Question for our American members.

So did you actually see secondary aged girls being spanked on their knickers by male teachers in front of boys? Perhaps you did. I'm not saying it could never have happened, just that surely it would have been the exception rather than the rule, even in the 1970's.

Not exactly spanked; didn't see an OTK spanking at school after primary (elementary) school.

I saw girls bending overview given the slipper (plimsoll) and the cane on the seat of their knickers. It was quite funny boys were given them on the seat of their grey school trousers, but girls school skirts were raised to take it on their school knickers. The reason given was because a skirt was looser, it provided more protection than trousers. They could be in trouble and get extra strokes if their knickers weren't the right ones as well. The usual excuse was their mum had put their school knickers in the wash.

It sounds as if you had a very, very interesting childhood, I must say.

That was a secondary school when I was a teenager. Perhaps more interesting in that respect than Sweden, where school corporal punishment might have already been banned.

I'd say so. It was outlawed in 1958 already. I don't think it was very exciting from a spanko's point of view before that either. The history book states that it primarily consisted of 1) slap in the face 2) pulling ear; and 3) whack fingers with a ruler.

Glagla

I am also Swedish but never went to school in Sweden (I lived in America most of my childhood and went to school there) - but I have heard that caning used to be employed in the Swedish public schools in the good/bad old days.

Well, that must be very, very old days. From what I understand, there was a decline already at the end of the 19th century, so it wasn't much practiced at the time of the ban. My parents only have memories of seeing students get whacked on their hands and nothing else. If you mean privatly owned boarding schools, it might be different. I think it was mostly penalism between older and younger studnets at those schools though, and not so much teacher - student. I think Jan Guillou wrote a book about it.

I never heard of or witnessed OTK in school here in the US in the late 50s. My eldest brother got a taste of the strap from the woman principal when he was younger, while I and other boys and girls got the yardstick from a male teacher while in the 4th grade. This took place outside of the back door and we had to bend over. That didn't fuel my interest.

Often123, I've often heard the term 'yardstick' in American books. Was it actually a stick that was a yard long or a stick picked up in the yard? If the former what was the purpose of such a long stick (other than for smacking naughty children)?
To return to experiences of cp at school I was in a UK state primary school when the ban came but never saw any cp in the few years before the ban. I think a lot of local authorities had already banned it before the national ban. I was briefly at a mixed boarding school when cp was still legal in private schools and this particular school had definitely used it in the past but had already stopped several years before the ban. My parents were both teachers and started teaching in the 70s and mentioned cp in the schools they worked at but thought it was wrong and never used it themselves. My mother said there used to be adverts in the TES (a weekly newspaper for teachers) for canes. I was then at Oxford and knew quite a few old Etonians but none of them ever mentioned cp or fagging. Friends a little older than me, so who went to school in the 70s and early 80s rather than the 80s/90s (just boys not girls) had memories of being caned on the hands at school and those boys posh enough to have gone to a prep school, which is a private school for ages 8-13, had experienced a slipper to the bottom. At the boarding school I went to, possibly as a hangover from the fagging days, the younger pupils 13-16 were expected to do various chores around the boarding house, like emptying the bins but it was the housemaster or mistress who told them do so not the prefects. I later worked in a girls' boarding school. By that time cp was completely illegal in schools but I don't think that school would ever have used it even before.
To any Americans wanting to write a reasonably realistic British school story involving cp of girls you were more likely to find it in Scottish schools and Catholic schools.

I believe a 'yardstick' is a three-foot long ruler.

At my school, the Biology teacher used to use one as a pointer. He wasn't allowed to hit anyone with it, but he used to slam it down on the desk of any student he suspected wasn't paying attention - which often resulted in the end of the stick breaking off and shooting across the classroom, so as term went on, his pointer got shorter and shorter...!