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 US School Paddle A Product of the “Progressive Era” and Female Influence? Mentions of the school paddle in written material begin around 1900. There are mentions of the school switch, hickory rod, etc. before that time and also of the slave, prison and fraternity paddle. There are news reports of serious injury or even death. It seems likely the paddle was introduced as a milder and less injurious device to placate those opposed to CP in schools and to protect children from harm. However, so far I have found no documentation to support this supposition. The deliberations and decisions of school boards do not appear to be accessible online at the moment which makes it hard to determine what happened and why. The spread of the school paddle makes it likely there was widespread discussion at the time, probably in the 1890’s.

Reference material A short history of US education
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antebellum_period

Excerpt: Education in the United States had long been a local affair with schools governed by locally elected school boards. As with much of the culture of the United States, education varied widely in the North and the South. In the New England states public education was common, although it was often class-based with the working class receiving little benefits. Instruction and curriculum were all locally determined and teachers were expected to meet rigorous demands of strict moral behavior. Schools taught religious values and applied Calvinist philosophies of discipline which included corporal punishment and public humiliation. In the South, there was very little organization of a public education system. Public schools were very rare and most education took place in the home with the family acting as instructors. The wealthier planter families were able to bring in tutors for instruction in the classics but many yeoman farming families had little access to education outside of the family unit.

The reform movement in education began in Massachusetts when Horace Mann (1796 1859) started the common school movement. Mann advocated a statewide curriculum and instituted financing of school through local property taxes. Mann also fought protracted battles against the Calvinist influence in discipline, preferring positive reinforcement to physical punishment. Most children learned to read and write and spell from Noah Webster’s Blue Backed Speller and later the McGuffey Readers. The readings inculcated moral values as well as literacy. Most states tried to emulate Massachusetts, but New England retained its leadership position for another century. German immigrants brought in kindergartens and gymnasiums, while Yankee orators sponsored the Lyceum movement that provided popular education for hundreds of towns and small cities.

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Campaigns against corporal punishment : prisoners, sailors, women, and children in antebellum America (Before 1861)

By Myra C Glenn
Publisher: Albany : State University of New York Press, ©1984.

The antebellum crusade against corporal punishment: origins and leaders —
Reform campaigns against corporal punishment: institutional concerns —
Reform campaigns against corporal punishment: cultural concerns —
Wife beating and the limits of the anti-corporal punishment crusade —
A victim’s perspective: nineteenth-century seamen and convict writings on punishment —
A house divided: public debates over corporal punishment, 1843-1852 —
From theory to practice: the decline of corporal punishment in antebellum America.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of … ted_States

Excerpt: The Progressive Movement began in the 1890s and lasted through the 1920s; the most active period was 1900 1918.

Dissatisfaction on the part of the growing middle class with politics as usual, and the failure to deal with increasingly important urban and industrial problems, led to the emergence of the Progressive Movement in the 1890s. In every major city and state, and at the national level as well, and in education, medicine, and industry, the progressives called for the modernization and reform of decrepit institutions, the elimination of corruption in politics, and the introduction of efficiency as a criteria for change. Leading politicians from both parties, most notably Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Evans Hughes, and Robert LaFollette on the Republican side, and William Jennings Bryan on the Democratic side, took up the cause of progressive reform. Women became especially involved in demands for woman suffrage, prohibition, and better schools; their most prominent leader was Jane Addams of Chicago (1860 1935). Progressives implemented anti-trust laws and regulated such industries of meat-packing, drugs, and railroads. Four new constitutional amendmentsthe Sixteenth through Nineteenthresulted from progressive activism, bringing the federal income tax, direct election of Senators, prohibition, and woman suffrage.

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Corporal punishment in American education : readings in history, practice, and alternatives
Author: Irwin A Hyman; James H Wise
Publisher: Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1979.

Part I. Introduction —
1. An overview / Irwin A. Hyman and Eileen McDowell —

Part II. Historical perspectives —
2. Social sanctions for violence against children : historical perspectives / Gertrude J. Williams —
3. The Children’s Petition of 1669 and its sequel / C.B. Freeman —
4. Discipline in the good old days / John Manning —
5. The abolition of corporal punishment in New Jersey schools / Donald R. Raichle —
Etc.

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American Education A History, 4th Edition
By Jennings L. Wagoner, Jr., Wayne J. Urban
2008
Routledge

Chapter 5. Class, Caste and education in the South: 1800-1900
Chapter 6. Beginning of a modern school system: 1865-1890
Chapter 7. Organizing the modern school system: Education reform in the progressive era, 1890-1915
Chapter 8. Completing the Modern School System: American Education, 1915-1929.

Corporal punishment receives only passing mention

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David Macleod, The Age of the Child: Children in America, 1890-1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1998).

Emphasizes a tug of war between different conceptions of childhood, from the varied experiences of farm children and working-class urban youths to the Progressive reformers’ ideal of a sheltered childhood.

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Power and the Promise of School Reform: Grassroots Movements during the Progressive Era
William J. Reese

A number of mentions of corporal punishment. Women had a big influence on educational and other reform in the four northern cities investigated: Kansas City MO, Milwaukee WI, Toledo OH and Rochester NY.

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?

Intractable ?
It is clear that the punishment paddle replaced other implements in many American schools sometime before about 1900, probably as a part of a movement towards milder, less injurious / less marking punishments. The issue must have been recorded in newspapers of the time but an online search has so far failed to find any such reports.

Many older newspapers were recorded on microfilm a few decades ago and some of these are now available online, free or for a fee. The printed originals were often not high quality (high speed printing on cheap paper) and were probably handled by the public in reading rooms before they were archived. The microfilming of the damaged or fading and yellowing papers was often done in a hurry – there were millions of pages to be done – so produced poor quality images. The subsequent automatic optical character recognition (OCR) conversion of the images to text is often poor which means keyword searches are unreliable. A further complication is that the word “paddle” has several meanings and appears relatively often in various contexts including paddle steamers, canoe paddles and playing in shallow water.

The New York Times appears to have the best online archives of any of the major USA newspapers. The quality of the photo images is generally good, as is the OCR conversion of the images to text. This allows reasonably reliable searching for keywords. There is free online access to the older archives. A charge is made for accessing the more recent archives. The New York Times is published in an area of the country that abolished corporal punishment in schools before the paddle came into regular use so it contains few items of relating to when, where and why the paddle came to be used in American schools.

The paddle was and is more used in the southern states and its use in homes and schools may have started there and spread north.

Those with access to pre-1900 southern newspaper achives are invited to search for relavent articles and to report back here. Please report searches that failed as well as those that suceeded.

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Another early mention of the paddle:

The Morning Leader, December 3, 1904. Page two, column 1. (Published in Port Townsend, Washington State)

The teachers’ institute strongly opposed the adoption of the anti corporal punishment rule. After the adoption of the rule, the institute called on its legal adviser is based[?] the assertion that the rule against corporal punishment is a dead letter and the Board of Education can not intervene between the loving instructor and his obstreperous charge.

What the board of education will now say on the subject, there is much eagerness to know.

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?

How to Find Old Newspaper Articles Online – For Free

Free US newspaper archives

Wikipedia list of online newspaper archives

<a href=”” rel=”nofollow”> Making of America digital library </a>

New Zealand newspapers and periodicals

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 further interim report Selected, possibly relevant, papers found using: Educational Resources Information Center.

I have not been able to read any of the following so do not know whether they provide any information concerning when and why the paddle was introduced into American schools.

Van Dyke HT (1984)
Corporal punishment in our schools
The Clearing House, 57, 296-300. (A journal of educational strategies, issues, and ideas).

Abstract: Traces the history of corporal punishment in the public schools and discusses its use today.

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Middleton, Jacob (2008) (Historian at Birkbeck College in London)
The Experience of Corporal Punishment in Schools, 1890-1940
History of Education, Volume 37, Issue 2, March 2008, pages 253 – 275

Abstract: Corporal punishment was an important part of the educational experience of many children educated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has often been assumed that it was an uncontroversial and widely accepted means of maintaining school discipline. This article questions these assumptions, using autobiographical accounts produced by individuals educated between 1890 and 1940. Working from common themes in these accounts, it presents a reconstruction of how corporal punishment was viewed by the child. Whilst educationists of the period encouraged the sparing and impartial exercise of school discipline, the accounts demonstrate how, in practice, the use of corporal punishment was often seen as arbitrary or unjust. Corporal punishment was, as a result, to become a major source of tension between pupils and teachers within the early twentieth-century school.

It is unclear whether there are any examples mentioning the use of the school paddle in earlier times.

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Middleton, Jacob (2005)
Thomas Hopley and Mid-Victorian Attitudes to Corporal Punishment
History of Education, v 34, n6, p 599-615, Nov 2005

Abstract: This paper discusses the trial of Thomas Hopley, accused of killing his pupil Reginald Cancellor in 1860 during an act of corporal punishment. The case provoked immediate sensational interest and became an important defining point in how corporal punishment is treated in British law. Established by this trial was the test that any corporal punishment, most particularly that which went on at school, must be “moderate and reasonable”, a test so central to discussion of punishment that it is described by modern legal experts as being of continuing relevance. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Hopley trial was an important precedent in any legal consideration of corporal punishment. (Contains 111 footnotes.)

It is unclear whether this case in England had much influence in the USA. There were similar cases of fatal beatings in the USA.

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Ryan, Francis J. (1994)
From Rod to Reason: Historical Perspectives on Corporal Punishment in the Public School, 1642-1994
Educational Horizons, v72 n2 p70-77 Winter 1994

Abstract: A historical overview of disciplinary practices used in U.S. classrooms shows that corporal punishment has been a consistent and conspicuous part of schooling since the beginning. Alternatives aimed at minimizing classroom punishment and disciplining students in a more systematic and psychologically oriented way are now part of teacher preparation programs.

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Travers, Paul D. (1980)
An Historic View of School Discipline
Educational Horizons, v 58, n4, p184-87 Summer 1980

Abstract: This article surveys educational environments and philosophies of school discipline from the colonial era through the twentieth century to illustrate that students have always been considered difficult to control.