Jim Eagles: It'll be our turn next to be found wanting

One of my favourite quotes is the opening sentence from L.P. Hartley's 1953 novel The Go-between which declares: "The past is another country; they do things differently there."

Unfortunately we often forget that truth and treat the past as though it were the world of here and now. We judge the people of yesteryear by our own rules, smugly assuming a vast moral superiority and condemning them for failing to measure up to standards which were never theirs.

In New Zealand that approach is most commonly seen in sweeping condemnations of early colonists as thieves, racists and environmental vandals for settling Maori land, destroying the indigenous society and clearing forests to create farms. Yet by the standards of the time they behaved in praiseworthy fashion by making use of unproductive land, bringing civilisation to a primitive society and building a new nation.

Almost as widespread is criticism of pre-European Maori as warlike savages who practised cannibalism. Yet all of us will have ancestors who engaged in what now seem like acts of savagery in order to survive, because that was what the circumstances of their times demanded.

Looking back from our lofty viewpoint we also condemn the likes of Socrates for condoning slavery, Martin Luther for sexist attitudes or Christopher Columbus and James Cook for initiating genocide on a par with that of Adolf Hitler.

This attitude of judging with the benefit of 20:20 moral hindsight has even coined a new word - presentism. The online dictionary Wordsmith.org defines presentism as "the application of current ideals and moral standards to interpret historical figures and their actions".

Wordsmith.org adds the timely example of "Mr John Teacher who caned pupils in his 1889 class. A presentist would say that Mr Teacher engaged in unacceptable violence against children, while one with an opposing view would claim that since it was considered okay to hit children at the time, Mr Teacher isn't to be blamed".

I found that example apposite because it was the controversy raging around former cabinet minister and ex-teacher David Benson-Pope that caused me to muse on presentist behaviour in the first place.

As we all know, the luckless Benson-Pope may see his political career destroyed following accusations that when he was a teacher at Bayfield High School 20-30 years ago he behaved in a manner that is now construed as bullying.

The claims are deemed to be relevant because, in his role as Associate Education Minister, Benson-Pope launched an anti-bullying programme for schools. Nevertheless, the whole furore seems faintly ridiculous, precisely because its starting point is an invitation for us to view the teaching behaviour of a different era from the perspective of today.

As Bayfield High School's present principal, Denis Slowley, has observed, today's pupils enjoy a different culture and environment to 20 years ago. "This is not the Bayfield of the 80s, it's a modern school."

Of course it's not the Bayfield of the 80s. There have been huge changes in education over the intervening years, not least the abolition of corporal punishment in 1990, which make comparisons pointless.

Anyone of my generation can look back to an educational era when the strap, the cane, a cuff on the ear, a thrown rubber, a rap on the knuckles with a ruler and other such robust devices were accepted by all parties as part of the tools available to teachers to keep their classes under control.

Most of Benson-Pope's former pupils appear to be grateful for a teacher they describe as gruff but effective, and strict but innovative.

I certainly don't think ill any of the teachers who gave me a cuff or a whack (though I do feel continuing resentment against a couple of teachers and a principal who used to humiliate youngsters with sarcastic comments). On the contrary, I consider myself fortunate to have been educated at a time when discipline, respect, achievement and individual responsibility were to the fore.

But, whether we think the educational system is better or worse than a generation or two ago, judging the behaviour of teachers or anyone else by the standards of a different era is absurd.

None of this, of course, is to say that we should regard things as tolerable simply because they were regarded as the norm at some period in history.

As Socrates argued some 1600 years ago - yes, he may have fallen down on the subject of slavery, but he was a great thinker - there are absolute moral standards which apply in all places at all times. Over the centuries there has been continuing debate about exactly what those standards are, but most societies probably agree that the likes of theft, eating your enemies, slavery, persecuting people because of their racial origin, beating up children or lying are unacceptable.

Fortunately, Benson-Pope's political future will rest not on whether his teaching methods were too robust by present standards, but on whether he breached one of those basic moral values and lied to Parliament. That is as it should be.

We can certainly be appalled at Luther's attitude to women, wish that Cook knew enough about disease to protect the societies he visited from germs carried by his crew, or deplore the thrashings administered at the famous Rugby School even under the headmastership of the revered Dr Matthew Arnold.

But we should be cautious about rushing to judgment on those individuals, because the attitudes we disapprove of were formed by the societies in which they lived, and there was, in fact, little chance they might think differently.

And we should also keep in mind that a generation or two from now people in the country of the future will doubtless judge our behaviour in the light of their own standards and find us lacking.

* Jim Eagles is the Herald's travel editor.