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?

An important complementary thread: The Paddle at School, Home, Work and College. It contains photos and dimensions of some real paddles.

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 Psychological Clinic, Volume 6 edited by Lightner Witmer. 1913 the word “swat” is used in relation to school corporal punishment.

CLICK

CLICK

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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?

American Way,

The item you give snippets of was reported above The paddle in California, 1913 on July 18, 2011.

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?

Hi <strong>KK</strong>,

I’m not able to answer your question vis-a-vis other implements being replaced by the paddle … However, here is a statistic that may shock you (it did me!). You said, “<em>The court decision confirms that school paddling was not unusual in the 1970’s</em>”…

Well, according to a news story that ran in <em>The Floridian</em>, on or about April 26, 1986, (remember this is the mid 1980’s now), it was reported that “<em>corporal punishment is administered approximately <strong>864 times a day</strong> in Florida schools</em>”. School paddling being “not unusual” wins the understatement-of-the-year award to say the least!

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 number does seem high at first consideration and probably needs to be confirmed before we get too excited.

If CP is the main form of punishment, as it was when I was in school, an average punishment rate of one incident per student per year would not be too outrageous. Off course, a few students would get punished often and most rarely.

864 times per day would be equivalent to about 160,000 per year depending upon the number of days in a school year. I do not know how many students were in school in Florida in the 1980’s but would guess there might be a about 1 million (10% of the population). If so, the paddling rate is low.

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?

Hi everybody,

you don’t need to reinvent the wheel on Florida , or anyone else’s numbers. The paddling stats from the early 70’s are all complied and available on the academic networks under the psychology department at Temple University. You may need an academic log in to access. these very detailed records formed the basis of the life work of Irwin Hyman , who I’ve mentioned many times before, and his many associates. They kept the ‘score’ over three decades for the US government. The figures in the 70’s and 80’s are clear under-reporting. In those days there was no compulsory recording of ‘classroom’ and ‘corridor’ paddling , only ‘administrative paddling. I’ve heard it estimated that, in Texas for example, the number of paddling recorded in the 70’s was about 33% of the REAL total.

In Florida they joke that even the Ingraham v Wright paddling ( 20 licks) wasn’t enough to get recorded.

The best estimate ,’uncorrected ‘ was for 1976 2.35 million paddlings across the USA. The reality of that is probably 5-7 million cases.

In latter times figures are more manageable and, with the by and large abolition of classroom/corridor cp , the figures are more reliable.

Here are the most recent Florida figures in line with Temple and the State returns.

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?

Thanks for the additional input <strong>prof.n</strong>

Let’s try to debunk the 864 JCP incidents per day a little bit.

1) How many school days are roughly in a Floridian school year? “<em>The state requires that each school teach for 180 days</em>” according to Wikipedia  This gives us 864 incidents per day x 180 days = Approx 156,000 JCP inidents in the 1986 school year.

2) How does this relate to student population? I cannot find total enrollments in Florida public schools for 1986, however, the median enrollment for the 2003-2008 period was approx. 2.65M students source. The median population of Florida for the same time frame was approx 17.5M people source. that gives us a student percentage against total population of (2.65M/17.5M) 15%. Assuming the percentage of school aged children in Florida was roughly in line with this 15% of population, we get 11.7M people x 15% = 1.76M students in 1986.

3) How does the CP administration rate compare? We have 156,000 JCP incidents over 1,760,000 students, or 8.9%. Now, this is all shades of gray and many will not agree with my take on this … However, I have found from actual JCP records that in areas where JCP seemed to have been resorted to judiciously, sparingly and only for serious offences, (more as last resort), the annual JCP incident rate vs enrollment is typically at 2% or under. So, either the 864 figure is out to lunch, or JCP was extremely overused (as first resort?) and likely most often for trivial offences.

That’s my take on it here, for what it’s worth.

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);”>Hi HH, KK and Prof.n,

HH, rather than looking at the probable number of pupils enrolled in Florida schools in 1986 I’d look at the number of schools in districts which hadn’t abandoned school CP (if indeed any had abandoned it at that time). Then I’d consider the maxim that a paddling a day keeps the lid on things. That would give a different perspective on the 864 paddlings a day!

But let us look at the graph supplied by Prof.n for 1989/90 onwards. Between 1989/90 and 1994/95 the ‘officially recorded’ paddlings decline by 19,288 per year. The annual number of paddlings continues to decrease throughout that graph, so we can reasonably assume that the decrease between 1984/85 and 1989/90 (projecting the graph time scale backwards) would be greater than 19,288.

I’m guessing it could be as high as 40,000, but let’s take a trifling 25,000. In that case the number of ‘officially recorded’ paddlings in 19884/85 would be around 58,000. Now I’m guessing that the report in ‘The Floridan’ actually used the figures for the 1984/85 school year to derive its average daily total. The given publication date (April 1986) is part way through the 1985/86 school year, so figures for that year wouldn’t yet be available.

I’m also guessing that they uplifted the total to cover unrecorded and unofficial paddlings. Journalists seldom eschew a chance to make reports more sensational. I’d bet they used an uplift around the ×3 quoted by Prof.n for the 1970s as that guestimate would have been widely circulated. On that basis we’re easily up to the sort of total we need for a figure of 864 paddlings a day!

Prof.n, is it possible that using your academic status you might be able to access the Temple University ‘official’ school CP figures for Florida for say 1983/84 thru’ 1986/87 and see how they look? That would be much better than guess work. But I do think <s>reasonable guestimates</s> soundly based suppositions indicate that the 864 was probably about right.</div>