely pushed this way and that by their animal desires and aversions—
and thus, of course, by those who know how to manipulate those desires and aver¬
sions. These people are, in Hamlet’s words, “passion’s slaves’ 7 , passion and passivity
being closely related terms both etymologically and philosophically.

10

of in terms of freedom, individuality and imaginative life, receives
practically nothing. Her mind is not disciplined or toned; her abili¬
ty to take intelligent, disciplined interest in things is by no means
stimulated and may often have been killed, and she cannot even
write a letter.

Corporal punishment is not the issue here. The issue is discipline
in its most rudimentary sense. If schools have abandoned the notion
of discipline, then it is time we abandoned them, for without it they
have nothing whatever to give. Children can learn more and devel¬
op better left to themselves. Ten years in a modern State school is
ten years of hell for a sensitive child. Ten years being force-fed with
grubby cynicism, sexual prurience and cheap political ideology. In
those ten years a child loses her innocence, her charm, her fearless
confidence in life, her imagination, her love of beauty, her sense of
adventure, her sense of honour, her freshness and her depth.

What does she gain in return?

Returning to the specific topic of corporal punishment: we find a
case reported in this book of a girl who was afraid to go to school
because she faced a caning. The case must have been rare enough,
since it is the only one of the kind in the published collections of the
anti-corporal-punishment lobby which have been extensively
drawn upon by the author of this book. If such fears were com¬
monplace we can be sure that the propagandists of this lobby and
of the mass-media in general (the two are scarcely distinguishable)
would have made hay with them. As it is, the case is played for all
its emotional impact.

We mention this because it is typical of the disingenuousness of
this type of propaganda. For every one child who thus lived in fear
of corporal punishment, there were and still are hundreds who five
in fear of bullying. Very few school teachers act with truly sadistic
intentions—and those few can and should be dealt with.
School children, on the other hand, frequently do. No one will ever
know the number of children for whom every walk to and from
school is made a nightmare by bullying and the fear of bullying;
who watch the schoolroom clock towards the end of the school day
not with anticipation of freedom but with dread of the ordeal

ii

ahead. If the terrorisation and pain suffered by children were of real
interest to the anti-corporal-punishment-lobby, then they would
have paid at least some cursory attention to this problem which
causes far more suffering—and far more prolonged suffering, and far
more intense suffering—than corporal punishment ever has, espe¬
cially under the moderate regimes that have been in force through¬
out this century with their philosophy of more or less ‘last-resort’
deterrence.

If they had given even a moment’s serious thought to this form of
suffering, they would also consider the possibility that the most
effective deterrent from bullying is corporal punishment. In many
schools before the abolition of corporal punishment, bullying was
one of the very few offences that merited the cane, and since that
time it is generally admitted that bullying and playground violence
have increased alarmingly. We do not claim that these two facts are
necessarily related as cause and effect. We do insist that at the very
least a certain proportion, and probably a very considerable pro¬
portion, of bullying could be curtailed if those in authority had at
their disposal a serious sanction against it. Many teachers freely
admit that in the face of determined bad behaviour they are now
just about helpless. With the moderate or sporadic bully the teacher
may hope to have some influence, but with the really hardened and
vindictive case she can do nothing.

I ask the reader to consider the feelings of a child who has been
hurt and terrorised for months by a school bully and who, when the
bully is finally brought to ‘justice’ hears him say swaggeringly to the
teacher: “What do you think you’re going to do about it? What can
you do to me?” and watches the teacher turn resignedly away, leav¬
ing the victim to her fate.

I do not say that these considerations should turn every aboli¬
tionist overnight into a supporter of corporal punishment. What I
do say is that if there was an ounce of sincerity in the supposed com¬
passion for children by which the abolitionists claim to be motivat¬
ed, they would at least take pause and do some heart-searching;
would at least openly weigh one evil against the other and admit
that, whichever side they finally come down on, things are not quite
as simple as they might wish. Have you ever heard an abolitionist,

12

or any one who follows the stock ‘anti’ line, pause for one moment?
Do you imagine that you ever will? Of course not. Because the truth
is that compassion plays no part whatever in their thinking. They
are hard-line ideologues who care for atrocity stories only when
they help their cause. For suffering that does not fit in with their
pre-digested picture of the world they care nothing. They turn away
from it with flint-hearted indifference.

The truth is that the anti-corporal punishment campaign has no
more to do with kindness to children than the anti-fur campaign has
to do with kindness to animals. Both are purely ideological move¬
ments, motivated by much the same ideology in each case. This is
not, of course, to deny that the majority of innocent dupes of the
propaganda honesdy believe that they hold the views they do out of
kindness. They have simply never thought about such questions as
the suffering that might be alleviated by corporal punishment
because that is no part of the propaganda that is fed to them. But
those who do the feeding know well enough that they are selecting,
sifting and slanting their facts. Suffering to them is not a cause for
concern: it is a weapon in the propaganda war, and when it hap¬
pens to fall on the wrong side of the fence—to make the wrong
point—its victims, however unhappy and frightened, however
young and innocent and bewildered, can never look to these people
for a flicker of sympathy or even recognition.

Sorry, kid. Your nightmare doesn’t tell the right story. Turn
instead to some unnatural little monster who wants to shop his own
parents for a mild spanking. Now he deserves real sympathy

At the other extreme from the abolitionist fanatics stand a growing
body of people who advocate corporal punishment in its most
extreme and even brutal forms. The favourable reaction of many
people to the case of the young American caned in Singapore, dis¬
cussed in this book, is as disturbing to my mind as the totalitarian
intolerance of the anti-corporal-punishment lobby.

The punishment in question was not a ‘good caning’ in the sense
understood by those familiar with the English school tradition. It
might better be described as an ‘evil caning’. One which sends the
victim into a state of medical shock and scars him for life. Perhaps

13

some of the people who applauded this punishment were naive
enough to believe that what was in question was simply an old-fash¬
ioned six of the best, and that such a caning would be a salutary
punishment for a boy who wantonly damages other people’s motor
cars. Not, in my view, an unreasonable position.

The majority, however, must have known exacdy what they were
condoning. I am sure the mass-media made it clear enough often
enough. I do
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