In Loco Parentis, Corporal Punishment and the Moral Economy of Discipline in English Schools, 1945–1986

Andrew Burchell

doi:10.1080/14780038.2018.1518562

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article uses debates surrounding teachers’ in loco parentis position to explore the social and cultural responses to school corporal punishment in post-1945 English schools. Analysing materials produced by educators and campaigners, it argues that retentionists conceived of their right to inflict physical chastisement as one based on an imagined and discursive status as a parent. This was challenged by opponents who stressed not only the severity of the practice but sought to directly counter the view that parental rights should be automatically delegated to teachers. Whilst the abolition of corporal punishment was ultimately a consequence of an ECHR ruling, it is suggested that it can also be read as the culmination of a longer shift in the status and forms of parental rights in twentieth-century Britain.

Highlights

When the 1938 Home Office Departmental Committee on Corporal Punishment administered in judicial settings recommended the abolition of birching for juveniles, its argument was framed through an opposition of the penal regime to the domestic and school interior
While there may have been a shift away from its use against younger children and towards adolescents – with one teaching union admitting in 1983 that the cane was still prevalent but that it was ‘in the secondary sector that corporal punishment has continued most in use’ – it is the categories of class and gender, as much as age, which are implicated in polemics over corporal punishment.[13]
As Sascha Auerbach notes about parental opposition to state education in the nineteenth century, the ‘dissonance’ was between those ‘who prioritised the needs and rights of parents from those who prioritised the state’s duty to protect children’, by the late-twentieth century, the issues surrounding school discipline, parents and children seem to have been transfigured into a question of parent versus teacher, rather than parent versus state.[91]

Summary

Introduction

When the 1938 Home Office Departmental Committee on Corporal Punishment administered in judicial settings (known after its chair as the Cadogan Committee) recommended the abolition of birching for juveniles, its argument was framed through an opposition of the penal regime to the domestic and school interior.

Results

Conclusion