When my daughter began nursery school about six years ago, she came from school one day so anxious to relate what had occurred, the words were tripping over each other. Wide-eyed and breathless, she related that her teacher had whipped one of her peers. I can’t remember what the child’s misdemeanour was, but I remember that I too became anxious-anxious to visit the school the next day to ensure that my child would not be the next to be at the receiving end of the teacher’s cane or whip.
It so happened that this was to be the first of many such trips for me. Barring the year she spent at Croft Nursery School in Nottingham in England where non-violent methods of discipline were used, this has become an annual event. But even so, whipping is so entrenched in local schools that the one year when there was a change of teachers in the middle of the term during the second year of her primary education, the unthinkable happened. I sat before the school’s headmistress the next day listening to the teacher try to explain that it was just “a little lash”; an explanation that meant nothing to my child who had nursed a reddened palm and cried and begged long and hard the night before never to be sent back to that school. It was a traumatic experience for the entire family.
When this new school year started last September, I tried a different method. I articulated my personal preference for non-violent methods of discipline at a meeting where all the teachers at that level and some of the parents were present. After a shocked silence, during which the disapproval of some parents was so palpable it could be felt, a few parents rushed to assure the teachers that it was okay with them if they “put some good lashes” on little John or Jane as he/she deserved it sometimes. With just a few words I had managed to forever disbar myself from the club of ‘I dis put some good lashes on s/he’ parents.
Unfortunately, no one challenged me though I had hoped someone would. I was aching to ask these advocates of the whip when last or how often they held or hugged their children and kissed them and said “I love you” to them in those exact words. I wanted to ask how many of them knew that this is integral to a child’s well-being and that it cuts the need for constant disciplining by more than half.
I am no child psychologist, but I am aware now that corporal punishment, which featured significantly throughout my primary school life, had a devastating impact on my personality. Proponents of corporal punishment have argued that it serves to rein in unruly children. It does not. But it does over-subdue children who are already quiet, making them introverted and more withdrawn.
The nuns at the Roman Catholic-run primary school I attended taught their lessons with canes in their hands. It was not unusual to suddenly feel the sting of the cane across your legs or shoulders and to be admonished to redo your letters because they were too crooked or your sums because they were wrong. In fact, the cane ‘spoke’ if your nails were not short and clean, if your hem was ripped down, if your hair looked like it had not been combed that day, if your diction was not perfect and for a myriad of other real or imagined offences. My peers of the day and I called it “licks like peas,” and bizarrely though we feared it, we even sang it in a rhyme. Often when we felt the cane we had to examine ourselves and each other in order to know why we were getting licks.
Throughout my primary school years the same children were caned regularly; they were the usual suspects-and these canings were apart from the daily “licks like peas.” Canings involved sometimes six, sometimes 12 lashes. Girls received them in the palms of their hands-an equal number on each palm-and boys on their buttocks. If they had learned anything from being caned the previous week it was not obvious. The same girls who flashed the boys or their teachers the week before did the same thing or something equally outrageous the next week. The same boys who fought during lessons over marbles or rubber bands that were forbidden in class anyhow, repeated this throughout their school life. The same children for whom dividing fractions was double Dutch and who did not know what a ewe was and could not spell the word probably left school in the same state of ignorance, despite the licks like peas.
For me, my home was my refuge. My father did not believe in whipping children and he never did it-he did a lot of talking. Lashes from my mother were a spur of the moment thing. She never planned a licking; she just hit out. In time we all learned how to dodge really well.
We should all know that each child is an individual and that some will be ‘A+’ all round, while others will be average and yet others below average. We know that some children are late starters and others are not and will never be academically inclined, but often we just give lip service to these very fundamental concepts. When children act up or are recalcitrant there is always an underlying reason, but this is mostly never explored because it is far simpler to just ‘put some good lashes’ on the child/children and brand them as bad.
Yet the fact is that a lot of us are bad parents or just middling because we never really learned how to be parents; it was just thrust upon us. Most of us have never had any parenting education. If we had we would have learned that a parent’s major role is to love his/her child/children. How about giving it a try?
