NRS-17186 | Punishment Book [Stewart's Brook Public School]

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Regulations under the Public Schools Act of 1866, adopted by the Council [of Education] 27 February 1867 regulated the punishment of children in schools by stipulating: “In the government of the pupils, all degrading and injurious punishments are to be avoided. The Teacher’s discipline must be mild but firm, his manner kindly, his demeanour cheerful and calculated to gain the confidence of his pupils, and his language marked by strict propriety. While he should overlook no offence, his aim should be to prevent the necessity for punishment by the improvement of the offender.”

In relation to corporal punishment the regulations continue: “Corporal punishment should be inflicted in extreme cases only, and then as a last resource; and the teacher must keep a record of the time and place at which pupils were corporally chastised, the amount of such punishment and the nature of the offence.”

Uniform stationery soon evolved to enable compliance with these regulations. These punishment books are registers of all cases in which corporal punishment was given to pupils. The information they detail includes: the pupil’s name; age; nature of offence; amount of punishment (i.e. number of strokes); by whom sent; the date of the punishment; and by whom the punishment was inflicted.

It appears that the portion of this volume dealing with the period from 1897 to 1900 is not the original record, but a transcription of an original set of entries which had been kept separately. The penmanship speaks to continuous transcription in this section of the volume, as do several obvious errors in the copying of dates, and the circumstance that there is an hiatus between the entries for May, 1897 and November, 1898 which coincides with the turning of a page. No Inspector’s signature occurs between 1894 and 1906. Again, the entries from late 1912 until the end of 1913 appear all to have been transcribed into the volume on one occasion prior to the visit of the Inspector in September, 1914.