Conspicuous by their absence from all the recent letters and blog comments disagreeing with corporal punishment are any alternative solutions to deal with juvenile miscreants, whether they be relatively minor vandals or the out-of-control feral thugs who seem totally incapable of understanding anything other than a violent reaction.
The discussion about the belt being used to punish left-handedness in a primary school in the 1950s (deserving the teacher's prosecution) is a diversion from the real issue.
All that the liberals seem to propose, just as they did 40 years ago, is
yet more research into why some children behave in this way.
No doubt we can learn from other countries, but we should not delude ourselves that continental Europe does not also suffer unacceptable levels of youth misbehaviour. And, of course, where the parents are the problem – not surprisingly as four generations of schoolchildren have now passed through our education systems since the 1960s, when discipline of all sorts became far too lax throughout European society – they are unlikely to be more than a small part of the solution.
There are reports that army units might be based in some schools. Is this really what we are now reduced to? Are there no teachers who now believe that the wholesale adoption of the Society of Teachers Opposed to Physical Punishment's policy was unwise?
At least, and at last, one politician (Boris Johnson) is articulating what many of us have thought for years – that future generations will look back in utter disbelief that our generation allowed itself to be in fear of its youth for so long.
JOHN H BIRKETT
Horseleys Park
St Andrews, FifeIn the days of the tawse, there were bad teachers who overused it and there were excellent teachers who used it moderately and judiciously; we can all supply examples of one kind or the other from our recollections.
In those days most of us would have known and understood one of Sir Walter Scott's favourite Latin tags: Abusus non tollit usum, a phrase with more substance to it than Pat Lines's vacuous cliché "violence breeds violence" (Letters, 14 May).
It cannot be seriously disputed that the standard of discipline in schools, and the overall standard of social behaviour, was higher in times when corporal punishment was a normal fact of life. It is naïve, however, to assume that the relationship between those two facts was one of simple cause and effect, or that bringing back the tawse would instantly restore the social and educational world of the 1950s.
The cataclysmic social changes that have occurred since then have undoubtedly had bad results, but it will take more than the reinstatement of one element of a vanished world to counter them.
J DERRICK McCLURE
Rosehill Terrace
Aberdeen Pat Lines (Letters, 14 May) claims that "violence begets violence". True enough, but does smacking children really count as "violence"? Does sending children to their room amount to imprisonment, taking away a catapult amount to theft, stopping pocket money amount to plunging into personal poverty, or telling off amount to verbal assault? Punishments are not meant to be pleasant, but the relationship of authority between a parent and child bestows the right to use reasonable sanctions which cannot be employed in most other relationships.
RICHARD LUCAS
Cowan Road
EdinburghThe full article contains 563 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
