Cash for caning.

From time to time my sister has an argument with a colleague. The argument usually starts when education is in the news, and her colleague usually starts it by remarking that teachers are underpaid. To this I typically reply that there are plenty of people in sordid and badly paid jobs who face worse risks, such as bankruptcy and death, without the comfort of a vocation, and anyhow teachers get about half the year off. This never has any effect. Her colleague has a friend who teaches; the friend has to deal with a lot of stress in her job; she spends a lot of her so-called ‘time off’ in marking and preparation; no job is more vital than the tutelage of the young; therefore teachers ought to get more money. So, last time, sister decided to try a different tack.
“Tell you what. You ask this friend of yours which she’d prefer – an extra two thousand quid a year on her salary, or bringing back the cane.”
“But don’t you think that hitting children is barbaric … never justified … only teaches them that violence solves violence … reasoning with them is so much better … etc ...”
“Yes, whatever, never mind all that, just ask her.”
And there she left it.
Shortly after this, sister and I were chatting about this conversation and I resolved to pursue the matter. The next time I found myself having drinks with a couple of friends, both teachers at an ordinary comprehensive, I decided to put the same question to them. Which would they prefer, cash or the cane? Their answer was prompt and unanimous. The cane. No contest.
“What, you’d prefer it to an extra two K a year?”
They nodded in unison. “Absolutely.”
I was fascinated. How much, I wondered, would you have to offer them before they went for the money instead? Well, certainly more than two thousand, they said. Three thousand? Five? Ten? More? And at this point something rather remarkable transpired. Of course it has to be borne in mind that none of us was entirely sober. But the question sparked off what I can only describe as a bidding war. We quickly established that they’d prefer a reintroduction of the cane as a deterrent to any annual pay rise below five grand a year, but that wasn’t all. Provided, my friends agreed, that they were allowed full access to what was, twenty-odd years ago, a teacher’s standard arsenal – the slipper, the cane, the tweaked ear, the pellet of chalk, the roundhouse clip round the back of the head, the sarcastic comment and teh verbal sally – they both told me that they would be prepared to forego a full £20,000 a year for the privilege.
Now, according to the DFES website, there were at the last count around 214,700 secondary school teachers in England alone. And I suppose it is possible that my friends are both abnormally sadistic deviants, although to be honest I feel it’s unlikely. But even supposing them both to set twice as high a premium on the value of caning as the average, it’s still impossible not to conclude that abolishing the cane has had the same effect on the morale of England’s teachers as an aggregate drop in pay of over £2billion a year.
Whichever way you look at it, this is a staggering sum. Nor, as far as I know, was it really anticipated, even by union representatives, in the run up to the caning ban. No wonder teachers are dissatisfied. In the long term they have indisputably lost out on a massive scale, and it does not therefore seem at all unreasonable to take a look at ways in which their loss might be addressed, in so far as is now possible.
One way, obviously, is to pay teachers more. That would presumably be acceptable to teachers, but my more cynical readers might say it runs a fair risk of setting off a whole round of wage claims from other public sector employees keen to evaluate grievances of their own. Or there’s the opposite approach: freeze teachers’ pay, and reverse the ban on corporal punishment. This would, I trust, be feasible - though by no means straightforward these days under European law - and would avoid the call for extra revenue. The real difficulty is that some parents are just implacably opposed to caning. “If someone laid a finger on my kid,” went one online comment I read from silver_blue, “I’d take a baseball bat to them.”* Nobody ought to have to teach in the face of this sort of threat.
Luckily, however, there is a third option. And that is to restore choice to the parents themselves. Suppose a tax was levied to compensate teachers for the cutback in disciplinary options, but that parents who consented for their offspring to receive corporal punishment could claim exemption from it. In this way, the demands of all parties could be satisfactorily met. Parents who had no objection to the use of the cane need not be obliged to defray the cost of its abolition. People like my sister’s colleague, who wanted to reward teachers for working under stressful conditions, would be free to do just that. And teachers themselves could be reimbursed on a pro-rata basis for any noli me tangere pupils remaining in their charge. Everybody would gain. It isn’t often that a Government gets the chance to placate one group without provoking another, and so it is with some complacency that I lay before you, for their consideration, this scheme in its outline form. I can’t be bothered to think of a palliative name for it, though, so as a private working title, may I suggest “Cash for Caning.”
And if anyone doubts that the scheme would be popular, I can attest that people who have heard it through so far have been unreservedly appreciative, apart from my colleague. The two teachers in particular thought it was splendid. Though they did point out that bleeding-heart detractors might try to liken it to a protection racket, or some kind of dubious financial arrangement between a supplier and Wackford Squeers. And it’s true one would soon see where people’s priorities lay. “But from a logical point of view,” they admitted, “there are no arguments against it at all.”

*This demonstrating the consistency of his claim that whilst teachers using the cane only teaches children that violence breed violence, him using a baseball bat would teach his children no such thing.