The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

There appears to be several types of paddles. Perhaps it is a teachers preference, or a standard issue to a particular school?

The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

The freshman paddled the sophomores (turned the tables). The sophomore trousers were stripped in front of tittering co-eds. The police did not use their tear gas for they were use to this behavior.

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The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

A list of and hyperlinks to Reports of the (US) Commissioner of Education from 1867.http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/010177542

http://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433012273896

UNITED STATES BUREAU OF EDUCATION BULLETIN, 1909: NO. 7, WHOLE NUMBER 407
INDEX TO THE REPORTS OF THE COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION: 1867-1907
WASHINGTON, GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE, 1909

Corporal punishment:
1886/87: p.228
1896/97, vol.2: p.1537. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b3970212 … %3Bseq=415
1899/00, vol.2: p.2578-80
1900/01, vol.2: p.2402-4
1902, vol.2: p.2385-86
1903, vol.2: p.2452-54
1904, vol.2: p.2285-87
1905, vol.1: p.205-6
1906, vol.1: p.221-23.
legal conditions, 1897/98, vol.2: p.1701-2.
Russia, 1899/00, vol.1: p.878-83.

The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

KK. Thanks again for sharing your references. Arizona’s corporal punishment policy (4th paragraph) seems quite progressive by today’s standards. It requires the transparency and accountability that some corporal punishment practitioners here would loathe.

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The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

This may have been cited before. It describes a time long before the paddle became popular.

http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uva.x0013291 … %3Bseq=335

English Pedagogy – Old and New: or, Treatises and Thoughts on Education, the School, and the Teacher in English Literature.
Second Series. Republished from Barnaud’s Americal Journal of Education. 608 pages.

Edited by Henry Barnard.
Brown & Gross: Hartford. 1876. $3.50
Chapter VIII School Punishments – Historically Considered pages 325-336.

The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

1930. Indictment. Defense. Acquittal. Mrs. Myrta Bardley. She was a young teacher. Mary Gerhardinger was a younger miscreant IMHO.

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The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

One method of unravelling history is to search the general literature for passing or detailed mentions of the item, subject or event of interest. I found the following:

Weir [family] of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson. Published 1896,

To Kirstie, thus situate and in the Indian summer of her heart, which was slow to submit to age, the gods sent this equivocal good thing of Archie’s presence. She had known him in the cradle and paddled him when he misbehaved; and yet, as she had not so much as set eyes on him since he was eleven and had his last serious illness, the tall, slender, refined, and rather melancholy young gentleman of twenty came upon her with the shock of a new acquaintance. He was “Young Hermiston,” “the laird himsel’ “: he had an air of distinctive superiority, a cold straight glance of his black eyes, that abashed the woman’s tantrums in the beginning, and therefore the possibility of any quarrel was excluded# He was new, and therefore immediately aroused her curiosity; he was reticent, and kept it awake# And lastly he was dark and she fair, and he was male and she female, the everlasting fountains of interest#

….

The above use of “paddled” was initially puzzling. Did the Scots use the paddle or is he using the word to mean “smacked”? RLS spent time in the USA and may have learnt about paddling there? However …

Robert Lois Stevenson attended the Edinburgh Academy (a high school) 1861-63 where the ball game hails was played using a bat called a clacken or clackan. The bat was used by the prefects to punish boys.

The clacken, or clackan, is described in the Scottish National Dictionary as “a wooden hand-bat or racquet used by boys at the Edinburgh Academy and Royal High School”. It is used play Hailes.

The design of the clacken, as described in the Encyclopaedia of Sport in 1898 as “a piece of wood about 18 inches long and has a head about 4 inches wide and 1/2 inch thick; just short of the head, the bat is thinned down to about 1/4 inch from back to front, and again the head is thinned off towards the tip to make it easier to raise the ball from the ground.”

Engraving from Sir Walter Scott’s “Tales of a Grandfather.”

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clacken
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hailes_#ball_game#
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Academy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Louis_Stevenson
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/ … 40,00.html

May contain OCR errors. Headings added and paragraphing changed. The problems 100+ years ago still pertain.

http://www.archive.org/details/american … 15unkngoog

The American educational review: Volume 31

No. 1. October 1909, pages 29 – 35.
A brief account of ancient schools – Written AD 2300 By Carl Holliday, MA

Except page 32-

Schools managed by amateurs

It is a curious fact that members of school boards were then elected by popular vote, and not chosen by civil service examination, as is now the law. Some of these gentlemen were so ignorant as to cause even the school children to laugh at their mistakes! I found in a Tennessee newspaper of 1910 that one candidate for membership announced that he did not have much “book larnin” (knowledge gained from books), but that he had a lot of “horse-sense” (common sense) and would see that the children learned their three “R’s” (reading, ‘riting (writing), and `rithmetic).

No salary was given for serving on a school board. Think of it! Those in charge of what is now considered the most important department of government received absolutely no pay ! No educational qualification whatever was required. The only essential was popularity with the crowd ! The outcome of this may easily be conjectured.

Superintendents who had made a life study of education were considered fanatics and hobby-riders, and children’s souls were dwarfed through the stubborn ignorance of these “popular” supervisors. As the office paid nothing, the members devoted but a few hours of each month to educational matters, and generally these brief periods were given up to haggling over financial affairs. I found in the newspapers of the early twentieth century a vast amount of scandal about these boards. Frequently, I noted, they were accused of getting a “rake-off” from publishing houses, desk-makers, architects, etc. All this may seem exceedingly strange to us today; for not many know that not until 2025 did the government take over the printing of all school books, and not until ten years later did it begin to furnish all building plans and materials at actual cost price.

Women employed because they were cheaper [Did they bring domestic style spanking with them?]

Owing to the low salary paid teachers – in 1900 it averaged but $25.00 a month in states south of the Mason and Dixon line – the vast majority of instructors were women; for married men could not maintain a family on the wages offered, while many women to secure “pin money” (money for luxuries, dainties, etc.) accepted seemingly without conscientious scruples – the miserably low remuneration.

During the first decade of the twentieth century the female teachers of New York City demanded higher wages; but, upon being warned by a professor of education that if decent salaries were granted, their places would be offered to men with families to support, they speedily dropped the matter, and the old miserly method continued until near the year 2000. At this time, however, the newspapers complained bitterly that the boys in the higher grades were becoming “sissy” (effeminate) and that feminine ideas and ideals were ruining the manhood of the nation; and a commission appointed by the government to investigate the subject presented such a drastic report that the various states raised salaries to so tempting a point that men returned to the profession. In the earlier days of this change men attempted to teach all grades, but made such fools of themselves in their efforts to teach the smaller children that the women gradually regained those classes where some imitation of mother-love is essential. Thus it has remained to this day.

Schools not designed to suit children

It may seem ridiculous and yet it is really true that in the twentieth century laws had to be made compelling children to go to school! Part of the resistance came from the parents, but most of it from the children themselves. Whereas the child of today loves the activities of education and looks upon the school as his second home, I find that the normal boy of four centuries ago dreaded and even hated the institutionl But have we not seen enough to warrant this feeling? One or two educators of the time ventured to say that if the school were made as pleasant as the woods and the rivers, the boy would not play “truant” (run away from school for a day) ; but such men were long looked upon as irrational enthusiasts. One glance at the curriculum of that century would cause the modern boy to run forever, and one day of it would probably make him a suicide.

In practically every school the studies were all “book-studies” and enormous tests of the memory. As indicated above, the pupils sat in hard desks four or five hours and told, not what they had discovered, but what they had read. History, geography, literature, science, mathematics the same question was asked, “What did the book say?” Many of the more normal children rebelled against this method, and these were known as “bad” boys and girls ; and such “bad” youth were beaten with tree switches until out of sheer pain, but not from conviction, they submitted to the unnatural and barbarous system. In only one city (New York) was it against the law for the teacher thus to punish children, and even there instructors frequently presented petitions to the school board, begging the privilege of giving the youngsters just a little spanking (vigorous paddling on the hips with the hand or a board). The board had the wisdom, however, to believe that if the methods were right the boy would be interested enough to do right, and the “privilege” was refused. At length it was discovered that the cramped position long maintained in thus sitting at a desk would make any natural creature restive or dull or vicious, and by the year 1975 all schools had adopted a curriculum in which each hour of mental work was followed by an hour of physical work, such as carving, moulding, gardening, etc. There was an astonishing decrease not only of misbehavior, but also of truancy, and I suppose there has not been a case of punishment or unnecessary absence in a hundred years.

[…]

It only took a jury one minute to put Principal Isaac Hughes into a chain gang.

Miss Bertha Winch, 15, a good looking and well developed for her age girl. What if she were not? What difference does it make?

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Here attributes are not mentioned here.

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My kind of chain gang.

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Real Life Female Chain Gang. Daily Mail a “high brow” British newspapers not at all like Murdochs. Who are these guys who search out for these titillating stories?

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The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

<div style=”width:100%;background-image:url(/realm/A_L_123/A_L_trg.gif);”>American Way said above:

Amazing! I didn’t think Americans had a sense of humour!</div>