The Need for Punishment

In former times (so my memory and general lore tell me), it was generally taken as a self-evident fact that boys needed punishment; today, of course, ideas are very different.

For my own purposes, as an adult boy, I favour the old-fashioned view. However, I am not for a moment wanting to campaign for applying 'traditional' treatment to child boys living in the world of today. I am myself an adult boy, still (psychologically) living in the world as it was in about 1960, so different standards apply. My own need for punishment is radically different from what most people (including myself) would recommend for children now– but is interestingly similar to, though probably rather more extreme than, the general practice decades ago, when I was a child boy myself. I have become intrigued by the realisation that my attitude to punishment as an adult schoolboy reflects the sort of attitudes that were, at least implicitly, still current when I was a child boy, but which were increasingly coming under question or being rejected.

Firstly there is the sheer frequency and extent of punishment: to put it simply, I need a lot of the stuff – far more than I ever needed or received as a child.

Then there are the reasons for punishment: I favour a system (for myself) that steadily lowers the punishment threshold - so that increasingly minor things become punishable offences. And so my standard of discipline is forced (though, paradoxically, it is ‘forced’ by consent) higher and higher. I want to be punished not just for overt bad behaviour, but for tiny instances of slackness, for any mere delay in obedience, and so on.

I want to be punished for slack schoolwork as well as for faulty behaviour – and there again, I should like the punishment threshold to keep rising.

I believe that punishment is (for me) essential to discipline. Basically, the more punishment I receive, the better disciplined I believe I shall be; and as I wish to become a very well-disciplined boy, the consequence is obvious.

Then there is a famous or infamous idea that was no longer being regularly voiced explicitly when I was a child, but which was certainly implicit in the attitudes and practices of many adults - principally adult men. And that is that punishment is character building. That may well seem now like a ludicrous idea, and I would not attempt to recommend it generally: but for me, as a consenting adult - yes please! Mysterious though the process may be, I believe it is valid: I can certainly find meaning in it for myself. In general, punishment is far more beneficial (and a profoundly positive thing) for me now (as an adult boy) than it ever was then (as a child boy). The reason for both phenomena is, I think, the same: I now have a very different attitude to punishment. Punishment works for me largely because I believe in it.

That brings me to the most controversial point. This is something that really had died out as an open policy when I was a child, but which was still there implicitly with some people – who had a tendency to think that a mere ‘excuse’ (rather than a valid reason) would do as a justification for punishment, since punishment was self-evidently a good thing. Again, I am by no means trying to make any general recommendation, but I have found undeserved punishment to be not only acceptable but extraordinarily valuable in my life as an adult schoolboy. I now take punishment automatically on a daily basis - quite apart from, and in addition to, such punishments as I actually deserve and am given for real instances of misbehaviour or slackness. (The similarity here to monastic beliefs and practices is, I think, very significant and deeply interesting.) People might variously call it maintenance punishment, warning punishment, preventive punishment... I generally think of it as discipline punishment (as opposed to corrective punishment), because it is administered simply with the aim of helping me to be a disciplined boy - and to become, hopefully, as every day brings me further benefit from further punishment, a better-disciplined boy... and so, quite simply, a somewhat better boy in general.

Such punishment is obviously undeserved in the sense that no specific misbehaviour has led to it. It seeks to contribute something positive, rather than to correct a negative: a better attitude, increased submissiveness, smarter obedience, a generally higher standard of discipline. But in a general sense, I believe that, for me, there is really no such thing as undeserved punishment. I deserve to be punished constantly, and since constant punishment is an obvious impossibility, frequent and regular punishment is the best thing. It is impossible (except in some obvious practical senses) to punish me too much, difficult to punish me enough... and so the more I'm punished, the better.

I need and want and deserve to be punished automatically for what in theological terms is called original sin: in boyhood terms I would call it my natural propensity to naughtiness. Many ASBs, of course, want to be naughty: to them, the whole thing is just a running joke, and the more they can indulge in deliberate mucking about (with the equally deliberate intention of procuring punishment), the happier they seem to be. Such punishment tends to be physically vigorous, but morally vacuous -  since there is no intention at all that it should improve behaviour or character. On the contrary, it is more or less blatantly given and taken on the understanding that further naughtiness and further punishment will continue unabated – the real object being pleasure, and the entirely artificial ‘moral’ element merely play-acting. Well, that is up to them, of course, and it is not my place to criticise. (All the time such activities are relatively harmless and entirely confined to consenting adults, I do not see that there is any need for anyone to criticise.) But I am the complete opposite. I know that I am naughty, because that is in the nature of a boy, but I do not want to be naughty: I want my naughtiness to be kept to the absolute minimum, and the schoolboy virtues that I love to be fostered in me to the absolute maximum. I believe that punishment, frequent and regular, is essential to that process. (I stress that I'm talking about myself, as a consenting adult schoolboy: I am certainly not talking about child boys in the world today.)