Stories about education in the Victorian and Edwardian eras border on the horrifying. It was not unknown for a young child to be hit so hard on the hand with a cane, the palm split. As an eight year old, this happened to the father of the editor of this publication. Such punishment was meted out on a daily basis for offences as mild as talking in class.
Flogging on the buttocks was often so severe that a child was unable to sit down for days. Flogging with cane, strap and birch were common place and brutal. Children as young as five were so treated.
But corporal punishment was common practise in every area of life in the West, and flogging was still permissible in the armed forces and penal establishments in Britain and some parts of the USA, until the end of the nineteen fifties. It was practised in some British and Australian schools until as late as the nineteen eighties, and was still permissible in private schools in the UK at the turn of the new millennium. Corporal punishment has always been the policy in Thai schools but is recently starting to be outlawed. But some of the teaching staff don't appear to know that yet.
The phrase ‘corporal punishment' emanates from the British Navy, where it was the duty of marine ‘corporals' to flog seamen who had transgressed maritime law. It was the role of teachers and for some their pleasure, to flog children who transgressed school rules. Unfortunately, these methods are still used to ‘educate' the young in far too many nations.
Only the offspring of the ruling-classes were once educated in the UK, and too much from the past lingers on. These were regarded as the privileged few. Albeit, such ‘privilege' included the dubious attraction of being unceremoniously taken from the family home at the age of five or six; deposited amongst strangers in cold, prison like conditions; liberally beaten by all who were older or senior, which meant everyone to start; and treated like a slave (a fag) in an English public school. As a result, many missed out on the joys and happiness of childhood.
For the uninitiated, ‘public' school actually means ‘private' school - a psychologically contrived use of words by the British ruling classes to make it appear that such learning establishments were open to all. In fact they were designed for the sons of the ruling classes, as in those days women didn't count for much any more than children of the working class. Hence sons of the ruling classes were usually educated, but their daughters and the poor were usually not. And it's not so long ago.
In the USA, ‘public' school describes an institution which is actually open to all, as wealth or personal connections are not required in order to attend. As Winston Churchill and Bernard Shaw once said about the UK and USA: "Two nations separated by a common language."
Rote learning - where continuous repetition of facts, tables or alphabets are undertaken to commit them to memory - often reinforced with the cane, made education a misery for countless millions for hundreds of years. It achieved very little in educational terms, as living in constant fear of being thrashed or shouted at is not a suitable climate for learning. In fact it is counterproductive.
That was, generally speaking, the Western method of ‘educating' the young right up until the last few decades, also in many nations of South East Asia. It was quite similar to the manner in which Lord and Lady Ponsonby-Smythe trained their horses, dogs and servants - harsh discipline utilised to inculcate basic skills. Sorry Britain, but that is how it was for the majority of people during the greater part of the last few centuries. For most, life became something resembling a drudgery, with schooldays far from being the happiest days of their lives.
Even worse was on offer for children of the ruling classes, as birching still went on in private schools (called public) such as Eton, Harrow, Rugby and many lesser known institutions in the UK, right up until the early nineteen sixties. As England was ‘swinging', so was the birch, strap and cane. Nothing much had changed since Charles Dickens' tales of Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. Australia, South Africa and the USA all more or less emulated this method of control in schools. Albeit, the less affluent classes were generally given the harder time in the USA.
Extraordinarily, in Texas and some other North American States, paddling on the buttocks is still a major pastime. Perhaps not by coincidence, Texas has one of the highest levels of murder and crimes of violence in the USA, plus the most executions per annum. American values? Perverse indeed.
So how should we educate our children in the new millennium? Prodigy tells you how.