“A normal and useful method of class control?” Policy on Corporal Punishment in Irish Schools: c1974–1985

Abstract

Even if we consider only the culture or civilisation we habitually call western European—that which emerged from the collision of Athens and Jerusalem symbolically taking place in first century CE Rome—it is obvious that corporal punishment has deep historical roots. It has had domestic, scholastic, judicial and military expressions (Scott, 1968; Gibson, 1979; Parker-Jenkins, 1999; Geltner, 2014). It is often referred to as spanking at home, caning or belting in schools, birching in judicial contexts and flogging if associated with the armed forces. It was decreasingly commonly permitted in families/homes in Europe by 2020 and its use in civilian or military law was unknown there by then (though it remained extant elsewhere; Human Rights Watch, 2020a, 2020b). In its scholastic form it was also anathema in western Europe by 2020 but it had been practised in European schools for centuries. Although it was practised in pre-Christian, pagan or classical western European life, including the Greco-Roman and Celtic milieus, it clearly has a longstanding and close association with the Judeo-Christian culture that has influenced western Europe since late antiquity (Scott, 1968; Gibson, 1979; Ristuccia, 2010; Geltner, 2014; Parsons, 2015).