School Corporal Punishment History131

Michael Aikman, Headmaster: “When an article in The Age treated Haileybury’s traditional educational programme under the provocative (but misleading) heading, ‘Cane Makes Them Able’, Haileyburians were delighted by an unexpected flood of parental enquiries about school entry. It is true that Haileybury has not abandoned recourse to the cane as a deterrent disciplinary tool, and that the school’s students seem to accept this situation as normal. However, rather than emphasizing the cane, Michael Aikman’s annual reports have stress ‘the progressive dilution of curricula’ and indifference towards traditional subject disciplines, which he believed were undermining State education and causing parents to turn to Haileybury.”