Sir, – Kitty Holland’s insightful article on physical abuse in schools (“Victims of corporal punishment on violence in the classroom”, Education, October 19th) brought back painful memories of my time (1955-1964) in Rutland Street School in Dublin. I recall the daily violence, both physical and psychological, inflicted on children. The sheer randomness of beatings meant that I was constantly hypervigilant for those six hours a day, every school day.
The damage done was permanent and emotionally crippling.
I learned how to read and write from my grandad. He knew from experience that education was not a priority in my school. Many of my classmates had no such support. School seemed to be more about social control, mainly through fear of punishment, and severe punishment, so often dished out mercilessly. Beating children who came to school cold and hungry was, I believe, a perversion of what a school should have been doing. I recall one teacher sending me out to a nearby shop to buy “thick bamboo cane”, as he had shattered one to splinters on a boy’s back. On returning with the new cane, I soon experienced the intense pain of it across my knuckles.
I think it was Jean Piaget, a child psychologist, who said that untreated childhood trauma becomes permanent adult trauma. It would certainly appear so. Over the years I’ve met a few classmates who were belittled and degraded into thinking they were somehow less than human. Some time ago, I asked a helpful teacher to access my school records. He said that he tried but could find no records of teachers or even roll books for Rutland Street School prior to the “new” school opening. It seems as if we have been written out of history.
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An apology seems little enough to ask for, although much too late for some of us. – Yours, etc,
PADDY REID,
Fairview,
Dublin 3.
Sir, – I grew up in a Midlands town where Convent of Mercy nuns (few, if any, of them qualified teachers) inflicted terrifying abuse, mostly on young girls, on a daily basis.
The “lower” the child’s socioeconomic status, the more savagely they were attacked.
No doubt this appalling scenario was replicated in numerous towns and cities throughout Ireland, well into the 1980s.
A formal apology from the culpable religious orders and the Department of Education is long overdue. – Yours, etc,
EMER HUGHES,
Claddagh,
Galway.