Belts, the tawse, the lochgelly made by saddler John J Dick , came in two or three weights and shapes – two-tail, three-tail – and teachers either kept them in handy drawers or looped them over their shoulders and under their gowns as a crafty gunslinger might.
A new book by the always-interesting Scottish writer Carol Craig argues that Scotland’s poor health, the worst in western Europe, has its roots in the prevalence of adverse childhood experiences, an American term signifying an upbringing affected by the stresses caused typically by a proximity to drugs, alcohol and violence.
“As a country, we need to admit that nurturing children has never been one of Scotland’s strengths,” she writes in the introduction to Hiding in Plain Sight. In a piece in this week’s Scottish Review, she contends that teachers were encouraged to belt a pupil in front of the class because the Scottish educational system “was designed to instil fear”. She says that in the course of her research she encountered hardly anyone of our generation (hers and mine) who hadn’t been belted, “many of them multiple times”, for offences as trivial as giggling.
Craig reminds us that the belt was wielded in primary as well as secondary schools, and that girls got belted as well as boys. In 1973, Edinburgh’s education committee voted to phase out the belt by 1977, but abandoned the decision after loud opposition from schoolteachers who were zealous of their right to beat children as young as five.
England was no stranger to corporal punishment in schools either, but Scotland was far more addicted to it – the contrast between the two educational systems grew after English local authorities began to limit the use of the cane in the 1960s. The truth is that the belt was popular in Scotland among parents and teachers, and its banning from state schools in 1987 stemmed from a judgment by the European court of human rights rather than local lobbying. Private schools had to wait until 1998 in England and 2000 in Scotland. Poland had banned it as long ago as 1783, the Netherlands in 1920 and Italy in 1928, but Scotland preserved a reverence for it
In 1972, according to logs kept by teachers, the belt was used about 30,000 times on an Edinburgh school population of 80,000, and 494 girls aged between five and 11 were among the 4,201 schoolchildren belted in the spring term of 1973.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/24/belted-school-education-corporal-punishment
A new book by the always-interesting Scottish writer Carol Craig argues that Scotland’s poor health, the worst in western Europe, has its roots in the prevalence of adverse childhood experiences, an American term signifying an upbringing affected by the stresses caused typically by a proximity to drugs, alcohol and violence.
“As a country, we need to admit that nurturing children has never been one of Scotland’s strengths,” she writes in the introduction to Hiding in Plain Sight. In a piece in this week’s Scottish Review, she contends that teachers were encouraged to belt a pupil in front of the class because the Scottish educational system “was designed to instil fear”. She says that in the course of her research she encountered hardly anyone of our generation (hers and mine) who hadn’t been belted, “many of them multiple times”, for offences as trivial as giggling.
Craig reminds us that the belt was wielded in primary as well as secondary schools, and that girls got belted as well as boys. In 1973, Edinburgh’s education committee voted to phase out the belt by 1977, but abandoned the decision after loud opposition from schoolteachers who were zealous of their right to beat children as young as five.
England was no stranger to corporal punishment in schools either, but Scotland was far more addicted to it – the contrast between the two educational systems grew after English local authorities began to limit the use of the cane in the 1960s. The truth is that the belt was popular in Scotland among parents and teachers, and its banning from state schools in 1987 stemmed from a judgment by the European court of human rights rather than local lobbying. Private schools had to wait until 1998 in England and 2000 in Scotland. Poland had banned it as long ago as 1783, the Netherlands in 1920 and Italy in 1928, but Scotland preserved a reverence for it
In 1972, according to logs kept by teachers, the belt was used about 30,000 times on an Edinburgh school population of 80,000, and 494 girls aged between five and 11 were among the 4,201 schoolchildren belted in the spring term of 1973.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/24/belted-school-education-corporal-punishment
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