There was a liberal use of corporal punishment in my high school.
It was in Blacktown in the late 1970s. We were seen as a loutish bunch of lads who needed a firm hand. Most of us copped a taste of the strap or the cane from time to time, even running a bit of a competition to see how many cuts we could notch up from any one teacher. It never seemed unusual to any of us even though at times the violence was brutal and gratuitous.
I don't feel the least bit of pain in remembering any of this but one thing is clear: it did absolutely nothing to help my education.
It was the libraries, both school and municipal, where I did most of my learning. I had a deeply enriching time there and feel a debt of gratitude to the librarians and to those who championed the cause of public libraries.
I don't know what drove me to the libraries, but I am certain it was not the stick.
Why, I wonder, in these more enlightened times, do we continue to see a class-based approach to the education and training of people who are living on the edges of the economy; a class-based approach that begins, moreover, with the assumption that the more disadvantaged you are classified as being, the more you need to be controlled and coerced?
The 2011 Federal Budget solemnly proclaims the Government's faith in the virtues of education and training, primarily, it must be said, to prepare you for the even higher virtue of work, spruiked with true Calvinist conviction. The urgency with which we must get potential workers into the labour market is intoned as a matter of national emergency.
It's funny how quickly we are meant to forget that many of these people were seen as expendable and surplus to the needs of capital in times past. Others have been injured while on the job, sometimes after years of hard and unrewarding work.
It appears to matter little. All are bundled together by Government, Opposition, and the other dismal cheer-leaders for paternalism, as being in need of at least a little nudge if not a firm hand. The people, and, let's admit it, entire locations, that have been previously judged to be surplus populations, are now described as the unwilling workers that the nation is crying out for.
Along with the financial penalty stick and the humiliation stick they