Learning the hard way: The stick and the leather

BY JOHN FITZGERALD

In 2001 Callan man Sean Holden recalled sitting behind his desk on a typical day at the local CBS all those years before. He listened to the teacher droning on about Irish verbs and tenses as he paced up and down the room.

Sean described what happened next: “Suddenly, without any warning, he’d spot a lad he thought wasn’t paying attention. Out came the leather, as quick as a flash, and he’d lay into the pupil. The lad would get it on the head, and across the back of the neck and shoulders. That was before he was ordered to put out his hand to be slapped.

“He put great force into each slap, and he’d give you a terrible look of reproach before the stick came crashing down. And he always went for the finger joints, to inflict real pain.

“As a rule, when this happened to you in the classroom, you tended to be more alert and tried not to look bored or half asleep for the remainder of the day. I suppose the corporal punishment worked in that sense. You learned by fear.

“Slow learners got a hard deal. They got slapped and knocked about almost every day. There was very little of the softly-softly approach we see nowadays in schools. No psychology or anything. “It was a military type setup. We drilled in the playground like little soldiers, and sang martial songs, mostly in Irish. When I got slapped, I preferred the leather because the bamboo really hurt, and I remember one lad whose hands bled after he got slapped with a stick that had splinters in it.

“And you never mentioned the slaps at home or your parents would give you another few, and maybe worse ones, for good measure. Political Correctness wasn’t heard of in those days. You hear nowadays of the Stick and the Carrot. There was no carrot back then, just the stick, and a