TRANSFORMATION OF CHILDREN'S SERVICES IN UK

Transformation Of Children's Services In UK



Transformation Of Children's Services In UK

One of the most obvious reflections of changing attitudes towards childhood is displayed by the manner in which children are taught and disciplined. At the beginning of the twentieth century, conformity and disciplined behaviour were educational goals as desirable as literacy and numeracy. For boys the enforcement of these was largely through corporal punishment, considered an appropriate way to prepare boys for the rigours of real life. In the British Empire at its peak, real life potentially included some form of military endeavour, particularly for the middle and upper classes. A wave of stories of the early 1900s set within affluent boys' public schools consequently held physical strength and "backbone" in high regard, with heroes regularly engaged in fistfights or other aggressive behaviour.

Factual accounts of boarding schools of the time correlate the descriptions of harshness and violence in these stories. As home secretary from 1910 to 1911, Winston Churchill was famously known to have declared that his prison reforming sympathies were largely the result of his own boarding school experiences. Similarly, the experiences of Roald Dahl in three British schools, documented in his autobiography, Boy, indicate strongly held convictions and traditions of brutal methods for control and direction of boys.

The frequent acts of violence that emerge in early boys' school stories were nevertheless frequently portrayed in a casual, sometimes light-hearted manner - a stance that testifies to its social acceptance within the period. The relaxed accounts of beatings like those throughout Martin Clifford's (aka Charles Hamilton) St Jim's tales of The Gem magazine, are merely necessary components of plot rather than a dramatic focus. The routine quality of the punishments bears witness to the view of corporal punishment as necessity for boys in the early 1900s. The wry narrative style of the author takes a more humorous tone for his long-running Billy Bunter stories, but both series describe an environment in which physical punishment was a perfectly acceptable and edifying force for boys.

Similarly, the fictional victims of harsh punishment displayed little serious resentment. The 1923 Martin Clifford story, Cardew the Rebel, combines formal punishment with peer aggression when a beating is ordered for Cardew by the Form captain and publicly administered by fellow students. The effect of the event is to see Cardew immediately doing "some serious thinking" about his idleness and disregard for football practice. Hours later he has determined to reform, and excel in the sport, furthermore expressing a greater respect for his captain for undertaking such action. Such a storyline in the 1990s would have undoubtedly received significant criticism of the level of inappropriate violence, but in 1923, the confrontation simply provides a vehicle for the promotion of values such as duty, loyalty and honour. The differing perceptions of violence held at the beginning of the century are further illustrated in Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co., by the students' consistent preference for caning as punishment rather than being "gated" (detained), or ...