‘I never understood how six strokes across the backside from a long cane of a sadistic master was helping me to understand geometry – a subject of which I had no prior comprehension.’ Some pupils far preferred the cane to the anticipation of a Saturday detention. Overall regimentation associated with Public School education before World War II provided benefits to some pupils who, from various backgrounds and for various reasons, felt that this was an appropriate way to provide discipline during their teenage years. For others this could not have been further from the truth: ‘Melbourne Grammar taught me a lifelong distaste of all-male institutionalised official regimentation and entrenched squareness.'”