Detention without trial

I’m not sure what prompted this thought, but: what happened to school detention?

Does anyone know when it disappeared?

I mean proper end-of-the-day detention, rather than what my children, who naturally went to school more recently than me, seem to think represented detention (ie something that went on during school hours or at lunchtime).

I imagine it is illegal now for a teacher to imprison children after school.

At Southend on Sea High School for Boys one might find oneself in detention individually or collectively. For the sake of the younger reader (if there is one) here’s the sort of way in which the collective variety unfolded…

Teacher: “Will the boy or boys responsible for (insert crime here) kindly stand up?”

No movement.

“All right, you’re all in detention after school until half past five or until…” (until confessions forthcoming etc)

The idea, naturally, was that peer pressure (in the form of 25 to 30 oafs who were not specifically guilty and who would be resenting the fact that they were being held because of the one or two oafs that were guilty on this occasion) would produce a result. The strange thing is that I can’t remember whether it did, typically.

Looking at it from the viewpoint of the teacher (which I have never been prompted to do until now) it seems a high-risk strategy, paying off only if it worked fairly rapidly and otherwise involving either an increasing escalation of the collective penalty or the abandonment of it with resulting loss of face.

Loss of face can be pretty disastrous to a teacher, as we were able to witness even in those days.

Back then no one talked about stress, but they did talk about nervous breakdowns, and I’m fairly certain we saw a couple of those rapidly developing. How I wish I could undo whatever part I played in that.