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?

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=fy … 64,3939346

Eugene Register-Guard – Jul 17, 1953, page 9A, col. 5.

Man invents soft paddle to avoid injuring Junior By HARMAN W. NICHOLS, United Press staff Writer

WASHINGTON – Something shocking has happened to the spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child method of fetching up our young.

Actually he wasn’t too severe.

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The only way such a hinge could work as a moderating influence is by limiting the force applied to accelerate of the paddle. It would encourage long stroke – lots of “windup” to get the device to stinging speed.

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?

Immigrants often bring their attitudes and customs with them. They can have a major influence on their new country depending upon their numbers. It is possible this is how the school paddle arrived in the USA. I have no evidence to support this speculation at present.

The following pie chart shows where US immigrants came from over the formative 120 years from 1820. The proportions coming from the listed countries will have varied greatly over the period. There is no information to hand as to where the immigrants settled. The southern paddling states are of particular interest.

Was the paddle known in Germany or Italy?

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?

I have been exploring the possibility that the school paddle might have been bought to the USA by a migrant group. I have not found any evidence for this. Indeed, the evidence seems to suggest that the main immigrant groups did not bring paddling with them as they mainly settled in the states where the school paddle was or is little used. Further, I have found no suggestion of the paddle being popular in their countries of origin.

German migrants are concentrated in North Dakota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa and other northern states although there were concentrations in parts of Texas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American

From 1880 to 1920, an estimated 4 million Italian immigrants arrived in the United States, the majority from 1900 to 1914. They were generally very poor and took a long time to gain influence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_American

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Americans

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Americans

If the masses did not bring the paddle to the USA, perhaps it was brought by teachers recruited from the home country, after the immigrants had become established?

Who established education in the paddling states?

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?

I first considered the school paddle as a possible result or byproduct of the Progressive Era two years ago (see here). I am becoming increasingly convinced this was the case although I still have no documentary evidence for the conjecture.

The lack of documents is not too surprising if the move to the paddle was the result of decisions made at the local level at different times and places, a bottom-up process rather than one imposed by higher levels of government. Education was and is very much a local matter in the USA. Local school board minutes and regulations from about 100 years ago, not accessible on the Internet, may provide the proof.

The Progressive Era in the United States was a period of social activism and political reform that flourished from the 1890s to the 1920s. It corresponded to a period of increased urbanization, industrialization, literacy and women’s suffrage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era

Initially, the progressive movement operated chiefly at local levels. It later expanded to state and national levels. Progressives drew support from the middle class, including lawyers, teachers, physicians, ministers and business people.

Education

The Progressives worked hard to reform and modernize the schools at the local level. The era was notable for a dramatic expansion in the number of schools and students served, especially in the fast-growing metropolitan cities. After 1910, the smaller cities began building high schools. By 1940, 50% of young adults had earned a high school diploma. The result was the rapid growth of the educated middle class, who typically were the grass roots supporters of progressive measures. During the Progressive Era, many states began passing compulsory schooling laws.

Not all teachers and school managers welcomed increased parental involvement in education (amateurs!), or all of the proposed changes. They had to deal with reluctant learners and parents who did not support compulsory education either because it deprived them of free labour or because they objected to others having influence over the childrens development.

I suggest that idealistic new teachers, especially females, were inclined towards milder forms of corporal punishment if it could not be avoided. The remainder sort to avoid antagonizing parents and the do-gooders by using punishments that did not leave marks. The paddle, known from the days of slavery, to fraternity graduates, and possibly from the practice of using common domestic items for corporal punishment at home, slowly became the instrument of choice in many US schools.

David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Harvard University Press, 1974) reviews the context and nature of the changes but does not seem to discuss corporal punishment. (The term is absent from the books index.) http://books.google.com/books?id=9gkiYzmk1gkC

There is no evidence that immigrants, or imported teachers, brought the school paddle to the USA.

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?

Power and the Promise of School Reform: Grassroots Movements During the Progressive Era William J. Reese, Teachers College Press, 2002. http://books.google.com/books?id=KHjvM84h-6YC

The book contains 7 mentions of “corporal punishment” as shown in the excerpts below. These suggest that women were active in trying to have corporal punishment abolished in schools. This may have lead to the use of the paddle as an implement that left less evidence behind.

Page 12

Discipline, self-control, adherence to rules and regulations: these things mattered greatly – schools that stressed deference to authority, sanctioned corporal punishment, and tried to integrate apathetic or hostile elements of the community into a single educational system.

The creation of a uniform, standardized curriculum was an essential part of early school reform, and it, too, was the source of continual controversy and debate in the Victorian period. Parents, particularly poor parents, were often criticized for sending their children to school dirty and without the rudiments of scholarship: pencils, paper, and maps. More significant, some parents fought for freedom of choice in the curriculum at a time when elite reformers sought uniformity in learning. More than a dozen years after the formation of the Milwaukee school system, the board of education regrettably revealed that parents still opposed a graded . . .
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Page 46

Greenwood blasted parents for not appreciating the value of military form as a central part of “character training.” During such emergencies as fires, he argued, parents would certainly applaud “instant obedience and military movement” that would “save lives and prevent the disastrous trampling of a mob.” Moreover, discipline, corporal punishment, and toeing the line #that is, aligning toes to the lines formed by wooden floors# prepared children for the rough and tumble of the competitive world. Greenwood then calculated the exact number of hours children spent at home instead of at school, supposedly proving that parents were primarily responsible for such maladies as the Saint Vitus’s dance.”
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Page 47-8

Women had similar problems with the school administration in Milwaukee. The appointed, ward-based school board, formed a phalanx against the Woman’s School Alliance and the new education. Only a handful of men broke ranks and supported the women. In the 1890s Alliance members regularly attended school board meetings, where they petitioned, better sanitary methods, the adoption of manual training and domestic science, nature study, and the abolishment of corporal punishment. Many of their programs were aimed at freeing children from some of the book-oriented aspects of schooling and to providing more activity-oriented programs for hand-and-eye coordination and muscle development. These innovations were neither class biased nor trade oriented, for when many of them were finally adopted in some form after the turn of the century, they were found in every elementary school. In the 189N, however, the Alliance specifically championed the needs of the poorest districts of Milwaukee.”
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Page 49-50

The Woman’s School Alliance was such a creative, constant source of new ideas that the president of the school board labeled them “impetuous” and fellow committee members who responded to their frequent charges called their reports “misleading and incorrect and their suggestions “impracticable.” Board members never successfully refuted their ideas, though they often dismissed them, and it would have admittedly been difficult for any school board to implement their ideas rapidly in the hard times of the 1890s. The Alliance demanded the abolishment of corporal punishment, a demand that was refused even though it did not involve money but differences between advocates of stem and “gentle” measures of correction. The Alliance also desired more pay for elementary teachers, adjustable desks for all new schools, playgrounds, sewing classes, manual training, and more kindergartens. It was invited to operate some experimental programs and to hold its meetings in various local schools, which provided an inroad for the wider use of the schools as social centers. However modest its early successes, the Alliance actively championed innovations before a body of men who were hostile to Progressive reform. #58#
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Page 52

Like the women in Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Toledo, those in Rochester similarly agitated for numerous reforms ranging from the abandonment of corporal punishment to higher pay for teachers to manual training and sewing; classes. Rochester’s women typically ran some new programs at their own expense, received some municipal funding to implement their ideas, and generally labored in a hostile environment. The superintendent and the school board viewed them as troublemakers and Socialists. One ward leader in 1898 said that offering sewing in the schools was as sensible as teaching “blacksmithing” or “potato digging.” It would only encourage other cranks to support lunatic ideas such as the construction of swimming pools in the schools for recreational purposes. Dangerous ideas indeed! #65#
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Page 53

“Parents have frequently expected our public schools to extend instruction outside their proper limitations,” wrote a special school board committee in Rochester in response to advocates of the new education. The committee then proceeded to attack the Women’s Union on every pedagogical point. The silly suggestion to treat children “with sugar coated kindness” by ending corporal punishment was a threat to authority and “a great mistake.” Little children, even those of “tender years,” should not “do as they please.” Similarly, manual-training and domestic science instruction belonged in the home, not in the school.”
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Page 246

Note 46. The best sources for the evolution of Progressive ideas on the local level are the grassroots petitions and original writings of the women and parents themselves. Helen Montgomery, for example, delivered an address in 1896 on the “new education,” a term which was later used interchangeably with “progressive education,” just as the “new woman” was often referred to as a “progressive woman.” See Montgomery’s speech in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 30 January 1896. In Toledo, as in the other cities in this study, clubwomen in the 1890s attacked corporal punishment, cramming, overtesting, and other aspects of what they called the “old system of education.” Many were familiar with Froebel’s writings, which emphasized motherhood themes, since they were teachers themselves.

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 paddle seems to have been well known as an implement for the punishment of children at home in the USA before it became popular at school. During the Progressive Era, the trend for schools to adopt the paddle was probably motivated by the need to adopt CP practices more acceptable to parents, as indicated by parents own practices.

The following short statement suggests all readers in 1906 were familiar with paddling.

http://books.google.com/books?id=ISMDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA125

Popular Science Monthly, February 1906. Page 125. The Lapses of Speech, by Professor Joseph Jastrow, University of Wisconsin.

With spank in mind, the threat to paddle the refractory youngster became “Well, I’ll spaddle you”.

A number of incidents of domestic paddling have been cited in earlier posts to this thread. Did US parents favour the paddle more than parents in other places? If so, why?