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?

Management and methods for rural and village teachers Thomas E. Sanders – 1905 – 304 pages

Nashville, Tenn., The C.J. Bell Company

Excerpt, Chapter XV. School Punishment, page 94-

Let your effort be to discipline with the least possible punishment, but when occasion demands and nothing else will do, punish, even to severity. Avoid indignities, such as slapping or boxing the ears, pulling the nose or the hair, or striking the head. If corporal punishment must be inflicted, use a switch, a strap, or a small paddle. Administer it slowly, calmly, quietly, but effectively. When the punishment is over, do not dismiss the pupil until you have talked over quietly and dispassionately the offense and the reason for the punishment. Most punishments fail because they are done hastily and in anger, and then pupils are dismissed while yet white with rage. If the judge sentenced the criminal with the same degree of warmth and passion, and the sheriff executed the sentence with the haste and anger many teachers show in administering punishment, our courts would be less effective than they are.

http://www.archive.org/details/manageme … 00sandrich

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 discipline of the school Frances Milton Irene Morehouse – 1914
(Supervisor of High School Teaching, Illinois State Normal University)

D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO

Excerpt from Chapter II, The Modes of School Government, page 14

That the teacher stands in the place of the parent has been one maxim universally accepted; and the nature and workings of the teacher’s authority have shown an interesting tendency to imitate the methods of control in vogue in the home. The era of stern discipline and severe corporal punishment in both was coeval [occurred at the same time]; and when parental severity was relaxed in favor of more gentle means, the school was forced to fall into line, and somewhat reluctantly to concede its right to paddle and whip.

Excerpt from Chapter XI Punishment (continued), page 197

Corporal Punishment

Corporal punishment is generally regarded as a last resort among means of correction. It may save the day when all else fails, and so must not be read out of the list of possibilities; but it is dangerous, antiquated, and uncertain in effect. It is, as its opponents claim, a primitive means of control, unsuited to modern ideals of government and to highly developed and sensitive children. Many pupils in the public schools, however, are primitive creatures from primitive homes, and are sensitive only to the stimulus of bodily pain, or the humiliation that attends its infliction.

Excerpts from page 199-

Where corporal punishment has been altogether done away with, it is usually the case that sentiment against it has been crystallized by some unjust or brutal case. To guard against this, especially in cities where the political situation imposes on the schools careless, ill-trained, time-serving teachers, there should be regulations which prevent hasty action, and which make it necessary to have witnesses to such punishment. Every safeguard against its abuse should be adopted – but corporal punishment should not be taken from the list of possible means of control. Reasonably administered, it is among the lighter punishments. With all due regard to the much-vaunted “sacredness of the person,” one has no patience with the mawkish sentimentality which regards a paddling as an unpardonable affront to the dignity of childhood.

[…]

There are some kinds of corporal punishment which may permanently injure children, and which should therefore be forbidden strictly. These include the severe canings once in vogue, boxes on the ear, flinging children across desks and tables, striking upon the head, violent shakings, hand slapping with a metal-edged ruler, and whipping with the little, clinging switches which raise hard welts and occasionally cause or aggravate skin diseases.

Paddling, slapping the cheek* or the hands, whipping (preferably with a wide-bore rubber tube), and striking the hands with a light ruler, are some of the means used with refractory children, which do not injure but do smart. The humiliation of being struck is, for most American children, far deeper than the physical pain is severe. This is especially true when punishment is given before other children – a procedure which some educators heartily condemn, while others contend that, since the offense is an offense against the school, that the culprit should be disgraced before his fellows, and the lesson impressed upon them. Be this as it may be, the nervous tension in a room in which a pupil is being punished is often so great that it punishes the innocent almost as much as the guilty. Most people have at some time experienced the breathless, impressive, “scared” quiet of such an occasion. It has sometimes a salutary effect upon the school; sometimes quite the opposite, after the immediate results are passed. Here is where some knowledge of psychology and sociology will stand the teacher well in hand; for it is the home training of the pupils, their degree of advancement in manners and motives, that must largely decide the method used to control them. There is no such thing as a secretly-administered corporal punishment; no matter how carefully guarded, the impressive details of such occasions are always public property soon after the event.

* There is danger that in aiming at the cheek the ear may be struck, consequently this mode is not recommended, and in many schools is strictly forbidden.

http://www.archive.org/details/discipli … 00moreiala

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 Child; a monthly journal of child welfare, Volume 1
Editor David R. Blyth
Publisher Children’s Charities, Inc., 1912
Shall Sense or Sentiment Prevail in the Treatment of Our Juvenile Offenders? By Paul Wiebe.

Excerpts:

The following is an abstract from the rules established by the Board of Control of the State of Minnesota only recently for the State School of that State, as regards corporal punishment and confinement, both of which are allowed in that school:

[…]

(11) “No other instrument shall be used for administering corporal punishment than a leather paddle which shall be not less than three and one-half inches (3-1/2) wide, not more than sixteen (16) inches long and not more than one-twelfth (1-12) of an inch thick. All edges and corners shall be carefully rounded to guard against injury.

http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?size … =51;num=45

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?

News item
The Oregonian February 14, 1908
A E Matthews has principal Hughson arrested, charging brutality

Editorial comment
The Oregonian February 15, 1908 page 8
Schoolboy Punishment

The first paragraph suggests that parents who complain about their kids being punished at school may not be good parents, or may have suspect motives.

The second paragraph praises the paddle as follows:

If boys must be flogged, the paddle seems to be an almost divinely appointed implement to do it with. That area of the body which it most aptly fits is not very susceptible to mortal wounds: it has merely a sufficiency of nerves to unlock penitential tears by their tingling when temperately flagellated; and the bones which it contains are so abundantly swathed about with muscular tissue there is no danger of breaking them. It is fashionable in these degenerate days to deny the hand of Providence in arranging the affairs of the world: but if there is one piece of evidence more convincing than another that the Almighty actually did fit this and that together and adapt one thing to another in our mundane sphere, it is the perfect adaption of this portion of a boy’s body to receive impulsive stimulation from a paddle.

The third paragraph asks if boys must boys be flogged, and goes on to say, in part:

What is the ultimate effect of paddling upon the boy himself and upon the teacher, upon paddler and paddlee, to borrow a legal terminology? In the opinion of The Oregonian the paddle is distinctly and unequivocally a means of grace. It edifies not only the physical and intellectual parts of a boy, but also his soul. Many unruly youth apparently foredoomed to perdition and predestinated to wrath, has been plucked like a brand from the burning by a regenerative paddling. […] Marvelous are the virtues of the paddle; salutary is the smart thereof, and the parent who rails against it is not wise. […]

The last paragraph suggests, Teachers as a rule have no disposition to injure children and goes on to defend the principal.

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?

Found by American Way

Dubuque Telegraph-Herald (Iowa), Saturday 13 August 1910
Prose Poem by Uncle Walt
[Walt Mason (1862 – 1939) a newspaper writer and humorist who spent his childhood in Ontario and moved to the USA as a young man. His father died when he was 4 years old.] Fond MemoriesMy life’s growing white with the snows of December, and soon it must yield to the force of the blast;
and like an old dotard I dream, and remember the things that occurred in the far away past.

How well I can picture the house I was born in, the kitchen, the stairway, the dark narrow hall;
the old clock that rang an alarm in the mornin’, the cheap wooden paddle that hung on the wall;
that plain wooden paddle, that long-handled paddle, that trusty old paddle that hung on the wall!

Then I was a wayward young lad and mischievous, and given to tricks that were foolish and vain;
and father would say to me: “Why do you grieve us, and fill our fond hearts with a cream-colored pain?

The life you are leading long since has disgraced you, and filled all our bosoms with wormwood and gall;
I see very plainly I’ll have to lambaste you-” Then down came the paddle that hung on the wall;
that cheap willow paddle, that unvarnished paddle, that three-cornered paddle that hung on the wall.

Then all of our helpful and well-meaning neighbors, whose lives were too barren of pleasure and glee,
would pause for a time from their pastimes and labors, to hear that old paddle connecting with me.

And O how they chortled and giggled and tittered, when hearing me let out an agonized bawl!
‘Twas little they reckoned that my life was embittered by that wooden paddle that hung on the wall;
that dingbusted paddle, that dodgasted paddle, that jim-twisted paddle that hung on the wall.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=gJ … 69,3962331