Rods Unspared

Dirty sandshoes, out-of-control choo-choo's and other good reasons for whacking a kid.

I'm bent over, my fourteen year old bum, encased in dark woollen schoolboy shorts, is facing the sun and all I can see besides black asphalt is a view of a rusty bike-stand.

And a man, rat-faced, short and a touch over-weight — but strong — is whacking the shit out of me with a stick.

To be fair it was a rattan cane, and he was legally entitled to beat me. I had committed a heinous offence, you see. I had come to his PE class with dirty sandshoes.¹

In his defence I have to say I wasn't being especially victimised by this treatment. No. Our PE teacher was zealous in discovering reasons for young lads to be led outside and told to bend over. Nor, at the time, did I think the concept of a teacher being allowed to dish out such punishment especially remarkable.

I'd been being whacked by teachers since my early days in primary school. Primary schools, of course, were not so cruel as to use a cane on the bums of tiny kids. Instead teachers were issued with wide, thick leather straps. Do something terrible, like kicking the boy next to you under the table, or surreptitiously placing a caterpillar in a girl’s Vegemite sandwich, and you were led to the front of the class, told to put your hand out and the strap administered.

Department of Education standards of the day allowed for up to six lashes for boys, three on each hand. Since females were known to be weak and delicate, the maximum for girls was a total of three. This, of course, aroused many a cry of indignation among the lads, but — Feminism not yet having a hold on the minds of the lasses of Shirley Primary School — they did not join in our protests of unfairness.

We repressed our tears of course, defying the teacher with a 10 year-old’s rebellious sneer and a sotto voce “didn’t hurt” remark to our mates as we passed them on the way back to our desk.

Some of the lads, impressed by a rumour that rubbing raw onion on your hand would cause it to produce horrific red welts when hit, attempted to get the perepetuator into trouble by creating evidence of excessive brutality. Aside from causing teachers to query what their mum’s had put in their lunch boxes however, I never knew this to have any effect.

The corporal punishment process then, designed to instil respect for authority, usually had the reverse effect.

Fortunately most of the teachers at my primary school did not much like this whacking process, dishing out the strap sparingly and with mild force. There was one old biddy, however, brought back out of retirement due to a teacher shortage. She looked like one of P.G. Wodehouse's characterizations of his evil aunts, and had a positively Victorian attitude to 'sparing the rod', dishing it out for all sorts of reasons.

As a 'for instance', we had small blackboards that ran around the walls of our old 1940’s pre-fab classroom (yes I'm that old!). Each child was assigned one of these, and a carefully measured quantity of chalk. One day I was inspired to draw a train of the old "choo choo" variety. Finding my blackboard too small to encompass the full glory of the train's billowing smoke, I naturally spread it across two or three neighbouring boards, causing the kind of kerfuffle that primary teachers the world over are very familiar with.

I got two straps on each hand for that terrible crime. Indeed so appalling was the incident that the enraged teacher did not allow us to rub the evidence off the boards, and when my mum arrived to pick me up she was invited inside the classroom to be shown what a perfidious child I was. My mother, after a minute gazing in bemusement at my choo choo train, and the outrage on the teacher’s face, could not restrain herself and laughed in the old cow’s face. I knew I might pay for it later, but I was terribly proud of my mum right then.

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Mostly these punishments were only fleetingly painful, and if they left a mark on my behaviour or personality I’m not sure what it was. But there were exceptions.

There was the time I was caught I drawing some words, possibly rude, in crayon on the corner of the primary school’s brick building. This offence was deemed too serious to be dealt with by my teacher, and I was sent to wait on a hard wooden stool outside the headmaster’s office. There, after keeping me sitting for a long while to build up my trepidation, he delivered me a lecture, and administered in a manner both ritually potent, and painful, six hard whacks. They might even have worked: certainly I haven’t done much graffiting since. I’m fairly sure though, that it was the waiting on the stool, and the seriousness of his demeanour that left the real mark on my memory.

Then there was the time in high school when a punishment really burnt into my soul. It was a science class, and our teacher was a decent man, whose lessons were cleverly constructed and interesting. He rarely had to resort to caning, although it was known that, when he did, it really hurt. Unlike the PE teacher he did not rely on brute force but managed to give the cane a little flick that somehow exaggerated the power of the blow.

I got into trouble over some exercise involving the use of dividers² when I discovered that someone had got into my pencil case and stolen mine. I made a fuss, disrupting the class, and causing something of a fight to break out. After making me explain myself, the teacher duly announced that if, “whoever took Gordon’s divider does not give it back within five minutes, I will cane Gordon”. ³ I’m not sure why - possibly he thought I might be lying, or that he would use moral pressure to force the culprit out. Whatever, no-one fessed up, and I was led outside. I protested - reasonably - that this was unfair, while he told me that he was sorry and he really did not want to do this (and in retrospect I believe him). But he did. And I cried, not so much because it hurt (although it did, his reputation was deserved), but because it seemed so unjust, a betrayal by a teacher I had thought to be one of the good ones.

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Now, with all these stories you are probably thinking I was forever getting whacked and was a bit of a naughty boy. In fact not. Actually I occupied pretty much a sweet spot in the old punishment stakes.

You see, for a boy of my era, not getting the occasional opportunity to be pulled up in front of the class and show your unflinching bravado was the sign you were a weakling, that most dreaded of things, ‘a teachers pet’. On the other hand, having it happen too often, while it might mark you out as a tough, was also a sign that you were too dumb to make decent excuses and doomed to a life of failure. So getting whacked occasionally, but not too often, was the desirable state. A life lesson in the importance of balance, I suppose.

Corporal punishment of this sort has of course disappeared from New Zealand schools (although it only became illegal in 1990), and my own kids and their generation have suffered only from time-outs, detentions, and rather convoluted, woke sounding, counselling and explaining sessions.

So what, I ask myself, is better for kids and society, the whackers or the wokers?

On balance, I fear the latter. It’s not that I don’t think a good clip around the ear, administered by the right person in the right circumstances may not do more good than harm. I recall once when I did something particularly stupid crossing the road and nearly ended up under a bus, my mum gave me a couple of very punishing whacks that went straight to my road-crossing motor-nuerons and instantly hard-wired my brain about that ‘looking both ways’ thing. Much more effective than any after-the-event, quiet calm lecture about road safety. But that was a punishment administrated right at the moment of my offence, by someone who loved me and only very rarely resorted to violence as punishment. I realised she was serious.

The trouble is that in my day too much of the corporal punishment against kids was delivered by people who had trouble with restraint, used it inappropriately, or actually seemed to enjoy it. If most kids, like me, rode that out OK, there was undoubtedly a good percentage who were so repeatedly picked on, or so sensitive to being whacked in a deeply humiliating manner, that it left psychological scars.

And the problem is that even if only a few percent of teachers or parents are like my old PE teacher or my silly old biddy of a primary teacher, you need to make social rules that apply to everybody. It’s one of those things where as a nation, if you allow practices that scar the minds of even only a few percent of kids, then you will pay a big price later in people that are maladjusted and even criminal.

So while now, I can look back at my punishments with mild amusement, I’m rather glad that my kids won’t have such memories. Better woke than whacked, I guess.

1. Sandshoes were the gym shoes of the day. Cheap and with canvas uppers that got dirty easily. You couldn’t polish them, you had to wash them, plaster them with a sort of white paint, and let them dry in time for your next class. A task easily forgotten by busy young lads.

2. Do kids still use dividers? I mean the instrument for measuring distance with two adjustable legs that are hinged together and end in sharp points. They were ubiquitous in my day, although less used by for measurement than for carving initials in desks or stabbing holes in your mate’s exercise book.

3. Teachers at my high school always used to call kids by their surname, a pretension I guess inherited from British public schools. Possibly it avoided over-familiarity, or emphasised that your behaviour reflected on your whole family?

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