Vivid memories of school room strap

Spare the rod and spoil the child. – Proverbs 13:24

Among the most vivid memories of my one-room-school experience in 1940s Newfoundland is that of older boys being strapped in front of the class.

“Hold out your hand!” yells teacher. Then the leathery SMACK, followed by a yelp of pain...

We younger ones cringed. Yet in fairness most teachers weren't necessarily being sadistic. Faced with a roomful of kids, grades 1 through 11, she or he must maintain order at all costs. Besides, back then strapping was standard practice with older students. We younger ones were seldom subjected to it and girls of any age almost never.

The older boys generally hid their hurt, returning to their seats red-faced but stoic, which we secretly admired. Some even taunted the teacher by withdrawing their palm before impact, causing the leather to whack his or her thigh. Or they'd shoot their hand forward at the last moment, letting a shirt sleeve soften the blow.

Curiously, I was never strapped at our local school, though at home I'd been “laced” more than once for misdemeanors. I escaped because after my Grade 3, our family mostly wintered in town (St. John's) for several years and Toronto when I was 15 – jurisdictions where such harsh punishment was being phased out.

Harsh? In my parents' day, it was worse. Grandma Saunders (born 1882), recalled that Gander Bay's first official teacher, James Rowsell from

Poole, England, kept a heavy leather strap on his desk for that purpose. The rougher boys he punished with an iron woodstove poker. One victim complained to his father, who challenged the teacher to a fist fight.

Rowsell, a fiddler and quick on his feet, won the bout, only to suffer a dose of gunpowder down his chimney that wrecked his wood stove. No wonder the older boys often quit school to work in the lumber woods!

What were they thinking, those headmasters and educators? As Bible readers, didn't they understand Moses's warning about the sins of the fathers being “visited on the children until the third and fourth generation”? (How often today do we learn that such-and-such a sex offender was himself sexually abused as a child?).

Worse, as professed Christians, had they forgotten that Jesus rebuked his disciples for turning away children [Matthew 19: 13-15], warning that unless they became equally trusting and innocent, they would never enter the Kingdom of Heaven?

So, until recently I couldn't for the life of me, understand our forebears' fondness for the strap. Hadn't my hero Henry Thoreau (1817-1862) quit his Concord Mass. teaching job because he refused to strap the pupils as expected?

Then, thanks to COVID, I came across P. Hume Brown's 1905 book “John Knox and His Times”. It revealed that Knox, Scotland's 16th century Presbyterian reformer, like his contemporary Martin Luther in Germany, not only condoned such child abuse but actively encouraged it – over 400 years ago.

To quote Brown:

A school in those days was a very different place from what it is now. There was but one room where all the scholars sat together, not on comfortable benches but on the floor, which was littered with straw... . Only the teacher had a bench, on which he sat in front of his desk, whereon lay his instrument of chastisement, which was truly “a rod of iron”. In those days it was believed that the more a child was whipped the better would he become.... If the men of [Knox's time] said and did coarse and cruel things, we have to remember that as children they were treated more like wild beasts than reasonable beings.

As a society we still have a way to go. To ease the transition, one local vice-principal hung a wooden paddle labeled “Board of Education” on his office wall—but never used it.

Firm, loving discipline, yes. Physical or mental harm, no.