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(Hebrews 5:8). Not that He learned to be obedient, as if He had before been disobedient, but. rather He learned what obedience entailed.

Today, corporal punishment of any sort is not allowed in schools and other institutions in the UK, with the result that there has been an increase in disorder in the classroom and in other places. The lack of the sanction of the cane in schools has left a gap between minor infractions which can be punished by giving extra work, keeping children in when they would otherwise be out at play, and the ultimate sanction of expulsion from the school. It is not a valid argument to say that we do not now administer the birch to adults, because, firstly we ought in some cases to do so, and secondly we have not got the sanction of prison or other penal institution where a child is under ten years old. What all this means is that children can get away with things that in days gone by they would not have been allowed to. This is not to suggest that the cane should be administered for every minor infraction, or for the kind of thing that Lewis Carroll speaks of in Alice in Wonderland: “Speak roughly to your little boy, And beat him when he sneezes: He only does it to annoy, Because he knows it teases”. The Duchess’s room was in any case full of the smell of pepper which is conducive to sneezing. Such kind of treatment does more harm than good, because the child to whom the punishment is administered is not taught a lesson by it. He will probably treat all punishment as something to be ignored. We have a similar type of thing in Mr. Creakle’s school in David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. As those who are familiar with the story will know, at the end Mr. Creakle was applying the opposite treatment (soft soap) to real criminals. The point is to administer punishment when necessary to show that certain behaviour will not be tolerated, but at the same time that punishment will not be administered for things that cannot be helped. When the writer was at school corporal punishment was administered to children in the junior school by giving them a racking on the knuckles with a ruler. Seniors had a stroke or strokes of the cane on their hands. At the grammar school the cane was applied to the seat of the pants. Personally I only had the cane once - a stroke on the hand. Maybe in days gone by there was too much caning in some schools and homes, but today the pendulum has swung too much the other way with

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