STRANGE PUNISHMENT

Waipa Post, Volume 45, Issue 3210, 30 July 1932, Page 6

STRANGE PUNISHMENT

I was brought up in a school in my early days where the wise head master punished his naughty boys by a compulsory walk, one of the prefects being set to carry this out. The master knew that there was nothing like hard exercise for dissipating illhumour and quieting those high spirits which led to indiscipline and naughtiness (writes Sir Leonard Hill in the Evening News, London"*. Another head master, whose school became famous, saw to it that his boys had long runs and walks over the open country on the wet and story days when games were impossible; he never kept boys in. And yet the common punishment at most schools has been detention—shutting boys up, after the long school hours, to write lines.

Confinement is the worst method of treating the ill-tempered and truculent. Make them tired with hard exercise, and so use up all the excess of unburnt foodstuffs in their bodies which is upsetting them, and they will become mild as lambs! The conduct in this matter of the authorities who administer our prisons strikes me as being silly. I would give prisoners at least five or six hours' exercise a day.