By Larry Marsh, Kansas City Star Midwest Voices columnist 2009
The failure of some American schools to produce well-educated students has many causes. One of the key factors is school discipline. Without orderly procedures and traditions schools lack the atmosphere necessary to achieve good academic performance. The British empire was based on an education system with strict discipline and traditions which made their way across the Atlantic to some private schools in America.
Nyack Boys School was an old Dutch mansion in the 1950s located on the west bank of the Hudson River just north of the Tappan Zee Bridge between the town of Nyack to the south and Bear Mountain to the north. Sing Sing Prison is located just up the river on the other side, and Tarrytown with its legend of Sleepy Hollow is directly across the river. Nyack Seminary overlooks the river along with old underground military bunkers nearby connected by tunnels that snake their way through the woods on the surrounding hills.
All students wore jackets and ties every day except during play periods. The jackets were navy blue with red piping and a school seal of red and blue with gold embroidery displaying the tree of growth, the lamp of knowledge and the scales of justice.
Before each meal, the boys would line up in rows in the first-floor reception hall. Younger boys were in the first rows and older ones in the last rows. A young boy served as inspector for the first rows and an older boy for the last ones. The procedure was routine: Inspector steps in front of boy. Boy smoothly raises hands together, palms forward in front of face. Turns hands slowly to show neatly trimmed nails. Inspector steps away. Boy lowers hands. The two best groomed boys (younger and older) would get to be inspectors before the next meal.
Mr. Karcos as headmaster maintained a very orderly boarding school with strict discipline in the English tradition. For serious offenses he may occasionally have struck a student across the hand with a ruler, but it was done only with just cause in an orderly way and without malice. It was not the pain but the humiliation that made the point.
For less serious offenses there were "cubes." Ten cubes were given for chewing gum in a building and twenty for running in the hall. Offenders would work off their "sentences" by cubing numbers at late afternoon cube sessions that would otherwise have been free time. In the 1950s hand calculators did not exist. Starting with the number 30, students cubed numbers by hand with all steps shown and taken to the front desk for inspection upon completion of the set.
Sigmund Freud in his conveniently ambiguous style would predict that such a system would permanently cause a boy to either love math or hate it. I learned to love it. Perhaps they did not punish me enough.
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Also see:
Tom Ryan's commentary: Students, take charge of learning
New math can succeed with right attitude and priorities
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Not even the English maintain the English tradition.
The UK banned corporal punishment in the schools years ago.
And, if Mr. Karcos taught in Kansas City in 2009, I doubt he would recommend whacking the hands of the students as a disciplinary measure. If he tried that, things would probably turn out even worse than they did for the brave band teacher on the school bus Tuesday night. Life in the KCMO school district is a lot different than for East Coast boarding schools.
Well, let me modify that slightly. There is the occasional similarity: “Nyack Boys School shut down in 1971. Financial trouble, the newspapers said. At the end, according to the mother of a boy in the last class, the place was chaos, with misfits on the faculty and students, unsupervised, scaling the heavy slate roof.”
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/13/magazine/about-men-the-road-to-self-reliance.html