I’m in a much better position to judge here and I think the way corporal punishment is used in Australian schools, has been acceptable (perhaps with a few exceptions) in nearly all schools that still used or use it, since at least the 1970s, although I have real doubts about it’s use in many schools before that – including my own, and including things I was involved in. I don’t think we were that bad – but this is an area where even being a little bit unacceptable simply wasn’t good enough. I don’t rip myself apart about it, but I also don’t deny it.
Being so prolific I would have benefited from you as an English teacher albeit without your dreaded cane. Forgive me for sacrificing clarity for the sake of brevity and for also substituting generalizations and surmises for qualifications and proofs. Isn’t it interesting that schools have mostly switched from hitting bottoms instead of hands and are hitting with less severity?