Having read Giles Fraser’s piece (I too bear the deep scars of a muscular Christian education, 6 February), it seems that the public schools of even the recent past occupied a parallel universe to the rest of us.
In the late 1960s and early 70s I attended a state grammar school (Northampton Grammar School for Boys) with a strongly evangelical headmaster, yet corporal punishment was not frequently used. Only the headmaster was allowed to administer it, and then only to the hands. At the same time, I attended Christian holidays run by the Crusader Union and no corporal punishment took place; punishments were extra chores or exclusion from activities. The ultimate sanction would be sending someone home, though this never occurred at any holiday I attended. I also helped at camps run by evangelical Anglicans in the 1980s with similar rules. I have to ask how it is that such different rules seemed to apply in the private school sector when the principles that the schools and holidays were run on were so similar?
Bob Floyd
Helensburgh, Argyll and Bute
• Giles Fraser referred to “Eton/Alpha Course Christianity” in his article on corporal punishment. I would like to point out that when my father, BJW Hill, took over the Corner House at Eton College in 1952, he banned all beatings (the prefects had been allowed to cane lower boys), never beat a boy, and prevented the headmaster at the time (and thereafter) from beating any of the boys in his house.
Olivia Dawkins
Felsted, Essex
• Like Giles Fraser, I too was caned at school, not by a master but by a prefect. My sin had been to tell a future hereditary peer and Conservative minister of something or other that he was thick. Lesson learned? Never to vote Conservative, which I haven’t.
Prof Charles Warlow
Edinburgh
• I take issue with Giles Fraser’s theology (Loose canon, 10 February) that “God the father violently punishes his son for the salvation of the human race.” The Qur’an rejects that premise: we are all God’s daughters and sons and God is one. The lamb before the throne at the beginning of revelation becomes the lamb upon the throne at the end. And please don’t take Rev Michael Green out of context – his gripe was not with all theologians, just woolly ones.
Ray Skinner
Tunbridge Wells, Kent
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