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Lotta_Nonsense374
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?
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holyfamilypenguin4,5593
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?
Sorry about the earliest paddle. I wanted instrument of correction as in the dreaded switch. I haven’t done the math but there seems to be more stories about SCP in the USA between 1900 to 1910. Maybe because newspapers became more prolific or more digitize. Does anyone difficulty accessing back years of newspapers. I am glad I figured away to circumvent the problem that threatened my frequents postings.
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KKxyz3,59957
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?
American Way:
Sorry about the earliest paddle. I wanted instrument of correction as in the dreaded switch. I haven’t done the math but there seems to be more stories about SCP in the USA between 1900 to 1910. Maybe because newspapers became more prolific or more digitized. Does anyone difficulty accessing back years of newspapers? I am glad I figured away to circumvent the problem that threatened my frequent postings.
Before the advent of television and radio, newspapers were the only source of public news. Early newspapers carried a lot of detailed information about local events. A wide range of ordinary people read them carefully.
Old newspapers are of very great historical interest and value including the advertisements, editorials and letters to the editor. They allow news to be seen in its social context.
Newspaper coverage of events is very uneven. Certain matters are considered more newsworthy than others are. The news is dominated by the extraordinary and the controversial rather than the ordinary. Everyday events are not news so are little reported. Human interest, items borrowed from other papers and other soft news was often used to fill gaps on the page.
School news tended to be reported in the early days of compulsory education. Not everyone approved and many were interested in the details. Newspapers grew in importance as literacy increased, a consequence of compulsory education.
The saving of newspapers was uneven. Some newspapers retained copies of their publications, as did many public libraries. The saved copies were sometimes in new condition or rather tattered and worn having been recovered from public reading rooms. The storage conditions of the saved newspapers varied.
Many newspapers and other publications were microfilmed in the 1950s and 60s as conservation and space saving measure. The coverage of the available publications was not uniform or universal. The quality of the microfilming varied. It was tedious task, often done under time pressure by unmotivated labour. Since, the microfilm has been digitalized, again not necessarily systematically.
Google does not have access to all digital material. Optical character recognition (OCR) requires clean legible text if it is to be accurate. Old newspapers often give poor OCR results. However, keywords used in searches often appear several times in a news item. This may allow one correct recognition and so allow important items to be found.
The digital records are not all available free online even when the original newspaper is no longer protected by copyright. Photographic and digital copies may be proprietary even when the original is not.
The above is not entirely satisfactory but things are very much better than in pre Internet days. Manual searching of microfilm is extremely tedious and laborious.
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?
American Way’s response can be found here
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 following book purports to give some background on the origins of the paddle. I think it is more a collection of interesting snippets than a coherent history of the paddle. It suggests, probably correctly, that paddles and the like were used by those who did not want to cause lasting injuries and / or visible marks on their victims.
Torture and Democracy
By Darius M. Rejali, Princeton University Press, 2007. Details: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8490.html
The following excerpt is taken from Chapter 12, pages 271-3. http://books.google.com/books?id=L8QLvrX-iL0C&pg=PA271
Paddles
Paddling makes deep bruises that will clear in a few weeks without any visible injury. “The punishment is dreadfully severe, but for all no blood is drawn.”(note 26) To strike more painfully, beaters perforated the paddle with several holes. Solid paddles trapped the air between the flat head and the flesh, cushioning the blows. [Unsubstantiated conjecture. Other mechanisms may prevail]
Paddling was originally a nautical punishment, mainly for minor offenses such as quitting one’s station during night watch. Among English sailors, “to cob” meant to strike or fight, and “cobbing” meant to strike the buttocks with a flat instrument.(27) The “cobbing board” was a flat piece of wood. Customarily, this was a stave of the cask with the bung-hole, a hole drilled into the cask for pouring out the liquid within. The stave would be cut in two and the beater would use the bung-hole end to strike the buttocks. Alternatively, sailors used a stocking full of sand, sometimes wet, to administer blows.(28)
The French also paddled, calling the instrument the baton de justice.(29) In the 1920s, French investigators cobbed every witness in piracy cases in Korea using instruments “rather like a canoe paddle or a thick cricket bat, on a part where he could not be injured, but where the bruises would show up beautifully.”(30) Ostensibly, witnesses insisted on this beating, arguing that bruises would allow there give information on river piracy while telling their neighbors that the French had extracted the information under torture.
In an age where ships were the primary means of transportation, nautical punishments were soon imitated on land. British officers cobbed infantrymen for petty offenses, and Irish schoolchildren were paddled for failing to remove their hats, becoming the first of many schoolchildren to be cobbed.(31) During the Revolutionary War, American officers cobbed soldiers for crimes “characterized by meanness and low cunning.”(32) Slave dealers also paddled slaves. American and Brazilian slave owners preferred the whip for plantation work and major offenses, but they used paddles for minor crimes and household discipline.(33) Some American prisons also used paddles in the late nineteenth century to intimidate as well as punish prisoners for poor contract work.(34) British sailors cobbed young trainees for being slow to leave the mess hall in the evening (“fork in the bean”).(35) Most judicial cobbing, at land or at sea, ceased by the late nineteenth century, but paddling persisted into the twentieth century in fraternity hazing, military initiations, domestic castigation, and S-M games.
By the early nineteenth century, beaters carved paddles with shuttle necks, and many paddles had perforated heads. The Brazilian palmatoria, the American military paddle, and the slave-cobbing paddle all had several auger holes.(36) The paddles ranged in size from the size of tennis rackets to oars and included battledores, large flat paddle-like instruments used for putting bread in the oven. The largest were made of oak or hickory. They were two to three feet long, four to six inches wide at the head, with handles about a foot long. Modern palmatorias sometimes use rubber heads rather than the traditional wooden ones.(37)
Until the twentieth century, what mattered in paddling was the lack of permanent injury, not necessarily the fact that one could escape detection by outside observers. Many slave owners wet and sanded paddles before use, a practice that would definitely leave marks. Mrs. Mann of Missouri was famous for her occasionally lethal “six pound paddle.”(38) Some prison paddles were filed to leave deep cuts.(39)
Stealthiness mattered most to slave dealers, who may have invented the perforated paddle for economic reasons.(40) A scarred slave was a troublesome one, and no one wanted to purchase trouble. The dealers used cobbing paddles and flopping paddles, the “flop” being a piece of leather a foot and one-half long and as broad as the palm of the hand, with a two-foot handle. These devices were used for “various offenses, especially the unpardonable one of ‘not speaking up and looking bright and smart’ when the buyers were choosing.”(41)
Police turned to cobbing in the twentieth century . . . .
(The notes are not accessible online.)
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holyfamilypenguin4,5593
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?
Mrs Mann of Missouri, mentioned in past posting, did not escape the attention of Jeff Charles. I prefer going earlier source as in 1842. About half way down first column.
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KKxyz3,59957
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 following excerpt from an outline of a recently published (1911) autobiography suggests “paddling” meaning “spanking” was well engrained by 1911. It does not indicate where the paddle was used only that most readers would understand the use of the term.
The Sun. March 05, 1911, Page 2, col. 1
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/ … -1/seq-32/
[. . .]
Dr Emmet, like many other gifted men, did not shine as a luminary in school. He frankly confesses that he never developed the faculty of acquiring knowledge by so-called study without the aid of another. When the dominie in the Virginia cornfield school house paddled him with the ruler by way of inducing him to apply himself to the spelling book he flung a large stone inkstand at his head and bolted for the door. The only variation in this dally programme lay in the choice of a missile, which ranged from the Latin dictionary to the spittoon.
[. . .]
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?
It is now nearly two years since I started the thread. A lot of interesting material has been gathered. However, it is still quite unclear when and why the paddle became almost ubiquitous in the USA.
There may have been more than one pathway but there is no evidence for this.
A desire not to leave marks was probably an important element in the adoption of the paddle.
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holyfamilypenguin4,5593
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?
Desire not to leave marks? That is an argument that the anti-CP zealots harp on. Slavery auction day prices went down if a prospective buyer saw lash marks indicating a hard to control slave. The paddle was painful to impart a lesson without drawing attention to his order shortcomings. Do you preclude that to be or not be more like to be case? Does your observation that the desire not to leave marks lend credence to that argument?
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KKxyz3,59957
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?
American Way,
I am not sure if I understand your question.
I was not around in the days of slavery but my understanding is that a number of reliable independent contemporary commentators reported the desire of owners, when punishing slaves, not to leave marks so as not to affect their resale value. It is certainly a plausible claim.
The book by Darius Rejali on torture and democracy, cited above, makes it clear that not leaving evidence of torture is a current concern of governments and their agencies who use “enhanced interrogation techniques” when attempting to extract information from prisoners and suspects.
It is also clear, from present day school CP guidelines and news reports, that paddling should not bruise or cause more than short duration reddening. It is very hard for mothers to complain if there is no physical evidence of trauma.