The school I did my first teaching practice at routinely violated the regulations that did apply to the strap (they strapped girls as well as boys, and told me I should strap even though I wasn’t actually qualified yet) and used it almost literally all the time. It was a very ‘tough’ school. I can’t say how typical my experiences in these two state schools were, but in both cases corporal punishment was not being used the way it was ‘supposed’ to be.
I went to four different schools as a boy – I started school at a small state school in rural Victoria before we moved closer to Melbourne and I started attending a much larger state primary school in the suburbs. When my father returned from the war, he sent me to the local ‘Grammar School’ – at that time, a fairly new independent school that had pretensions towards being an ‘elite school, and after three years there I moved onto the truly elite Geelong Grammar. My experience of corporal punishment was quite different at each school.
