Garth George: Benson-Pope’s discipline creative and surely effective

David Benson-Pope is probably a bully. There is evidence. He has a pugnacious look about him; he was labelled "brownshirt" by his colleagues when he was their Chief Whip; and he was remorseless in taking over the sponsorship of, and bulldozing through, some unpopular anti-social legislation last year.

So it was rather ironic that as Associate Minister of Education the Dunedin MP was the sponsor of anti-bullying legislation. But not surprising. Hypocrisy is no stranger to Parliament.

For all that I have a great deal of sympathy for him. He has become the latest victim of those who judge historic behaviour by the "standards" of today, which are not standards at all but an amorphous mass of prejudice parading as "tolerance" - and "rights".

Mr Benson-Pope is alleged, in his long-ago schoolteacher days, to have shoved a tennis ball into the mouth of some disobedient and yappy young punk, then taped his hands to his desk so he couldn't pull it out. And to have thrown tennis balls at inattentive pupils.

So what? It sounds hugely creative and highly effective to me. And it's a damn shame there isn't a bit more of such discipline in our schools today - cricket balls, perhaps.

I well remember one of my high school teachers who used small pieces of chalk for the same purpose. His aim was unerring; depending on your posture at the time he either got you on the top of the head or on the breastbone.

And I remember being cuffed on the ear by a primary schoolteacher named Aitken so hard it made my ears ring. But it wasn't the physical pain that hurt the most. It was the gut-wrenching, face-reddening humiliation of it happening in front of a class of my peers.

It obviously left a lifelong scar on my psyche because it's about the only thing I remember of my years at South School in Invercargill, back in the late 1940s and early 50s. Perhaps I should sue.

There are those who ask apropos the Benson-Pope affair why a complaint wasn't made at the time.

Which just goes to show that a lot of people have very short memories, or were born into the days of political correctness and know no better.

Complaints weren't made at the time because to complain was to be labelled a tattle-tail and a wimp and to become a pariah. As it was in my day.

To whom would I have complained? The headmaster (of whose name, incidentally, I have absolutely no recollection)? He would have stood by his teacher.

My parents? Mum would probably have said something like, "He shouldn't have done that, but you no doubt brought it on yourself", and Dad would have grunted something like, "You better learn to control your mouth", and gone back to his newspaper.

I remember, too, my infrequent canings at high school, every one of which was deserved. You see, back in my schooldays, and even in Mr Benson-Pope's early teaching days, schoolchildren knew right from wrong.

Which certainly didn't mean that we always did right; what it meant was that if we did wrong, we knew there were consequences if we were caught and that we would have to take our punishment like the men we were being taught to be.

There were inflexible rules of dress, deportment and behaviour and you disobeyed them at your peril. One was that pupils of Southland Boys' High School did not smoke in public.

That was my undoing. When you are spotted on a Saturday night having a fag outside the local Civic Theatre by the rector himself there are no excuses.

And it wouldn't have occurred to me, or any of my peers, to have tried to blame someone else for the punishment that was sure to ensue.

In fact, I wore four pairs of underpants to school every Monday morning. But even then I ended up once or twice with painful red and blue welts across my bum.

Although I deplore Mr Benson-Pope's politics, I have to give him credit for standing down as soon as these allegations became public. It's a pity a few more people in the Cabinet and the bureaucracy wouldn't take a leaf out of his book.

Full marks to Professor Graeme Taylor for resigning as chairman of the Qualifications Authority in the wake of the NCEA debacle, but only two cheers for chief executive Karen Van Rooyen, who hung on until her position became untenable before taking $50,000 to "work" from home for three months, the equivalent of $200,000 a year.

The rest - Police Minister George Hawkins, Police Commissioner Rob Robinson, Chief of Defence Force Bruce Ferguson - simply provide further evidence, if any were needed, that there is no such thing as taking responsibility any more.

And that rot is right through society. Whenever something goes wrong the blaming begins and everyone points the finger at some other person or institution. The favourite is to blame the Government, and while sometimes that is exactly where the fault lies, mostly it's not.

I remain wedded to the principle that if something is wrong in my life, then it is up to me to come to terms with it or to walk away from it. It is complementary to the principle that if you can't stand the heat, you get out of the kitchen.

But in these first years of the 21st century it seems the buck never stops, it just keeps on going into outer space.