Physical discipline.

A translation by Judith Turcotte.

After a first grade in a coeducational class, it became essential to transfer me to a school for boys only. Boys should be moved away from the girls. You never know even if you are seven years old. I was registered at Académie Saint-Michel, situated on Lorne (now condos), a school run by the Clerics of St. Viator.

At that time, if we did not succeed the exams at the end of the year, we repeated the year with the result that we had students much older than us in our classes. Many were problem students and discipline in the class was at times difficult to impose.

No psychologists, no psychoeducators, no social workers but a severe discipline accompanied by physical punishments. In one of my classes, the wooden ruler on the fingers was the tool of choice. The wooden rulers were sponsored by the company 7up and were destined for the students. Instead of distributing them, one of my teachers kept them in a locked drawer in his desk and used them to discipline the disruptive students. He, nevertheless, removed the metal rim to avoid injury. In most cases, the students underwent the punishment without saying a word, except for one who pretended to faint much to the teacher’s despair.

The school’s director of discipline walked around with a strap that he had taken from a Pear Ball game. He supervised recesses, strap in hand, that he used to hit his hand all while walking in the school yard. Another cruel punishment was the obligation to kneel with arms crossed in front of the class. The pain in the knees and arms was not long in coming.

One of my worst memories is that of the teacher who on the first day of class explained what the punishment would be if we were unruly. He got up and opened a window. We were on the third floor. He then took a chair by the two back legs and held it out in the open promising that the next unruly student would find himself sitting on the same chair. I admit that the demonstration was a success; the class was one of the most disciplined that I knew. It must be said that we were in second grade.

These few examples demonstrate that the creation of the Ministry of Education in 1964 was necessary. The teacher who used the rulers was a layman who lost his employment following the takeover of the school by the government; he did not have the qualifications to teach. The teacher with the chair was a cleric who disappeared from circulation after a year.