Yes many times. I was punished with a strap, ruler, etc all throughout elementary school. It was very common, and accepted as the norm. I had one classmate whose parents came in and requested he NOT receive physical punishment, and I remember thinking in 3rd grade that somehow that was odd/special, and I viewed it as preferential treatment in my small mind.
This was in the 1990s in a religious school on US soil. (Although not the continental US)
My beatings started early. 1950’s. Midwest IL. Private Day Care Nursery School.
Some nasty little piece of work on crutches grabbed my rubber duck and bit the head off then threw it at me out of the clear blue sky, JUST BECAUSE SHE KNEW SHE’D GET AWAY WITH IT.
I kicked her crutch and down she went.
Miss Bertha Tank, the headmistress, came barreling out of nowhere and grabbed ME! by the neck and perpwalked me to the bathroom where she rubbed a huge bar of nasty Fels Naptha soap into my mouth. I was incredulous. I kept saying to her over and over thru the soapy mess, “But why … ? I didnt say a bad thing!” She had no explanation for her actions.
I was excused from going back there forever.
I met a woman on the Taos Pueblo who was roughly around my age (49) who got smacked with a ruler if she spoke Tewa or Spanish rather than English. This was at a private school and yes, if you flinched you’d get more licks.
I never got paddled but was warned by older kids shortly after I started 1st grade to watch out because the principal had a paddle with nails in it. A few years later my brother went to the same school. The principal must have upgraded because my brother was warned about an electric paddle.
It was the cane in my day. Some arbitrary number of strikes, called cuts, up to a maximum of 6, across the palm of the hand. Each cut produced a bruised welt across the hand. This continued all the way up to high school. I was a victim more times than I can remember.
It was all pretty grotesque in retrospect. The teacher would pull out his cane and swish it around, like Tiger Woods taking practice swings. Then he would carefully address your palm, before taking a nice big back swing and hitting you as hard as he could. This was exclusively a male teacher’s prerogative. The female teachers would send you to some male teacher for your punishment.
At the time, the fact that these teachers were brutalizing children didn’t occur to me. And I was always guilty of whatever I had been accused of so I just took my punishment. Eventually in high school a situation arose where I was to be punished for something I hadn’t done and I refused to be caned, despite the teacher’s screaming and yelling. For this I suffered other, longer lasting punishments but I don’t think I was ever caned again.
It’s funny really that until this thread I had never though about how revolting the whole thing was. When I think of how small my hands were when I was 9 or 10 years old, how the hell could someone think it appropriate to be belting them, at adult power, with a half inch flexible cane.
When I was at boarding school, it was accepted that house prefects could beat younger pupils with a sandshoe and school prefects could cane.
It all seemed normal at the time, but it was really an abomination that boys could legally thrash younger boys.
But then for the rest of your school careers you would both have been “that weird kid who totally spazzed out when Mr Rogers went to give him one little slap with the gymshoe, I mean, he was like foaming at the mouth and screeching and trying to bite and then he for-real shat himself…” and your socialisation would have taken a giant step back and…
You know what, I’ve totally forgotten what point I was trying to make here, and it was really profound too. 
We had that at my school as well, but it wasn’t just house prefects; basically, anyone in an older form could do it. It wasn’t officially accepted, and teachers were supposed to prevent it or punish it, but it was common practice.
Instead of a sandshoe, it was usually a cricket bat across the buttocks.
Given that many of the boys at schools like that are running countries now, perhaps it’s not surprising that the world is such a violent place.
I know that I was far more accepting of brutality after I left school, than I might have been had I been in a more humane system.
The boys gym teacher and the school Vice Principle were the only two people who paddled anyone in my Junior High school (grades 7-9). I earned a swat from the gym teacher. This was around '77 or '78, in Massachusetts.
They used a flat wooden board that was approximately one foot long, six inches wide, not counting the handle. They had you place both of your hands, palms down, on their desk, which had us slightly bent over. (“Assume the position”, indeed.) I don’t know how many licks was standard. My assumption was no more than three. Anything worse merited detention, or sumthin more official.
I also used to get the cuts at school sometimes 6 but usually 4. When it was 6, it was like you, 2 on the right, 2 on the left, and then 2 more on the right. The hands stung for a while but I felt bloody good after it. I was one of the boys!
nm
zombie or no
nuns liked sticks. leather was sacrilegious.
Junior high school (grades 7-9), Los Angeles, 1963-1966. I never got into any kind of trouble, but the majority of classrooms with male teachers had a paddle hanging conspicuously on the wall. IIRC, it was controversial (among the students) at the time whether paddling was legal – This was during a time, I think, of rising public opinion and laws against it.
I never saw a paddling happen. I did hear sporadic stories – supposedly, always on the butt, not on the wrist.
All the paddles I saw hanging on walls were covered with students’ names or initials. I gather that when you got paddled, you got to take the paddle to the wood shop and carve your name or initials on it.