Caning a thing of the past ?

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32819, 20 January 1972, Page 9

Caning a thing of the past ?

“Six of the best”—-a term well known to all secondary school pupils but one which properly belongs to horse and buggy days of New Zealand education.

Condemned by most enlightened secondary school teachers, corporal punishment is still however in use. There has been some decline in such use in State secondary schools over the last few years but it’s still very much part of the fabric of many private schools.

As a means of discipline it seems peculiarly inappropriate at a time when secondary education is placing more and more emphasis on the development of self discipline in the young men and women that comprise the senior forms of all secondary schools.

Schools are moving away from a type of discipline imposed on students-from, the outside towards something involving them in their own discipline and as this happens the days of caning 17 and 18 year blds will be struck from the pages of New Zealand education for ever.

Abolition of corporal punishment is a challenge already before the New Zealand Post-Primary Teachers Association. Whether the challenge is taken up in 1972 is the responsibility of individual schools which must grapple with alternative ways of educating and training their students towards better and more lasting methods of discipline. At last year’s conference of the P.P.T.A. the association’s president Mr John Murdoch said that corporal punishment was an act of violence inflicted by one person on another. “Attempting to solve problems by personal violence is becoming a national concern on our streets and on our sports fields. It is our duty as teachers to oppose hitting and teach self control,” he said.

Few adults will disagree with Mr Murdoch's words, but many are doubtful as to what constitutes good discipline. It generally brings to mind the old adage: Spare the rod and spoil the child and represents one of the less pleasant aspects of

parents’ and teachers’ relationships with children.

One of the oldest misconceptions about discipline is that it is a rigid set of controls imposed on a child or young adult from the outside. Such a view

leaves all young people without any responsibility for their own behaviour. It also overlooks the fact that the . child himself, with proper encouragement is able to co-operate actively in his own disciplining. And only if he does so, will a sense of discipline become part of his own personality instead of something imposed on him against his will.

In secondary schools throughout the country young people are being taught to question and evaluate present day society in a way which has never happened before. By necessity such a process means that each young person is lead towards an understanding of how he as an individual must fit into the pattern of life outside the school gates. Young people are learning more about themselves and more about their responsibility to themselves arid to others. It is hardly surprising then that the place of the cane and the strap seem totally inappropriate in such a context.

With salary problems all but completely settled the Post-Primary Teachers’ Association will soon spearhead some of the changes mentioned. Together with the Department of Education the P.P.T.A. will towards the end of this year set up a special committee which will report to government on the whole future of New Zealand secoridary education. It is safe to predict that this report — the first to be made on the curriculum in secondary schools since 1942 — will alter the face of the secondary schools. The school day may change in timing, the design of classrooms and schools may be recommended for drastic change, single sex schools will become an anachronism and community involvement in schools will become a must.

The secondary schools will become in short excit-

ing places in which to learn, producing young people with tolerance, understanding and adaptability to face a world of change unlike that which has ever been known before.