To demonstrate how the thinking on all this has shifted, but clearly not enough...

When I was at Hefner Jr. High in the early 70's, "paddlings" were extremely common, usually by the assistant principal or a particularly macho male teacher or coach who was almost too happy to volunteer.

At the time, Hefner was the largest junior high in the state and PC schools were considered the best in Oklahoma.

In the 8th grade (would have been around 13 years old) I had a history teacher named Mr. Thurman who was easily 300 pounds. And he was one of the corporal discipline specialists that other teachers would send their misbehaving students to so he could beat them with the menacing paddle (with holes drilled to increase velocity!) that hung prominently in his classroom. Many, many times there would be a knock on our door and Mr. Thurman would stop class so he could step out into the hall and beat a child that he outweighed by 200 pounds with a heavy piece of wood. The sound and cries were horrifying -- and were meant to be.

One day we had a substitute teacher in this particular class and when Mr. Thurman returned he told us that his replacement had taken names of everyone who talked; turned out that literally every kid in the room was on the list. The girls got detention, the boys all got a 'lick'.

I'm sure he didn't hit me as hard as he hit others in other circumstances and he only hit me once, but it hurt like a mother goose. And I had a bad welt which turned to a bruise or my arse for more than a week. Of course it did! I was a skinny little kid who probably didn't even weigh a hundred pounds.


(Also, I had gym all three years at Hefner and we had one big communal locker room and shower and I remember lots of boys showing off their "lick scars" with a certain degree of pride.)

This was all par for the course back then; a 300 pound man beating pre-teens with a piece of lumber. Happened virtually every day at that school.

Finally, someone wised up and put a stop to it.

When I tell one of my younger friends about this, it's hard to believe myself. It sounds completely insane. And of course it was completely insane but it was just the continuation of something that had always been done, without much consideration.


And now that I think about it, there were never any licks when I got to high school. I'm sure they knew that the students 1) would not put up with it and/or 2) would likely retaliate. In other words, we'll beat them until they are big and strong enough to stand up for themselves. Makes the whole thing that much more perverse.


One more thing... I just helped organize our 35-year high school reunion and for the first time we used Facebook quite a bit to share memories from our school days. About half of us went to Hefner (the other half went to a much less strict Central Jr. High) and even though the group was mainly about high school, there were several threads about Hefner and this paddling thing. Here were all these people in their 50's sharing traumatic experiences like a support group. So please don't tell me these things don't have a long-lasting effect, especially when society tells you, basically, to shut up and take your medicine.