Terry Dunleavy: Perhaps we should bring back corporal punishment

Terry Dunleavy

As someone who left school more than 62 years ago, I find the brouhaha over allegations of "bullying" by David Benson-Pope more than somewhat bemusing. It seems that what today is termed "bullying", in my school days was recognised by all of us - teachers and pupils alike - as discipline.

Step out of line, break accepted school rules, and the ultimate penalty was the cane. There was the dreaded ceremony of sending an innocent schoolmate to the director's office to fetch the cane, which was then administered across the tips of the fingers of outstretched hands in front of the whole class.

The shame in front of one's mates was almost as painful as the short-lived pain from tingling fingertips.

It was always a salutary lesson: for the boy caned, for the watching classmates and, as often as not, for the administering teacher who would be left to wonder how he had let indiscipline come to this.

It taught us discipline. It taught us there were limits, and where they fell. None of my generation was any the worse for what became later to be known as corporal punishment.

In the classroom, so also in the home - in my case the odd clip over the ear but never the strapping applied to some of my mates.

When it came the turn of my wife and myself to become frazzled parents, my wife found that a wooden spoon rapped across offending hands conveyed the age-old parental message of what was acceptable behaviour and what went over the limit. Before long, even the threat of that wooden spoon was sufficient to restore discipline at the table and elsewhere in the home.

None of our children has shown any signs of being scarred by this treatment; in fact we are proud of the fine citizens they have all turned out to be.

I like to think my children are as grateful to us as we were to our own parents for the underlying love and caring which was at the root of the discipline instilled into us.

We were taught manners; we were shown limits; we grew to know what was acceptable behaviour and what was not. The cane, the clip over the ear and, indeed, the wooden spoon, were integral aids to this learning process.

We lament the appalling laxity of behaviour of many children in this day and age. And we wonder why. Corporal punishment, whether in the home or in the classroom, has become a legal and social offence; it is certainly not politically correct.

Parents and teachers are today denied the salutary lessons available to their predecessors to teach children where the boundaries lie in acceptable behaviour.

I feel for the teachers of today. They have to deal with the indiscipline that emanates from many homes in which streetwise kids know they can stretch their parents' patience well beyond what their parents did when they were of the same age.

Even in my schooldays, when teachers and parents were not proscribed from administering what today is branded as corporal punishment, there were a small minority of fractious pupils who delighted in testing the limits of teacher patience, or of actively seeking the supposed notoriety of applied disobedience.

They were the adverse role models whose indiscipline necessitated the exemplary punishment by the cane.

Not all teachers possessed the patience of Job, and I can recall teachers throwing chalk at recalcitrant offenders; or a celebrated case of two persistent pests being brought to heel with whacks across bended backsides with a folded wooden blackboard compass. Those two "pests" were to grow up to be model citizens.

So, un-PC as it may be in these days of alleged enlightenment, the chucking of tennis balls by a frazzled teacher, even the stuffing of one such ball in the mouth of a defiant heckler, doesn't seem all that heinous a crime.

Especially not when we see so many examples of unmannerly, uncouth, antisocial behaviour of some of the products of the politically correct disciplinary laxity which today's system seems to encourage in homes and classrooms.

Bullying in schools by pupils against other pupils is another matter entirely, and is rightly a cause for concern now, as it has always been.

But if this type of bullying is more rampant now than it was in earlier generations, one has to question the extent to which it has been caused by indiscipline in home and school arising from the PC restraints on parents and teachers.

The accusations against a minister will run their course in the official inquiry, and one has to fear for his political future if he is found to have misled Parliament last week.

But his case might well be the basis of some nationwide soul-searching of whether or not official attitudes to corporal punishment are really in the best interests of today's children, and of the teachers on whom we rely for their education.

* Terry Dunleavy, aged 76, is a Takapuna writer.