England is a classic country of corporal punishment
TraditionsThe most developed system of corporal punishment of children, which became a tradition and survived throughout the modern era, existed in Great Britain (see: Chandos, 1984; Gathorne-Hardy, 1977; Gibson, 1978; Raven, 1986).
The first thing an English boy came across in school was cruelty and abuse of power by teachers. A particularly sophisticated ritual of corporal punishment, which here was called “beating” (beating) or “execution”, was famous for Eton College founded in 1440. Some of his teachers, for example, who led Eton in 1534 – 1543. Nicholas Yudall (1504 – 1556) were very real sadists who were sexually enjoyable by beating up boys. English epigram of the 17th century says: "Scratching a student’s pants, the pedant satisfies his own itch."
Udall's connections were so high that even after he was fired and convicted of sodomy, a few years later he headed another, Westminster College.
Pupils were flogged literally for everything. In 1660, when schoolchildren were prescribed smoking as a means of preventing the plague, one Eton boy was flogged “as never before” for ... not smoking. At Eton, the parents of pupils were charged half a guinea in addition to the tuition fee for the purchase of rods, regardless of whether their offspring was punished or not.
It should be emphasized that the point was not only and not so much in the personal inclinations of the educators, who, as elsewhere, were different, but in the general principles of education.
The most famous “chopstick”, who led Eaton from 1809 to 1834, was Dr. John Keate (1773 – 1852), who once for one day cut the 80 (!!!) boys with his own hand, was distinguished by a kind and cheerful disposition, the pupils respected him. Kit simply tried to raise the weakened discipline, and he succeeded. Many punished boys perceived flogging as a legal payoff for losing, for not being able to deceive the teacher, and at the same time - as a feat in the eyes of classmates.
Avoiding the rod was considered bad form. The boys even showed off their scars to each other. Of particular importance was the publicity of punishment. For older, 17 — 18-year-old boys, humiliation was worse than physical pain. The captain of the Eton rowing team, a tall and strong young man who was about to be flogged for abusing champagne, tearfully implored the director to carve him alone and not under the eyes of a crowd of curious younger boys for whom he himself was an authority and even authority. The director categorically refused, explaining that publicity is the main part of the punishment.
The ritual of public flogging was worked out to the smallest detail. Each House in Eton had its own scaffold - a wooden deck with two steps (flogging block). The punished person had to lower the trousers and briefs, climb the scaffold, kneel down the lower step and lay his stomach on the upper part of the deck. Thus, his butt, the cleft between the buttocks, the sensitive inner surface of the thighs and even the genitals in the back were completely exposed and visible, and if the whipping teacher would be willing, for the painful blows of the birch twigs. This is clearly seen in the old English engraving “Spanking in Eton”. In this position, the boy was held by two people, whose duties also included keeping the floor of his shirt, until the guilty received all the blows assigned to him.
What feelings this spectacle evoked in the boys is described in detail in the famous Eton poem by Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909) "The Whipping of Charlie Collingwood". Since there is no Russian translation of the poem, and I am not capable of it, I will limit myself to a brief retelling.
Charlie Collingwood is a seventeen-year-old handsome man, tall and broad-shouldered, with well-developed muscles and a shock of red hair on his head. He perfectly plays all sports games, but poems and compositions are not given to him. Therefore, five or even six days a week, he is a victim, and then he is punished. For younger boys, seeing the spanking of Charlie Collingwood is a real treat; traces of birch on his ass more than the leaves on the tree, such a ass nice to see. But Charlie is not afraid of anything. He goes with his pants down without making a sound. Viewers look from the director's red rod to the schoolboy’s red ass: a scar on a scar, a scar on a scar. The director is exhausted, but Charlie is not the first. The rod burns all the more sensitive, on the white sides of Charlie, like snakes, crawling birch patterns. Red patterns are visible on his bare white belly, and between the white thighs something hairy opens. The teacher chooses the most sensitive places, as if she wants to chop Charlie into pieces. “Of course, you are too big for whipping, at your age it is embarrassing to be whipping, but while you are here, I will fly you! The boy is never too big to beat! ”Twisting in pain, Charlie eventually screams:“ Oh! ”- and the younger boys laugh, that the rod still made the big guy scream. But the second such pleasure, they will not wait. The teacher gets tired before. Charlie Collingwood rises from the scaffold, red-faced, with tangled red hair, purple ass, tear-filled blue eyes and a look that says “Damn!” Then he pulls on his pants and leaves the school, surrounded by a crowd of boys who go after their hero and proud to see Charlie Collingwood spanking ...
There is everything here: teacher's sadism, unconditional obedience and desperate bravado of the punished, cruel laughter and simultaneous glorification of the victim, with which each of these boys is identified in his own way. And above all - taboo sex ...
From the memoirs of former Etonians:
“I was caught in the chapel for singing rude, obscene poems to the motive of the psalm and summoned to the Junior Master (something like a deputy director. - I. K.). You had to take off your pants and shorts and kneel on the shoe. Two ministers kept you. You flogged with a whip on the bare ass. I was trembling all the time, white as a sheet of paper, absolutely frightened. Received six blows, as a result blood appeared. When I returned to the classroom, everyone shouted: “Where is the blood, where is the blood?” I had to lift up the hem of my shirt and show bloody stains. ”
“Spanking was just part of life. After evening prayers, the older boys formally called you to the Library. Although I didn't have any particular offense, the Captain of the House decided that I was defiant and deserved a beating. It was extremely painful - a real old-fashioned whipping to the point of blood."
“I don’t remember that in my life I was ever so scared than when I was sitting in my room, knowing that I was to be flogged. My master phage told me in the morning, “I’m afraid you deserve to be beaten,” and I waited this punishment all day. Being small and frail, I was especially afraid. “Go down to the library and wait.” “They made me wait four or five minutes.” - “Enter.” - You enter and see that the issue is resolved, no excuses will save you. Captain House is already standing with his stick. “It’s unforgivable, you three times didn’t light the light from your phagemaster.” Come out. ” “And you have to wait again.” It was a sophisticated torture. “Come in!” - and then they beat you with a stick, as if they were knocking out a carpet. ”
“My grandfather and great-grandfather were equally flogged in school, and ... on the same scaffold. Given that their school years are shared by 29 years, it always seemed funny to me. Neither my grandfather nor my great-grandfather had any regrets or negative feelings about the punishment, it was then a normal part of life. As my grandfather said, birch was a way to “tune the spirit”; although the results could look miserable, the skin healed in three weeks ... "
Remarkable vicious traditions existed at the Westminster School founded in 1179. Its most famous director (he has held this position 58 for years) Richard Busby (1606 – 1695) boasted that he personally broke the 16 future bishops of the Anglican church and that only one of his students was not whipped once. According to Dr. Busby, whipping forms a healthy attitude to discipline in the boy. By the way, his teacher's career began with a scandal: Busby was convicted of sexual abuse of one of the students. In 1743, the famous poet Alexander Pop satirically portrayed him in the poem "New Dunsiada". But Busby was appreciated “not only for this”: no English school could boast such a number of famous graduates as the Westminster of the Busby era (architect Christopher Wren, naturalist Robert Hook, poets John Dryden and Matthew Pryor, philosopher John Locke and many others). Does this not prove the success of a whipping? In addition, Busby collected and donated to the school a rich library.
Tradition Busby carefully preserved. In the spring of 1792, on the wave of liberalism (a revolution occurred in neighboring France), a group of students at the Westminster School published a satirical magazine, Flagellant, for two and a half months. Nine issues were published, a total of one and a half hundred pages, after which the magazine was banned, and its initiator, the future famous romantic poet Robert Southey (1774 – 1843), was expelled from school.
Two hundred years later, the Russian writer Igor Pomerantsev got acquainted with the magazine, and this is what he writes (Pomerantsev, 1998):
“The young men hurried. I literally hear their feathers creak tirelessly in the spring of 1792. In the end of May. At that time, a gothic romance flourished, romanticism was in vogue, but Westminster high school students neglected fashion. It was not for nothing that they were taught rhetoric, so they wrote in the spirit of Cicero's treatises: they proved their own, disproved their opponents, precisely chose words, built phrases proportionately. In their writings you do not distinguish between a dull blow of a stick, there are no stains of blood in them, streams of tears. But still…
“I have no doubt that the teacher’s hand will not reach for the rod, if he understands that it was invented by the devil !!! I appeal to you, professor whipping! Who was the god of ancient paganism? Devil! Catholic Rome is a hotbed of prejudice and superstition. Would a Protestant be denied that the savagery of monks, and among these savagery beating, is from the devil? We have thrown off the yoke of Rome, but the rod still dominates us! ”
Another author of the Flagellant addresses parents:
“Honorable Fathers! Let me from a distant land inform you about the attitude to “Flagellant”. The imperfection of my style, sensitively, will be smoothed by the essence of my message. Know, righteous brothers, that I am under the auspices of a teacher, Mr. Tekam, whose hand is heavier than his head and almost as stern as his heart. When we received the first number of “Flagellant”, the teacher asked what kind of nonsense we read. We responded. He grabbed the magazine and, putting it in his pocket, exclaimed: “Well, and times! The boys are allowed to reflect on themselves! ”I often heard about the right of the anointed of God, the monarch, and, I confess, had doubts. But that the teacher is also God's anointed, I did not hear anything! ”
And here are the memoirs of a Westminster schoolboy from the middle of the XNUMXth century:
“They were punished for disrespecting high school students, for not keeping their word or for blaming someone for their deeds, for card cheating. They beat me with the handle on the legs. They beat my hands. Oh, those winter mornings! I stretch the chapped hands in pimples, now they will be slashed with a ruler. Once I came home for the holidays, and my father took me to the bathroom, washed my hands for a long time with hot water and soap, brushed mourning from under my nails, smeared it with grease and gave a pair of kid gloves. I didn’t take them off for two days, all the wounds healed, the skin became soft, pale ... It was customary to smile while whipping. I have never heard a moan or a sob ...
In Westminster, there was almost no bullying in vain. But still it happened. Sometimes they were forced to spread their fingers and put their palm with the back side up on the desk. After that, the tormentor often jumped between his fingers with a pen or penknife. Some did it masterfully, back and forth, back and forth. But it always ended in one thing: blood.
All corporal punishment of students was carefully documented. In the school "Book of Punishments", which was kept by the elders-high school students, the names of all those punished, the dates, the measure and the reasons for the execution were preserved. Igor Pomerantsev quotes some entries from the 1940s:
"M. punished for foul language. Warden Stamburger made a remark to the class so as not to scream. When Stamburger had finished, M. got up and said: “I will go after my evening.” He was told to hold his tongue. But soon it all happened again. I told M. that he earned three hits. He appealed the decision. We discussed it with the director and decided that it was necessary to punish not just for foul language, but for everything together. True, they agreed on two blows ... "
Spanking was an organic part of the school tradition, many pupils became ardent fans of it for life. A former student of the Charterhouse School (founded in 1612) recalls that when, in 1818, the then headmaster, Dr. Russell, decided to replace corporal punishment with a fine, the school rebelled:
“The rod seemed to us completely compatible with the dignity of a gentleman, and a fine is shameful! The school revolted under the slogan “Down with the fine, long live the rod!”, and the old order was solemnly restored.”
Of course, not all students were spanking fans. The future Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965), who did poorly at school and was also distinguished by a rare stubbornness, was not at all enthusiastic about his preparatory school, St. George:
“Flogging with the Eton fashion was the main part of the curriculum. But I am sure that not a single Eton boy, nor, moreover, a boy from Harrow, was subjected to such cruel whipping as this director was ready to bring down on the little boys trusted in his care and power. They exceeded cruelty even what was allowed in correctional schools ... Two or three times a month, the whole school was driven into the library. Two class elders pulled out one or several guilty in the next room and there they were whipped with blood, while the others sat shivering and listening to their screams. How I hated this school and in what anxiety I lived there for more than two years! I didn’t have a good time in class and I didn’t succeed in sports ”(Churchill, 1941).
The famous Oxford philosopher Alfred Jules Iyer (1910 – 1989) is also nostalgic about spanking. In his elementary school, “discipline was very strict. Only the director punished with a stick, the matron controlled the rods. I received one or two whipping with rods and once, in my last school year, for mischief in the bedroom, a whipping stick. I do not remember that they gave a lot of sticks, but they were very sensitive. After that, the victims gathered in the dressing room, showing each other traces of sticks on their asses. ”
About Eton, where Ayer studied in 1923-1928, he also has something to remember:
“The usual punishment for unfulfilled tasks was a whipping by the captain of the sports team ... The guilty boy was called into the room where the sixth-graders were having dinner. If he saw a chair in the center of the room, he already knew why he was there. Once, without any need, he was told that he was to be whipped, he took off his outer clothing, knelt on the armchair and received seven strong blows he was given ... The blows, especially if they were inflicted by strong athletes, were very painful, but you should I had to move them without crying and without twitching, but having dressed, say goodbye without a shiver in my voice ...
The executive smacking was solemn. They were attended by two sixth graders responsible for discipline, they were called praepostors. The culprit was brought with lowered pants, the gatekeeper was putting him on a special deck. The director then folded the rod into the beam and usually delivered at least six strokes. I was present at one such whipping and was glad that I did not have to go through it myself ”(Ayer, 1979).
Whipping rituals were changing. In 1964, the then director of Eton, Anthony Chenevix-Trench (1919 – 1979), replaced semi-public whipping with a rod or a cane after a bare bottom with a private punishment with a cane in his office. By the way, he did it not from humane considerations, but rather from personal predilections. One student of the Shrewsbury School, where Trench had been the director before, said that he offered the guilty ones a choice: four strikes with a cane, which was very painful, or six strikes with a belt, which was not so painful, but with pants pulled down. Despite the humiliation of the procedure, sensitive boys often chose a belt, the execution clearly gave Trenc sexual pleasure. Heading Eaton, Trench abolished the traditional right of older boys to publicly punish the younger ones through their pants (the guilty were even offered to appear at the spanking in old pants, because the cane could break them, making the punishment even more brutal). Trench's successor continued these reforms: having retained the custom of privately whipping the boys as director, he abolished the need to lower his pants and cowards. Because of this, spanking has become not only less painful, but also less humiliating and sexual. But after all, 1970s were already in the yard ...
In the 1950s and 1960s, corporal punishment still flourished in most English public schools:
“I was beaten with a stick for not wearing a school headdress. It was three miles from the school and twenty yards from my house, I was denounced by my brother who was the prefect.”
“The director punished me with a stick because he didn't like the way I wrote the letter 'f'”.
“The music teacher punished me with a cane as part of a weekly ritual; at the beginning of the lesson, he flogged the whole class, saying, “I know that some of you will misbehave and not be noticed. However, you still won’t escape punishment!”
The famous actor Adrian Edmondson (born in 1957) told the Times that in six years (1964 – 1970) of his studies at the Poklington School (East Yorkshire), he received a total of 66 cannons. The director of the Birmingham Royal Boys' School forced every guilty person to go personally and buy a cane with which he would be carved. However, only the director himself was punished, solely for the cause and without any sadism; most of the punishment was limited to two strokes.
In the 1950s and 1960s, punishment with a stick or a flexible rattan (bamboo is too hard for this) cane (caning) gradually began to give way to spanking with a rubber sports shoe or slipper (slippering). It's painful and loud at the same time. In joint schools, boys were more often punished with a cane, and girls with a slipper; in women's schools, a slipper was generally preferred.
The nature of the punishment depended on the type of school. In public schools, corporal punishment was carried out exclusively by the principal or his assistant and was relatively mild. In public schools, with their ancient traditions, the maintenance of discipline, including the distribution of sticks, was assigned to high school students, captains of “houses” or sports teams, “prefects” or “monitors” (guards). The number of blows depended not only on the seriousness of the offense, but also on the age of the pupil. A first grader could get four hits, a second grader six, a sixth grader up to ten. The punishment was, as a rule, public. In one school, famous for its academic achievements, prefects up to 1965 had the right to punish infants' undergraduates with a sports shoe, but sometimes this humiliating punishment did not avoid even 18 — 19-year-old sixth-graders who could be older than the prefects.
Peter Townsend, Princess Margaret's husband for whom she sacrificed her title, recalls Halesbury School in the 1920s:
“I was beaten for petty offenses six times. Once, realizing what was ahead of me, I put a silk scarf under my trousers to reduce the pain. After a conversation with the director, which ended with the order “Prepare the bedroom!” I ran across the room and noticed that my silk handkerchief was hanging like a pennant in one of my trousers. This gave me an extra hit with a stick.
The sentenced himself was preparing the room. It was like digging your own grave. You moved all the furniture to one wall, with the exception of two wooden chairs, which you put back to each other so that your executioners would be more comfortable to smack you. For the victim, whipping by the prefects was a test of character. You expected your executioners; when they arrived and commanded: “Bend down!” - you, following the noble tradition of many courageous martyrs, climbed the scaffold, kneeled on one chair and leaned so that your head touched the seat of the other. You held the seat with your hands and waited for the first executioner to scatter, then the second, third and fourth (the maximum number of blows allowed by the prefects at home). Then the command came: “You can go!” You rose with all the dignity you could muster, and left the room with your head held high, with the certainty that if you didn’t flinch, you successfully completed another survival exercise ”(Townsend, 1979) .
At the Royal School of Canterbury, located next to the famous cathedral (it was founded as a church church in 597, and in 1541, Henry VIII converted it into a public one; among its famous pupils are writers Christopher Marlowe and Somerset Maugham, physicist William Garvey, field marshal Montgomery ), in the 1940-ies all the penalties were distributed by the school captain and the elders. Wardens caught offenders and then, after sentencing, beat them with a stick. Spanking was considered a responsible execution: “You know, it's not just like that, to hit him with a stick!” We prepared for it in advance. Wardens usually gathered five minutes before the appointed time, put on the front red mantle and carefully studied the lists of the guilty who waited for their turn in the next room. To joke and laugh at this time was forbidden. The intruder’s flop is usually the headman who noticed the violation. Most elders openly enjoyed their power. When the guilty person entered the room, the headman told him: “Jones, I will punish you for running along the corridor. Do you want to say something? ”Then, not paying attention to the words of the convict, he ordered him to kneel down on the chair, lie down with his stomach on his back, put out his butt, lift and spread his jacket folds and smooth his trousers. The younger elder felt down if the trousers were tight, and then the spanking began. At the first strike, the punished just silently started, after the third or fourth strike, he could not help but scream. If the boy was silent, they suspected that he had planted something under his pants, put on additional underpants, and so on. Experienced elders could identify a scam even by the sound of blows. In this case, the number of strokes increased. At the end of the execution, the elder said: “Now you can go,” to which the vortex had to answer “thank you!” Or “thank you, Simpson!”. Any extra word was regarded as audacity and could lead to additional punishment.
Many elders execution sexually excited. To hide their erections, they covered the front of the trousers with a mantle or kept their hands in their pockets, and after whipping in private they “discharged” in the toilet. Some punished did the same. Not surprisingly, the “old boy” who described the practice of the Canterbury School half a century later sees nothing particularly cruel in him and believes that she “definitely improved” his character and made him a better person and citizen than he could have been without her.
Did pedagogical statistics confirm this opinion? The first attempt to answer this question was made by British pedagogy in 1845, when school inspector priest Frederick Watkins presented to the Education Council an official report on corporal punishment in schools in the Northern District. From the 163 schools surveyed, corporal punishment was practiced in 145, absent from 18. Almost all the schools of the second group were exclusively girlish, “infant” (for children from 4 to 7 years) or mixed (heterosexual) and also small. Despite the absence of corporal punishment, there was excellent discipline and academic performance in girls' schools and in infant schools. In other types of schools there were problems with that and the other.
When conscientious Watkins separately analyzed the state of 27 schools, in which corporal punishment was used most often and were the most cruel, the result was altogether deplorable. In 20 of these schools, the discipline was significantly worse than the average, and even the worst in the district. In the 15 schools, the moral atmosphere and academic performance was also bad. Of the remaining 7 schools, 3 was in good condition and 4 was mediocre. As the inspector concluded, the “discipline of fear, not love” does not contribute to either mental or moral development.
This was especially true for boys' schools:
“Among the destitute, uncivilized, and almost bestial inhabitants of our boys' schools, there are natures who submit exclusively to force; but the task of the teacher is to try to win them over by all other means; it is obvious that the more often the rod is used, the less attractive it becomes” (How They Were Taught, 1969).
However, the time to abolish corporal punishment has not yet come. Sir Cyril Norwood (1875–1956), a well-known British educator and headmaster of Harlow, wrote of XNUMXth-century teachers:
“They hacked their way semester after semester, with a high sense of accomplishment. Flogged for ignorance of the lesson, for inattention, for vice. Often the teachers did not know the boys who were flogged, nor would they flog them for anything” (Norwood, 1929).
Two tragic incidents had a noticeable impact on changing the attitude of the British public towards corporal punishment.
The first is the death in 1846 as a result of the brutal “military whipping” of the 27-year-old private hussar regiment of Frederick John White. For striking a drunken brawl with a metal stick to his sergeant, White was sentenced to lashes with 150. The spanking was “normal” in the presence of three hundred soldiers, a colonel and a regimental surgeon; Ten of those privates who were present at the execution, including four experienced soldiers, lost consciousness from this terrible spectacle. In the hospital, where, in accordance with the instructions, White was immediately taken, his streaked back healed safely, but for some reason he developed pain in the heart area and three weeks after the execution, the private died. The regimental doctor acknowledged the death as natural, unrelated to flogging, but White's fellow soldiers doubted this, there was so much tension that the colonel even had to take the ammunition from the soldiers just in case. The local vicar divided the soldiers' doubts and refused to allow the funeral without opening the body, and when he was held, the jury ruled that Private White died as a result of cruel flogging. To this, the jury added the following text:
“In passing this verdict, the court cannot refrain from expressing its horror and disgust to the fact that there are laws or rules in the country that allow outrageous punishment in the form of flogging to be applied to British soldiers; The jury pleads with every person in this kingdom to spare no effort to write and send to the legislature petitions demanding, in the most urgent form, the repeal of any laws, procedures and rules that allow the shameful practice of flogging to remain a stain on humanity and good name of the people of this country. "
Several letters with similar examples were published by the Times. A petition demanding the abolition of flogging entered the House of Lords, which on August 14 1846 obliged the government to seriously discuss this issue. On the advice of the Duke of Wellington's Minister of War, the maximum number of lashes was reduced to fifty. However, a complete ban on flogging did not happen; these attempts failed in 1876 – 1877.
The second case, the death in 1860 at the hands of a sadistic teacher of a 13-year-old schoolboy, looks even more terrible (Middleton, 2005). Eastbourne school teacher Thomas Hopley (1819 – 1876) was unhappy with the successes of the “retarded boy” Reginald Cancellor and wrote to his father, asking permission to punish the student “as much and as long as necessary to make him learn.” Father gave consent. Hopley led the boy late at night to an empty classroom and beat him with a heavy copper candlestick for two hours, after which the child died. The teacher failed to hide the crime, he was found guilty of manslaughter. The court ruled that although Hopley had the legal right to physically punish a student, especially with the consent of his father, the punishment he applied was excessive, according to the law it should be "moderate and reasonable." But how to determine the verge of both?
The evolution of British pedagogy on this subject has been long and difficult. The first voices in favor of a more humane upbringing were heard in England as early as the Middle Ages. Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), later classified as a clique of saints, called for "moderation in punishment" and condemned the abuse of corporal punishment of children. During the Renaissance, these voices are amplified.
In the XVI century. English, as well as all European, pedagogical thought was influenced by Erasmus Rotterdam (1469 – 1536). In the book "On the decent education of children from the first years of life" (1529), he wrote that he completely "agrees with Quintilian in condemning flogging under any conditions." “You should not accustom the child to the blows ... The body gradually becomes insensitive to the cuffs, and the spirit - to the reproaches ... We will insist, repeat, repeat! That is what stick you need to crush the children's ribs! ”
The author of the treatise “The School Teacher”, Roger Ash (1515 – 1568), wrote that many boys run away from Eton because they fear flogging, and that “love encourages children to learn better is better than beating.” However, Esch himself did not work at school, he had only private students. In the XVII century. English pedagogy experienced the beneficial humanizing influence of Jan Amos Comenius (1592 – 1670).
At the end of the XVII century. critical attitude towards corporal punishment increased, and social and moral ones were added to didactic arguments. John Locke in the famous treatise “Some Thoughts on Upbringing” (1693), which survived before the 1800 of the 25 editions, without denying the legitimacy of corporal punishment in principle, demanded that they be applied moderately, as slave discipline forms a slavish character. “This method of maintaining discipline, which is widely used by educators and accessible to their understanding, is the least suitable of all imaginable” (Locke, 1988. T. 3).
Instead of persuading, spanking “generates in the child an aversion to the fact that the educator should make him fall in love”, gradually turning the child into a secretive, malicious, insincere creature, whose soul is ultimately inaccessible to a kind word and a positive example.
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Contemporaneity
The problem of discipline in British schools has long become a real headache for teachers and parents of the United Kingdom. According to the latest opinion poll, a significant percentage of Britons favor the resumption of corporal punishment in the country's educational institutions. Strangely enough, the schoolchildren themselves also believe that only a stick can calm them down with excessively aggressive classmates.
In British schools, corporal punishment may be reintroduced soon. At least, the results of a sociological survey conducted by the Times Educational Supplement in 2012 show that residents of Albion do not see any other way to calm their out-of-the-box children. According to sociologists who polled more than 2000 parents, 49% of adults dream of returning the time when public flogging and other corporal punishment were actively used in schools.
Moreover, every fifth of the 530 children surveyed said that he fully agreed with his parents, who advocated the return of such "draconian" measures of restoring order. As it turned out, not only the teachers were tired of the hooligans, but also the schoolchildren themselves, whom their aggressive classmates were preventing from learning. The introduction of corporal punishment in the schools of England may soon become a reality, since this program is actively supported by the British Minister of Education, Michael Gove, who believes that it is long overdue for the “troubled” children to show “who's the boss”.
According to the official, almost 93% of parents and 68% of schoolchildren in the country believe that teachers need to untie their hands in terms of tougher penalties. However, not all British teachers agree with the Minister of Education. Thus, the head of the National Association of Women Teachers, Chris Keats, believes that “in a civilized society it is unacceptable to beat children”
Teenagers felt like the masters of the schools and began to violate discipline in the classroom with impunity. In 2011, teachers were still allowed to physically prevent the actions of teenagers if they threaten public order.
“If some parent now hears at school: “Sorry, we have no right to use physical force against students,” then this school is not right. Just not right. The rules of the game have changed,” the minister said.
The head of the country's education department also suggests that more men should work at the school. And he proposes to hire retired military men for this, who will have authority among the most passionate students.
In Britain, they began to officially refuse assault in schools only in 1984, when such methods of establishing order in educational institutions were recognized as degrading. And this only applies to public schools. In 1999 corporal punishment was banned in England and Wales, in 2000 in Scotland and in 2003 in Northern Ireland.
The country's private schools were also advised to stop hitting delinquent teenagers. But there was no abolition of corporal punishment.
The main instrument of punishment in many public and private schools in England and Wales was (and is) a flexible rattan cane, which is used to strike the arms or buttocks. In some places, instead of a cane, a belt was used. In Scotland and a number of British schools, a leather ribbon with a handle - tousi - was very popular.
A common tool is a paddle (paddle - paddle, spatula) - a special paddle in the form of an elongated plate with a handle made of wood or leather.
Another leader of world democracy, the United States, was also in no hurry to abandon the practice of bodily suggestion. Again, the system of private schools and public education should not be confused.
The ban on the use of physical measures of influence has been adopted only in 29 states of the country, and only in two of them - New Jersey and Iowa - corporal punishment is prohibited by law and in private schools too. At the same time, in the 21st state, it is not forbidden to punish in schools. Basically, these states are located in the South of the USA.
However, private schools, including prestigious ones, have left this instrument of influence on students in their arsenal. The teaching staff of non-state educational institutions was only recommended to stop hitting students. However, push-ups from the floor and other additional physical activity for especially active students in the army spirit seem to have successfully survived the period of prohibitions.
By the way, physical punishment in Russian schools was completely abolished in 1917. At the beginning of the last century, this practice began to be gradually abandoned in other European countries - Austria and Belgium. Punishments in Russia-owned Finland were also abolished.
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"Whipping Boy"
During the monarchy of 15 and 16 for centuries, a whipping boy was a child assigned to a young prince. Children were appointed to this position by the court of England, and this title itself was created on the basis of the so-called right of God’s anointed, who claimed that no one except the monarch could punish the royal son. And since the king himself could seize a child extremely rarely with his own hands, it was very difficult for teachers to teach hooligan princes.On this basis, the title “whipping boy” was organized. Such children for the most part belonged to families in a high position in society, and they have been studying with the prince since the day he was born. Because the prince and the whipping boy grew shoulder to shoulder, they usually experienced a strong emotional attachment to each other. In this case, the child of the monarch in fact did not have another friend or partner in the games, as is the case with ordinary children.
It was this strong attachment that the teachers exploited, punishing the closest person instead of the delinquent prince. Whipping boys were flogged or beaten in front of the future monarch in the belief that such disobedience would not be repeated in the future.
By the way, in Mark Twain's novel The Prince and the Pauper, one of the characters was also a whipping boy who, unaware that the prince was an impostor, helped him relearn the intricacies of court etiquette.
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