You know all those comforting fantasies we all have about the 1950s? When men smoked pipes, chuckled heartily, and drank Scotch in their slippers? When women used upright Hoovers, baked cakes, and turned to Valium to numb the existential pain of enforced domestic servitude? When disobedient children could be disciplined in the proper, loving, Christian manner of being hit by someone bigger and more powerful than them? Well, fantasise no more, because Christian schools in Queensland have looked deep inside their shrivelled, reptilian hearts, and decided to continue the tradition of teachers giving students a good, hard whack-around when they’re being unruly.
Bundaberg Christian College principal Mark Bensley said corporal punishment had become a drawcard for some parents because of a “lack of boundaries” at other schools.
“A growing number of parents come to our school and say the school got their attention because it uses the paddle,” Mr Bensley said.
[…]
“It is always administered in a loving way. In fact, we pray with them afterwards.”
Whoa, whoa, people. Premeditated violence perpetrated against somene less powerful than you is an expression of love? What is this, 1984? If you say it often enough, do you start believing it’s true? And then the poor kid has to kneel down in front of God and pray with the person who just whacked them! The Creeposaurus Rex factor here is off the charts! Institutionalised coercive violence alert! Abort! Get Jesus and the rest of the dino-riders in, quick!
So this is in Independent schools, right. Corporal punishment in State schools in QLD was “banned” in 1995, if by “banned” you mean “incurred the mild, tut-tutting, non-binding disapproval of some lazy politicians”.
In Queensland corporal punishment was banned in schools by a cabinet decision of 1995, but this is still not legally binding, and the paradoxical situation has arisen, where, in spite of the school ban, teachers can:
“…continue to have defence to a criminal charge of assault if their conduct is determined to be reasonable under the circumstances.” (Personal communication R. Welford, Attorney General, Queensland, Feb 21, 2002).
So not only did the Queensland Cabinet in 1995 fail to care a ha’-penny about pupils in Independent schools, they also didn’t think it was necessary for abusive tachers to suffer any kind of, you know, punishment. Which is highly amusing to your narrator this morning! Teachers who disobey the Cabinet’s bannination of violence potentially suffer no actual consequences, but if your kid is being too unruly during playlunch, you’d better belive that’s a paddlin’.
This seems to be something relatively peculiar to Queensland, if this article is anything to go by. It details the various ways in which government schools in the sunshine state are “cracking down” on students doing heinous, disruptive things like not wearing scrunchies:
“I tell them their hair can be any colour that is found in a human being. The girls have to have their hair tied back in a ribbon or scrunchies. The boys have to have their hair cut above their collar.”
I remember back when I was a young’un at school, a whopping 18 months ago, the massive learning difficulties I suffered because my school didn’t enforce gender normative hairdos. Undoubtedly I would’ve been at an advantage if all the girls had worn beehives, and a military barber was contracted to shear the boys’ ears off. Just think, the principal whipping out a metre ruler, using it to make sure all the beehives were at least 10cm off the scalp, and then giving you a right smack round the calves if they weren’t. Now that’s the kind of wholesome, egalitarian learning experience that schools are trying to cultivate in Queensland.
She's a Carnivore 