how many of you ever experianced having the slipper or cane across the bare bottom or have seen it administered. I am talking as used on children not

@chikki My daughter got CP in school, but on the hands. Punishing girls on hands was common here, but not with the cane. In some schools the switches were in use, however - my mother was a teacher and told me she punished girls on their bare legs and thighs.

In my high school, the boarders were caned by the supervisors, only in private. A caning was inflicting for big offences like coming out the school without permission, smoking, home works not done, etc. Bad grades were recorded in the reports and usually `rewarded` by a CP at home (my case, for I was not a boarder).

For a bad grade I always confessed at home the same day. What would be the use to wait until my parents knew it from the school report? I surely got it much worse and the waiting would create me a real discomfort 🤔 As a teacher, my mother was very severe and did not admit C or less.

@Codrin Never occurred to your mother to have the sense to use her professional experience to consider why you might not have excelled in every subject going? Perhaps even to help you constructively to learn difficult subjects?

Or was she just on a snobbish ego-trip - "I am a teacher therefore my children will be shining exemplars of ability and behaviour so I can bask in their reflected glory" ?

I think the best way to deal with such selfish, foolish parents is to have as little to do with them as soon as possible in adult life, and certainly refuse to follow any trade or profession they may try insisting you follow, but make very clear why.


Punishing someone for wilful misconduct is one thing, BUT that misconduct must be that which genuinely harms others, and the punishment MUST genuinely be fair and neither gratuitous nor excessive.

Punishing for something harming only the "miscreant" and no other person or institution, such as alleged or actual laziness or sloppiness at school, is stupid and pointless. It raises questions of the authority's motive - is it to guide the indolent for his or her eventual, genuine, individual benefit, or to heighten the disciplinarian's sense of power?

Punishing for inability is not only even more stupid and pointless. It is also even more cruel.

And it raises questions of the disciplinarian's ability to help the victim learn.


I was never punished as such for inability, as my schools and my parents had more sense. However I suffered one Mathematics teacher who may have done that a century earlier when adults thought it clever to beat children for owt or nowt. Known behind his back by his old cricket-club, bizarre soubriquet, "Drasher" Hill was a bombastic clot interested in only the brightest, keenest pupils.

Baffled by a particular maths detail, I asked in class what he thought a stupid question. Drasher did explain it, but so sarcastically that I never dared ask his help again - the bloody fool then had the nerve to write on my Report, "Has large gaps in his background knowledge that need addressing - H.H.Hill". (For no known reason, Dad had kept this ephemera, which surfaced after our parents' deaths.)

Thanks to Hill's professional ineptitude compounding my natural inability, I failed that Year-end, G.C.E. Ordinary-Level, Mathematics exam, but scraped through a second attempt two years later.

That modest success was NOT due to being bullied by idiots - at school or home. Just the reverse. It was thanks to proper teachers - ones who both respected you as a person, and encouraged and helped you learn to the best of your individual ability. A teacher or parent who cannot understand that simple, basic principle should have become neither.



SW has revealed many past parents and teachers who actively resented both roles and children. Parents could not help being parents, teachers were attracted by then-relatively high pay and conditions. The bad of both were unable to see that children are individual humans, not cyborgs programmable to artificial, over-zealous "standards" of academic, artistic or sporting success.

@ArishMell Hello,
Maybe I was unclear or you understood me wrong and amplified my message. I never was punished for inability, so much the more I was a good student. But yes, my mother was strict about my school results and punished me only a few times for bad grades or bad conduit at school.

I think it is important to establish why grades are bad. If it was because a child just did not understand they need help not a sore bottom. However, f it was due to just not revising for a test in a subject that he finds easy as a rule, he does deserve his bottom thrashed...that is a lack of any effort and not a low mark due to not understanding.

@chikki With respect to both you and Codrin - I did make that point. It is wrong to punish anyone, never mind how, for being unable to learn a subject.

In my case I found both help and negligence - the latter from a teacher who was not interested in pupils who found mathematics hard to learn. Surely he was the lazy one there?


I understand your point about punishing someone for being lazy, and of course in adult life it could mean a matter of your livelihood; but in school it hurts no-one but the lazy individual which is why I question who is meant to benefit.

Codrin had mentioned being punished for bad grades as if that was the offence. Not for lack of effort whose consequence happened to be bad results, but bad results full-stop. I have seen much the same message from others elsewhere on SW, too.


As an aside, in that GCE O-Level year in which 'Drasher' was my maths teacher, I had dropped French and History, but there were also several pupils who had dropped Maths.

Most of them were girls, so perhaps they had the idea girls didn't need to learn Mathematics. This was in the 1960s, after all, so it would not surprise me.

One of the other boys had dropped Maths... and every other O-Level exam subject in the curriculum! Now, I recall that school seemed to us at the time as existing only to put you through assorted exams for no very clear purpose; but as I type this I wonder what happened to him over the last half-century.


I will give another background detail that may help explain my principles - and helped form them.

I studied A-Level Technical Drawing at the same school, and one day the teacher had a rather bitter public argument with a girl in that class. He lost control and demanded to know why she'd picked the subject. She replied tearfully that her father had made her, intending her to work in a drawing-office. This wrong-footed the teacher, and he closed the row with a lame, utterly stupid exclamation, "Well, you should show some loyalty to your father!" I thought that utterly wrong as the girl's father was obviously a bully in trying to force her career. My later and current view was that the master ought to have calmed down and asked her to see him privately to try to help her in an adult manner. I have no idea what happened to her, but I hope she made her own, happy way in life nowhere near a drawing-office.

@ArishMell I think it would be reasonable to say that you, Chikki and Codrin are in fact all in agreement, along with myself, in that punishing a student because they have a lack of understanding about a subject is simply wrong. Punishing will do nothing to help the situation and in fact only make it worse by instilling resentment and make the child give up. If a child is having trouble understanding a subject, it is the duty of the teacher to give extra guidance and tuition. That said, there are also children who are just lazy and don't bother to put in so much as a modicum of effort. If the root cause of that apathy, after reasonable efforts to establish otherwise prove fruitless, then a degree of punishment to show error of ways is not out of place.


I have read numerous accounts over the years where it is expressed that some schools had a standard routine of administering punishment if test scores were below a certain level. I don't know if those accounts are based on fact or have become "Chinese Whispers" - Chikki, you may be in a position to shed some light on this. What I can say is that I didn't experience such a thing in my time.


That said, the whim of individual teachers is something that I have experienced, not often thankfully. I specifically recall when I was in 4th year high school chemistry, the class was set the task of learning the first 20 elements of the Periodic Table. We had 4 nights of homework to learn the symbols, names and atomic weight and there was to be a verbal "round-robin" test on the Friday. The chem master said that if any boy (it was an all boys school) failed to pass the test, they would be caned. I slaved over those 4 nights to learn those 20 elements and put in much more than the normal homework time for one subject. Even my mother helped me. Come the Friday, I started off ok getting the first few questions right but then I faltered. In the end myself and 2 other lads were the last ones standing (meaning we had incorrectly answered the last 2 questions fired at us). We were called to the front and each given 3 strokes of the cane.


At the time I didn't feel too badly about it but I think that was because I wasn't the only one, but later I did feel bitter. I had done what I thought was my best and yet I was still caned.

@Caned4doz
Thank you - if anything your own experience rather proves the point, as well as proving the incompetence of your chemistry teacher. Incompetent at teaching, not at the subject, obviously.

Apart from the cruelty it also shows he thought mere memory is what matters. I dropped French because I did not have the memory for a language, but failed Maths because even when I could remember formulae I could not understand how they work or how to analyse mathematical problems.

I remember an ex-soldier telling me when they were taught basic vehicle maintenance, their sergeant impressed on them not to rely on remembering tyre pressures, engine adjustments etc: "Always look it up - one day the makers will change the specifications", and of course, one day you might simply forget. Now, the Periodic Table won't change like engine specifications, but a professional scientist would still have it to hand - would know where to find the details, and understand them. Parroting is not learning.

I have worked for professional scientists, and they all had the text books in their offices. They understood the science and how to do very hard sums, but could not be remember know all the formulae and deeper practical details without help from the reference books.

I wonder if this is what Charles Dickens had in mind and was trying to show up by exaggeration in his novels, when he described the thugs passing themselves off as as school-masters in Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield?

@Caned4doz I would had shot that teacher then went to his house and shot his whore and bastards. getting caned for studying your ass off is totally wrong and is a death penalty offense.