Corporal punishment: stern discipline or abuse?

Allegations against David Benson-Pope have sparked a furious debate about school discipline. Leah Haines hears some horror stories and asks if they were simply a sign of the times.

A million years ago in a blue-collar Wellington schoolyard, property magnate Bob Jones was a small boy of nine or 10, about to break a school record.

Young Jones stood facing Baldy - a teacher who shall otherwise remain nameless - his little hand outstretched ready to receive his 27th lot of six strappings that day. He had already broken the record with 26 sets - 156 lashings in all - and suddenly decided he wouldn't take any more.

"They bloody hurt," he remembers. "So I hit Baldy with a left hook to the belly. He was a short fat bloke. And he never touched me again."

Jones remembers being "brutalised" in his school days in the 1940s and 50s, and can vividly recall the canings that left purple welts on boys' bottoms for days.

"People say 'it didn't do me any harm' and in a way I agree with that. But it's just wrong in principle."

Nevertheless, he feels some sympathy for associate education minister David Benson-Pope, who stood down last week amid allegations he bullied students while a teacher in the 1980s.

Benson-Pope has denied throwing tennis balls at students, shoving one in a boy's mouth and strapping his hands to a desk, and caning a boy until he bled.

Jones doubts the MP did anything wrong. But even if he did, he says: "That was the culture of the time, kids were constantly thrashed."

We all have our stories.

When I was seven, Ms Shirley called me a slut for wearing shorts to school and sent me off to the head teacher for a strapping. A colleague says he was beaten every day by his teacher and forced to stand in a corner with his arms out at right angles and weighted down by a stack of text books on each hand. If his arms dipped below 90 degrees he would get strapped.

With corporal punishment legal until 1990, it seems unfair to judge historic behaviour by the standards of today.

But the question remains, were the Baldys of their day right? Or were they deficient maniacs who should never have stood before a class?

Auckland Grammar headmaster John Morris rejects as "largely ineffective" the acts of teachers who used the cane to rule their classes.

"Some of the corporal punishment I had to witness when I was a young teacher made me physically quite sick," he says.

His comments reflect a cultural change at schools over the past three decades, especially at boys grammar schools, which were the staunchest defenders of physical punishment.

Morris began teaching in 1973, and did not arrive at Auckland Grammar until 1993 - three years after the law was changed.

But after 27 years at the school, economics teacher Alan Calvert has clear memories of when the cane ruled the day. "It was about four or five feet long, it was nearly always bamboo and there used to be a selection of canes," the 57-year-old remembers with a chuckle. "A thick one, or a thin whippy one, or one that was fairly rigid and thicker. And if you think of bamboo, it's not entirely smooth, there are little ridges on it as well."

Not that Calvert ever used physical discipline himself. But from being on the receiving end as a young boy there is no doubt, he says, that a caning used to hurt. After two or three strokes in the same spot it wasn't even out of the ordinary to draw blood.

The Education Department in its 1971 Secondary School Boards manual, remembered affectionately as "the little green book", clearly laid out the rules for schools using corporal punishment. These included: "It is to be used sparingly and only after due deliberation; it is not to be applied to girls; and if more than one stroke is to be given, a senior teacher must be present."

Calvert says the general perception of Grammar boys who were caned in the 70s and 80s was one of acceptance.

"If someone was going to get the cane, the reaction of his mates - and I mean his friends - was 'bloody good job, hope it hurts' and that sort of thing. It was very much accepted and acceptable, which for you, and maybe in today's environment, would just seem so strange."

Back then, however, a strong movement against caning was already under way.

Most schools had banned it by the time it was outlawed, thanks largely to a wave of feminism that had started to assert its influence over the profession.

Women were not allowed to use the cane, so had to develop other ways to keep classes in order. From 1975, when the Education Department allowed women to become deputy principals and principals, their influence began to be felt. Ann Dunphy was the first female deputy principal, in 1976 at Tangaroa College in Otara. Now a lecturer in education at Auckland University, Dunphy remembers two visionary edicts of the school's principal at the time, Gerry Mullin: There would be no corporal punishment and everyone had to learn Maori.

"It was incredibly brave. I'd like him to be remembered," she says.

 

Does she think the behaviour Benson-Pope is accused of was typical of its time? "Some of what was described is clearly going over the line. But in an atmosphere where you use physical violence to control people, I'm sure there were a lot of incidents like that.

"I can remember as a girl at school being slapped in the face for no reason by a teacher at assembly hall. I was totally humiliated. But that was the ethos at the time."

WRITE TO US... We want to hear your stories about school discipline. And whether you think the allegations about David Benson-Pope are fair. Mail to:

The Editor,

Herald on Sunday,

PO Box 32, Auckland.