Get the cane, Mr Sykes! cried our primary headteacher to her husband on discovering that Tony Franks, the naughtiest boy in the school, had committed yet another misdemeanour. A frisson of terror rippled through the whole assembly. Mr Sykes - whom we never saw on a normal day - duly appeared like a bespectacled Nemesis, and Tony was led away to reappear later in the classroom, red-faced and tearstained.
These events were common currency in the schools of the 1950s, when small girls were smacked for getting their sums wrong, and six-foot boys in the sixth form had to wear school caps and could be caned for smoking on the bus.
And this, it seems, is the world that 40 private schools want to return to in their plea to have the law against corporal punishment repealed. It’s a world where there was more respect and deference in schools - as well as brutality and fear. But on the surface it seemed so much safer and more orderly.
The cane, it seems, has become a symbol of that lost orderliness. Bring it back and the other ancient virtues will return as well. Strangely, the schools which are in the vanguard of this movement are Christian, a religion which preaches that love should overcome fear.
Surely “respect” bought through physical punishment is no more than disguised fear. And those bloodthirsty Biblical quotations about sparing the rod are pre-Christian - from the Old, not the New Testament.
Maybe Britain is simply a more brutal society than other developed countries. Other countries fear our football fans. Two children every week are killed by their parents through violence or neglect. We were the last European nation to abolish caning in schools - more than 100 years after Poland and Denmark. Private schools hung onto their right to administer corporal punishment for a few more years - in spite of the ludicrous fact that caneable children (whose parents paid full fees) might be sitting next to uncaneable children (whose fees were being paid by the state via the assisted places scheme).
The usual argument for the cane is that it is the only language some young people can understand. This cliche deserves to be unpicked and thought about, for it is truly shocking. If the youth of other countries does not have to be beaten into submission, what on earth is wrong with ours?
More to the point, what’s wrong with British society, that the processes by which young people are socialised and taught to reflect on their actions seem to be so ineffectual? Teachers and au pairs from other countries are stunned by the reckless, thoughtless behaviour of our young, and not only the young from impoverished backgrounds.
In an under-educated society such as ours, schools have been handed the job of civilizing the coming generation, while the rest of us do nothing but snipe from the sidelines or harrumph in the columns of the right-wing press.
Meanwhile, outside the walls of the school, personal assertiveness and unthinking hedonism are in full swing. The pushy attitude of the young is fuelled by commercial interests that have turned children as young as five into consumers and encouraged them to pester their parents to get what they want. A generation repeatedly told it has the right to choose which products it buys now feels it has the right to choose how to behave.
The cane cannot be used to force children to respect teachers in a society bent on money-making, where disruptive behaviour is simply a lifestyle choice.
