A thought-provoking entry on a school message board on Friends Reunited:
“How many times did we copy out the school rules in detention only to go and break them all again within a few days?”
What a nice concept: I’ve always thought of girls copying out Latin tracts, or writing lines, or neatly reproducing pages from a heavy encyclopaedia. Copying the school rules would re-enforce correct behaviour, and allow no excuse were future offences to be committed.
One could imagine that some girls in detention would have committed more serious offences. Their hands would shake as they copied out the relevant section from the rules, documenting how these particular misdemeaours “would additionally result in a caning at the end of Detention”.
Alternatively, they might be made to copy out the school history, a chapter per detention. A note would be taken of how many chapters each girl had copied during a year: once they had written out the whole book, their next detention would be replaced by a caning.