Education Commission

Press, Volume C, Issue 29467, 20 March 1961, Page 3

Education Commission

Sir.—l agree with John Summers that it is high,time for a long look at the use of corporal punishment in New Zealand schools. In. Canterbury the strap is even permitted in infant departments .although it is not used in either play centres or kindergartens and children grow more, not less, reasonable. Corporal punishment is never the answer; it makes children aggressive or frightened. But if teachers with large classes feel reluctant to forgo its use completely, as a last resort, surely there can be no excuse for using it with children of five to seven years of age. Could it not be forbidden for this age group at least?—Yours, etc.. MARY WOODWARD. March 16, 1961. Sir,— -Looking back on life at an English public school over 50 years ago, one recalls that most days of the week some boy or other got a beating, usually richly deserved and rarely resented, from the headmaster, one of the housemasters, or the senior prefect. This particular form of punishment was never meted out for any educational shortcomings, however flagrant. For such delinquencies there were plenty of alternative sanctions, from being kept in after school to, in the case of a somewhat eccentric but much revered classical master, being made to stand on one’s head in the corner, as the penalty for putting a three-syllable word at the end of a pentameter—a crime he held equal in monstrosity to murdering one’ grandmother. The essence of the performance, of course, was in the amount of contraband material liable to cascade, coram publico, from the victim’s inverted pockets.— Yours, etc., ILAM. March 16, 1961. [Since that part of this correspondence dealing with corporal punishment is straying from the original subject no further letters on that aspect will be printed.—Ed., “The Press.”]