My own attitude to school cp is one of total opposition, but I also think there’s no need to make it out to be worse than it was. Because what it was was bad enough. At my school in Africa, like Dean’s in Aus, you weren’t caned on a whim. The kind of arbitrary justice that I sometimes hear about on this forum never happened at my school. There was at least consistency. You knew what was a caneable offence and what wasn’t.
Well this is part of what I mean by whim. The whim part has to do with delineating a list of caneable offenses that are arbitrarily chosen as those that exact a beating. Central to the process is the behavior eliciting the caning in the disciplinary approach rather than the child being the center of concern and consideration. After all isnt the point of discipline to make the child better and to develop a sense of responsibility and morality? Certainly discipline has to be more than a menu for how many strokes of the cane for what in a ritual of retribution.