Advance notice: Next Friday, 19 February there will not be a post to this blog. When we caned children to enhance a picture please click itThis week I read in The Spinoff, (a New Zealand site covering pop culture, politics and social life,) a story by David Hill titled When We Caned Children. I take notice of anything David Hill writes. He writes well and he knows his way about our world. This time his opening narrative begins like this: 'A whole lot of years back, when I was a teachers’ college student observing for three weeks at a boys’ high, a teacher ordered me to witness a caning. It wasn’t some bizarre part of my professional development, but a cover against complaints from tiresome parents. I was too junior and too timorous to object. I don’t know what the boy’s offence was. The teacher hit him fiercely, savagely almost, three or four times across the backside with one of the whippy lengths of basket-making cane you could buy from The Blind Institute in those days. I remember the boy crying out in pain. I remember also the look of distress and reproach he aimed at me as he left the room.' Fast forward a decade, and that teacher was principal of a different school. There’d been issues with a couple of boys. He caned them, too. One lunchtime, they hid in the foyer. When the principal appeared, they shot him dead.' Decent menI knew that principal. He wasn't a thug. He was 'a decent man'. I expect that most of the men who caned in the days when caning was legal, were known as 'decent men'. My father was a high school teacher. I was a high school teacher. He caned. I caned. It was the done thing. Corporal punishment was endemic. Not only the cane.At my boys only primary school I was strapped many times for bad handwriting. During writing class our teacher paraded around the classroom, strap over his shoulder. We were learning long-hand with the help of copy books. When the teacher spotted untidy work the boy had to stand by his desk hold out his hand and receive four wallops. That really improved the handwriting! My wife Marion, when at her co-ed primary school, frequently watched boys being strapped. One boy, a neighbour whom she particularly liked, was strapped so hard he cried. Marion remembers and finds the memory horribly upsetting even now. One woman teacher in her school strapped girls. Marion is glad she was never in her class. Another sceneIn the middle 1960s I left South Otago High School, Balclutha, where I used the cane, and became a teacher at Woodstock International School in Mussoorie, UP, India, where I didn't use the cane. In that American based school corporal punishment didn't seem to be known. Class room discipline was never a problem. The multi-national teenage boys and girls I taught, listened, took part in discussion and did their individual work. The whole scene was a bit of a revelation to me. Outside the classroom, in the hostels and beyond teaching hours there were difficulties but they were of a different order. Yet another scene
To the capital cityWhen, after a short spell at Auckland Grammar, I left teaching to go to an administrative job in Wellington, questions about caning sank from view. but corporal punishment overall was still an issue for many and in 1987 it was banned from schools. However, bullying, including harassment and abuse, found life not only in schools but in the workplace. as I experienced in one of my later Wellington appointments. My boss frequently rang my home in the morning before work. Finding I wasn't there he would explode with "Out with that damn dog again!" Marion and I became tired of that and I left the job. A lot of bullying in Wellington
Last September the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) published a report Bullying and Harassment at Work. The same year similar reports were released by the police, the army and the legal profession. Bullying in one form or another seems to be uncomfortably alive and well. I hope these sorts of investigations and their consequences will curb its life. Deep answersI've seen reported that in a recent survey of 51 OCED countries New Zealand has the worst level of school bullying apart from Latvia. As I think about the 'spare the rod and spoil the child' tradition from which bullying probably comes, I see, antecedent to it, a history of domination and egocentric power hunting. It's a deep seated nastiness which is a blot on the New Zealand culture. I'm glad the stick and the strap have gone but the desires to hurt and dominate have not. Over the last three years, before the onset of the pandemic and since it began, Prime Minister Ardern has been urging kindness and respect, as she did when addressing the UN General Assembly. I think that cultivating those attitudes are the deep answers to every sort of bullying. □ John McInnes 12 February 2021 References: New Zealand has the worst level of school bullying apart from Latvia Bullying and Harassment at Work -MBIE Review of bullying and harassment in NZ parliament David Hill, Spinoff - When we caned children Laura Jones, Newsroom - Systemic changes needed to fix bullying in workplace Special greetings to Chinese readers. Happy New Year! ##########
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