The earliest mention of the school paddle in the USA 17

The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

Another maybe amusing post on the shingle.

CLICK

The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

In the USA education was and is largely locally organized. This has made my research into the origin of the paddle difficult.

I have found no discussion of the merits of the paddle versus other implements in any of the more “progressive states” – those with good newspaper and other online archives – or in the present paddling states (Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama and Tennessee), which tend to have less complete or less accessible archives.

Can anybody suggest a state where the paddle was once popular that I might concentrate on?

The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

1873 shingles for spanking purposes. How are shingles made for spanking services different than shingles?

CLICK

The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

Just a thought. The problem is the rather partial nature of administration in the South in th pre and post civil war period which make records far more difficult to trace. Can I suggest Louisiana? It was a slave state ( sugar etc.), and quite well organised from the point of view as a commercial hub . Now Orleans /Baton Rouge ? Just an idea

The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

The slave paddle is well known, as is the leather prison and reformatory paddle in use towards the end on the 19th. century and into the 20th It seems that prison authorities had considerable autonomy deciding disciplinary practices with little regard for the law. Prison conditions were often very harsh.

The wooden paddle was used in some prisons, probably a carryover from slavery.

http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc2.ark:/139 … %3Bseq=268
The development of American prisons and prison customs, 1776-1845
By O. F. LEWIS PhD.

Late General Secretary American Prison Association and the Prison Association of New York
Published by the Prison Association of New York

GEORGIA

Page 266, excerpt:

In 1841, the Reverend Gerrish Barrett visited on his travels this prison [the State penitentiary of Georgia]. He described it as in the suburbs of Milledgeville, the capital of the State, on ground that was too low. It had 150 cells, occupied by 160 prisoners, among whom were 4 white women and one mulatto. The cells were on the Baltimore prison plan, but smaller. The spaces between the tiers of cells were entirely floored over. The cell doors were of wood, without any grating, and fastened with a padlock.

The chief industries of the prison were shoemaking, harness making, and wagon making. The prison did not support itself. No ardent spirits and no tobacco were allowed. Thirty of the 160 prisoners could not read and 52 could not write. There was no one save their fellow convicts to teach the ignorant to read. There was preaching once a week from a minister from the town, who received $150 annually for his services. There was no flogging in the prison, but the paddle was used. The paddle consisted of a piece of wood, 4 feet long, and 2 or 3 inches in diameter; one end of the paddle was wider than the rest, flattened, and was filled with holes. With the flat end, from 5 to 30 blows would be applied to the bare skin of a prisoner, while he was held over a block or a barrel.

The above seems unlikely to be a precursor for school paddling.

The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

<div style=”width:100%;background-image:url(/realm/A_L_123/A_L_trg.gif);”>Hi KK,

What a very curious description of the Georgia State Penitentiary Paddle in 1841 in the article you quote above. I would have thought that ‘two or three inches in diameter’ couldn’t be for instance a confusion of a handle with the whole of the device. It is surely too large a diameter to be comfortably and firmly gripped for an active use like paddling.

I can’t readily visualise the device. Can you?</div>

The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

AL,

The description of a paddle with such a large diameter does not make sense. Even the word flattened is suspect – one does not normally flatten wood. Wood is not mallable. I wonder if there has been a problem with the type setting of a fraction. Otherwise, the description might have suffered from transcription errors. Perhaps the dimensions were recorded from a verbal description without the paddle being seen.

I envisage a paddle shaped like a small oar consisting of a shaft, perhaps one or up to one and one half inches in diameter, with a flat blade at the end. Such a paddle might have been cut from a single plank.

Alternatively, the blade of the paddle might have been two to three inches in diameter – a flat disk on the end of a shaft – a palmaterio. The name suggests application to the hand but it seems unlikely slave owners would have risked injuries to the hands or that slaves could be easily forced to submit.

(If only people would write more clearly.)

The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

<div style=”width:100%;background-image:url(/realm/A_L_123/A_L_trg.gif);”>Hi KK,

With regard to the strange paddle description you say above:

Yes, that certainly sounds reasonable. I’ve always assumed that, despite the various descent lines for paddles from shingles etc., the actual name paddle derives from the aquatic propulsion device.

Some time ago here I posted with reference to a site our esteemed fellow contributor American Way had linked:

Those paddles were vast, and could certainly have propelled a racing eight. The site has changed it’s nature now, and a quick look tonight failed to discover any examples, though doubtless they are still there somewhere. But what they had in common with the far smaller 16″ x 3 1/2″ x 1/4″ paddle recently deployed by Renee of Teachers Who Paddle here (ouch! ) is that both types could be used to propel a boat by a paddle action.

I’m not sure about your palmaterio for use for disciplinary purposes in the State Prison though. Hold out your hand you naughty prisoner! Nope, doesn’t have quite the right ring to it! </div>

The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/detail?accno=ED253347
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1 … 4v04n01_06

Paper presented at the Annual Convention of the National Association of School Psychologists (Philadelphia, PA, April 20, 1984).
Analysis of Recent Corporal Punishment Cases Reported in National Newspapers Clarke, Jacqueline; et al.

This paper presents examples of types of corporal punishment and a content analysis of newspaper articles since 1977 dealing with corporal punishment in public and nonpublic schools. Examples are used to illustrate types of punishment, paddling injuries, injuries to other parts of the body, special punishments devised by teachers, deaths due to physical punishment, and punishments administered to special education students.

The content analysis used 212 reports which contained data on the sex and job position of the educator, the sex and age of the student, the nature of the infraction, and the severity of the punishment. Student infractions were divided into violent and nonviolent categories. Punishments were divided into cases that required medical treatment, cases that resulted in physical injury not requiring medical treatment, and cases thought by parents to be improperly administered. Results indicated differences by sex in the frequency of both meting out and receiving punishment. The incidence of punishment was found to increase up to junior high school, and severity of the punishment was found to be related to sex but not to age or to the violence of the offense. Results are discussed in terms of the educational system and prevailing cultural norms.

It is concluded that lawsuits may provide the impetus for the development of more adequate guidelines for the use of corporal punishement. However, the failure of current guidelines to protect children suggests that corporal punishment should be abolished.

[The newspapers are likely to have reported the extraordinary rather than the ordinary so represent a very biased sample of all corporal punishment. This is not to say the extraordinary is unimportant.]