SELECTIVE COMPASSION

At school 50 years ago we were taught woodwork - really cabinet making - from age 11 to 16. So good was the teaching that 15 years later when I bought an old house in London, I was able to make Georgian wooden sash windows, cupboards, and even doors with proper joints and panels - and sell the house.

The teacher was capabable, clever, and popular. When he saw any boy do something dangerous, careless, or silly with a chisel or saw, he would hand him a piece of rough timber, with instructions on the size of the finished article, and leave the boy to prepare it.

"Put down that bradall and come here Wright (me), you clot! What did I tell you about chiselling or bradalling towards your hand or body? (slap!) What shall I say to your mother when the doctor tells her to stop your violin lesson because you've no tendons in you left hand? (slap!) OK, take this piece of wood...."

Only when the wood was of the right length, breadth, and thickness, right-angled and planed, would it be used to whack the boy on the backside. Terrible! Child abuser!! Pervert!!!

15 years later, when I was teaching at a school in Watford, the equally capable and clever woodwork master had to get rid of all sharp tools, because the pupils might stab each other. Wood had to be shaped using a safe grinding wheel. The pupils could make nothing of interest.

Dom Philip Jebb, Headmaster of Downside told me 20 years ago that he had had either to discontinue beating at the school, or declare in the prospectus, "We will beat your son." I gathered he thought corporal punishment to be at times an efficient behavioural modifier, though with a negative public image.

In these more compassionate times, such practices reek of the Dark Ages/the Marquis de Sade/the Spanish Inquisition/an expensive brothel - you may choose your own horrors.

I think of busy, kindly men, doing their best for the kids they had to teach, and doing it well.

Smacking a child can send you to gaol, with a lifelong legal requirement to register as a child-abuser at you local police station.

The same legal system allows the excruciatingly painful killing of unborn childrem; it sends 16 year-olds to juvenile prisons like Feltham, where they may be raped or otherwise maltreated or stabbed (or so ex-inmates have told me). It knows of no compassion beyond the sentimental.

It's all about feeling and seeming good. The slapped child, the executed murderer make us feel bad.

The aborted child and the violated young offender make us feel nothing, because we don't have to see them.

Stupid and wicked.