Coming back to the UK, this is admittedly only a sample of one, but a former housemaster tells me that he was quite specifically instructed how to do it by a more senior staff member — the expert flick of the wrist at the last moment, the importance of aiming at the lower half of the posterior, how to measure where to stand, how far to “follow through” — and urged to take practice strokes on a well-padded armchair. Had this been standard procedure everywhere, we should surely have had fewer stories about inept canings that went wrong. There seems to have been insufficient understanding in some parts of the teaching profession that caning accurately and fairly is quite a skilled operation.