She has my sympathy. I also attended a Catholic primary school which thrived on corporal punishment. The head nun’s motto was ‘the greater the suffering, the greater the repentance’.
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Mine too, I hold no candle of any religion but thank my lucky stars that I went to both a CofE primary and grammar shool. No violence at the first and the only caning offence at the second was for disobedience. The only time I got it was after disobeying an intruction not to take the school sledge down the school run, the Sacrista Run (it was behind the boarding house called Sacrista). Punishment was swift and painless because I was still wearing several layers of winter clothing. 
What is (or, hopefully was) it with Catholic clergy?
The best thing to come out of my Catholic primary education was my devout atheism!
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I have a feeling it was very much the ‘Stanford prison’ situation, where otherwise ordinary people behave in a particular way that they might be shocked at if they were observing from the outside. Otherwise decent people were put in a situation where they were told certain things about the kinds of people they were looking after and given guidance that was rooted in traditions rather than intelligent care. Eventually I should expect that the nuns and priests running these places would lose a sense of what would constitute appropriate and decent behaviour and be consumed by their imagined roles. Of course there would be a few who would see it as opportunity to satisfy their own personal wishes, possibly long repressed, and begin to intentionally abuse.
Indeed. When my parents complained to my school about the nun who knocked me out by slapping me very hard around the head, they were told that they must forgive her, as she had had a difficult childhood. They escalated the complaint to the local bishop and she was quietly removed to a convent in Ireland. I presume her god knows what injustice she inflicted there.
(My crime? I had asked if I could play the tambourine rather than the recorder in a music lesson. I was six.)
Original sin? - the assumption that we are inherently evil, and must have it knocked out of us…
Improved it a little 
They’re all at it, just look at the southern baptists in the US, and sadly not at all a past tense thing.
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Ah, yes, the idea we’re all somehow tainted and it can be addressed by physical violence against another. I’d forgotten how screwed up Christianity is as a religion.
Tell me anyone who is a roman catholic how you remain a roman catholic knowing what has been going on worldwide and the cover ups to protect that faith?
Besides the fact that any sin merits and justified punishment in the eyes of the nuns, my wife’s experience (primary school, Midlands, 1970s) was that the nuns themselves were utterly devoid of any maternal feelings towards their pupils, and were probably sexually repressed etc
Perhaps the sexually repressed nuns and sexually repressed priests should have got together and everyone would have been a lot happier.
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I’ve not…
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Ditto for my wife…
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I tend to think that those types maybe didn’t turn out ok, if they think this sort of behaviour is ok.
Was usual before the Catholic church put and end to it and enforced celibacy in the early 12th century. This was in part because of the problem of resulting children with the right to make the church responsible. Thereafter, the church became a refuge for homosexuals.
In the 16th century Protestantism amended this, allowing marriage in the priesthood.
All this talk about abusive teachers in French schools, no one has mentioned abusive parents to teachers! They exist and come in all forms of harrassment and rudeness and nuttiness too and of course, their little darlings are the epitomy of good behaviour and intelligence. There is trouble on all sides of the education system here just like anywhere else in the world.
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Yes, I nearly added “like they used to do”.
Plod made a comment which was widely seen as negative and which he later recanted, with his agreement the original has been deleted.
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