|
 y
attention was caught by last Thursday's story in the New York
Times about corporal punishment, known in these
United States by the cheerful little euphemism: "paddling." The
story concerned 10-year-old Megan Cahanin, who was whacked on the
bottom by her school principal (a female) down in Zwolle, La. The
Times reports that Megan's father, obviously one of those
modern men who never stray far from the Kleenex dispenser, and whose
idea of a relaxing weekend is to take off into the woods to beat
on drums and hug fauns with Robert Bly, "collapsed on the floor,
crying" when he saw the resulting bruises. He soon recovered sufficiently
to get himself lawyered up, though, and we can now expect a minor
national debate on the pros and cons of paddling — or, as good
liberals prefer to say, "child-beating." It turns out that 23 states
still permit paddling in schools, though most school districts in
those states let parents sign a form exempting their own children.
The Cahanins could have done this, but didn't bother. (Memo to Mr.
and Mrs. Cahanin. TRY PAYING ATTENTION TO YOUR CHILDREN'S EDUCATION.)
This is a no-brainer for liberals. They are, of course, against
corporal punishment in schools. Children, they know from reading
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, are morally superior to adults. Authority
is oppressive, a manifestation of the corrupt power relations that
prevail in late-capitalist society. Violence is wicked, unless used
— as against the unfortunate Serbs — to enforce "diversity".
Way back in the 1930s, when the young Malcolm Muggeridge went to
work at the Manchester Guardian, then as now the leading
liberal newspaper in Britain, one of his first assignments was to
write an editorial piece on this topic. Unsure how to approach it,
he went to a colleague who was typing away at a nearby desk. "What's
the paper's line on corporal punishment?" asked Muggeridge. Replied
the colleague, without looking up or breaking rhythm on the typewriter:
"Same as capital." Liberals have it so easy. They always know what
to think. It comes in neat little formulas that you can pick up
in half an hour. And if you forget what you're supposed to think,
pretty much any newspaper or TV station will remind you. For us
conservatives, life is more complicated. Do we want our kids to
be whacked? All right: Do we want them being whacked by members
of the NEA?
Now, I know what you're thinking. Derb … Brit … beating
… bottoms … What a surprise that this particular topic
should have engaged the interest of this particular columnist …
NOT! The Brits are well known to have…issues
with smacking and thwacking: and a conservative Brit —
well, enough said.
No use trying to brush this aside. It is a matter of common observation
that national stereotypes, like
other stereotypes, almost always have a firm foundation in fact.
To a noticeable and significant degree in every case, Germans do
tend to be obsessed with order, Russians do drink a lot,
the Chinese are addicted to gambling and Italians do
talk with their hands. And, yes, we Brits do, or until recently
did, have a thing about flagellation. Le vice Anglais, the
French call it, and they know us as well as anyone. (The French
vice, in case you're wondering, is that having invented a device
to wash one tiny part of their anatomy, they see no need to bother
washing the rest.) The infant Vladimir Nabokov, forming his earliest
ideas about the world from what he heard and read in pre-revolutionary
Russia, wrote that his first distinct mental image of the British
as a nation was of a fierce red-haired schoolmaster thrashing a
small boy. Hard-heartedness towards children has long been thought
to characterize those brumous isles of my birth. Remember the passage
in Gone with the Wind where the Butlers take their new baby
on a trip to London, and are scandalized when the English nanny
they have hired lets the child cry in the night without attempting
any intervention? "Children cry," huffs the nanny as Clark Gable
hands her the pink slip, "that's what they do," or words
to that effect. Exactly the advice my mother gave when we had our
first child. "If she's dry, fed, and not running a temperature,
let her cry."
The great English boys' boarding schools — "public schools"
— are of course at the heart of Britain's collective flagellation
neurosis. The names of the schoolmasters in classic British fiction
give the game away: Wackford Squeers in Nicholas Nickelby,
Thwackum in Tom Jones…you can practically hear the birch
rod hitting the glutes. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy's book The Public
School Phenomenon, now apparently out of print on both sides
of the pond, is very good on the history here, with some wonderful
anecdotes. (I have looted its pages shamelessly for the following
illustrations.) The offenses boys were flogged for were not always
what you might expect. In the 1660s, smoking was made compulsory
at Eton, as it was believed to be a prophylactic against the plague.
A certain Tom Rogers remarked about this time that "he was never
so much whipped in his life as he was one morning for not smoking."
A hundred years later, Sam Johnson observed that: "There is now
less flogging in our great schools than formerly, but then less
is learned there; so that what the boys get at one end, they lose
at the other."
Fifty years further on, Dr. John Keate, headmaster at Eton 1809-34,
was a notorious flogger. On one memorable occasion in 1810, he flogged
the entire lower fifth form — about 100 boys.
He
did so in public, in front of anyone who cared to watch, and in
front of those about to be beaten. Before long, angered or excited
by the sight of their friends being flogged, the audience began
to stamp and shout. Soon they began to throw eggs at Keate; his
task of flogging, while also dodging and sloshing about in burst
eggs, became not only ludicrous but impossible. He had to send out
for the assistant masters to patrol with birches while he beat the
final eighty-odd boys.
Yet, as Gathorne-Hardy notes, as a method of discipline, all this
flogging was virtually useless. "The noise from Keate's classes
was continuous and deafening, so that passers-by would stop and
listen in wonder." (To be sure, it did not help that Keate's classes
were often 200 strong.)
The more you look at the flogging culture of these schools, the
more the whole thing looks like one of those inexplicable, cruel
and pointless cultural aberrations that nations fall into, sometimes
for centuries at a time — like foot-binding in China. And though
I am normally suspicious of cheap psychological explanations for
human behavior, it seems clear that all that flogging did have some
negative consequences on individual victims. When Evelyn Waugh went
to Ethiopia in 1936, his first call was on the British Ambassador.
Waugh recorded the event in his diary as follows:
Arrived
Addis 4 p.m. Dinner with British mission. Asked me to beat him.
Well, I didn't go to one of those schools myself. My primary school
had some fine and dedicated teachers, but it was in a slum, and
the kids were a very rough crowd. Whacking on the hand with a ruler
was common. Done skillfully, it hurt like a bitch. For more serious
defaulters, the headmaster kept a stout cane, also for use on the
hand. There was no thwacking on the bottom in either of my schools.
(They were both day schools, and the folklore on this subject was
that the target of chastisement was related to the type of sexual
misconduct boys were thought most likely to indulge in: at day schools,
masturbation, ergo the hand; at boarding schools, buggery,
ergo the bottom. I have no idea whether this theory has any
foundation in the behavioral sciences.) My secondary school, for
all that it aped the old-established boarding schools in a lot of
ways — we had a "house" system, and played rugger instead of
soccer — had corporal punishment only in theory. I don't recall
any boy being beaten in all my seven years at the place, though
it's possible I missed something. The flogging culture had pretty
much died out from British life by that time, anyway.
So whatever you might think, I come to this issue with a mind unclouded
by prejudice and a heart uncontaminated by any trauma more severe
than a stinging palm at age ten. If you come to dine at my house
while the wife and kids are away, I shall not ask you to beat me,
I promise (though if you feel like doing the dishes, I won't object).
From this standpoint of lofty objectivity, I declare that I don't
see much wrong with a little corporal punishment. I have smacked
my own kids, when they have been exceptionally naughty — a
sharp smack on the back of the hand. I haven't done it often —
once or twice a year, I think — and I have never hit them anywhere
other than on the hand. It's an ultimate deterrent. In the matter
of parental discipline, I'm a parents-rights extremist. All but
the very worst parents are better for kids than institutional care.
I would smack my kids in public if I thought it necessary, though
it never has been. If any ACLU-subscribing busybody raised a fuss,
I'd tell them to mind their own damn business, and if hauled off
to court, I'd willingly beggar myself to defend my rights as a parent.
And in schools? In spite of my support for parental chastisement,
and my instinctive feeling that anything liberals hate as much as
they hate corporal punishment must have something to be said
in its favor, I can't say I'm enthusiastic about teachers hitting
kids. For one thing, I'm just not enthusiastic about teachers. Where
I live, public-school teachers make $70,000 a year, work 4-hour
days, take twelve weeks' vacation a year, retire at 55 on three-quarters
pay and have a union armed with thermonuclear weapons. Teachers
drive Volvos and vote Democrat. No, I'm not crazy about teachers
as a species, though of course I know there are many honest and
conscientious ones, possibly even a few Republicans. I don't want
teachers hitting my kids. In my state, as it happens, they can't.
If they could, I'd sign the exemption form.
However, I do like the idea of people setting standards for these
things according to the custom of their own localities. One of the
wonderful things about the U.S.A. is the regional variation; not
just in trivial things like landscape and flora, but in manners
and morals, too. Up here in Pyongyang-on-the-Hudson, our behavior
is strictly circumscribed by regular directives from PC Central.
Down in Lousiana, on the other hand, they drive those pickup trucks
with a gun rack behind the seat, chew tobacco, breed coon dogs and
hang signs saying SPARE THE ROD, SPOIL THE CHILD in the classrooms.
Good luck to them. If the people of Zwolle want teachers to paddle
their kids, I say, leave them alone. Parents can exempt their own
kids almost everywhere the practice is permitted; or, if they feel
strongly enough about it, they can always move to another state.
The Tenth Amendment was still in the Bill of Rights, last time I
looked, and should be honored.
|
