Children quite like a bit of theatre, and they are not usually averse to watching a classmate get whacked when they know they are not going to be. So the Teacher’s subliminal message there was ‘see, I’m punishing this naughty child, and giving you good children some entertainment. Be good, and be entertained’.
Exactly the same two elements, deterrence and entertainment, are still being used by Teachers elsewhere in much more recent times. Watch many of the surreptitiously shot classroom punishment videos from The Republic of Korea, Thailand etc. Those Teachers also seem to have to deal with big classes without assistance, and they are in cultures where good educational results are the expected norm. They’d have been quite at home in UK classrooms in the mid 20th century, and they adopt the same methods as teachers did then.
