Te Radar: Tennis balls are too good for'em

Collectively there are fewer more vindictively malevolent groups than classrooms of children, whose shallow knowledge of life is combined with an unblunted viciousness.

As harried teachers daily face the apathetic, malicious, conniving and pseudo-innocent faces of youth, it is small wonder that some of our educators snap, and decide to use novel methods of discipline.

But, if one of the many teachers I maddened with my insolence had ever inserted a tennis ball into my mouth I would certainly recall it, no doubt because I would have thoroughly deserved it. The punishment may even have benefited me.

However, I would expect the perpetrator to at least remember and acknowledge his or her correctional innovation, if only for the sake of my own vanity.

The real shame of the current Tennis Ball Saga is that no one has instigated a debate about such methods being introduced to our criminal justice system. What better way to reform the criminally inclined than through ritual public humiliation.

It would serve to reduce our staggeringly high incarceration rate, while simultaneously providing tourists with quirky scenic attractions, as they crowded round our public squares to witness our criminals being disgraced.

As for our burgeoning youth crime statistics, nothing deters wayward youth like the prospect of public ridicule. A few hours with their foreheads taped to a wall they have defaced seems fitting.

Likewise, having to loiter outside premises they have robbed with signs stapled to themselves detailing what they have stolen is appropriate.

For the violent, being forced to stand barefooted in buckets of animal manure seems an apt metaphor for the trouble they are in.

Anyone who has tried to control unruly children will know that they can take an inordinately short period of time to move from innocence to insurrection.

As one chum recently commented: "Even if you are not in the mood to be antagonistic, there are 30 others in the class, so someone will pick up the baton."

At my high school, one teacher whose wife had apparently passed away was reportedly taunted with the low chant of "Mog killed his wife, Mog killed his wife". It would come as no surprise to hear that he had cracked and committed a classroom atrocity.

I had little idea of the horrors that can be inflicted by verminous youth until I had the recent misfortune to address a particularly boisterous mob of intermediate school students.

Grappling to seize their attention through methods other than systematically impaling their hands to desks with pens, I asked if they knew of any famous New Zealand historical criminal gangs.

"But not," I said, "the Black Power, the Mongrel Mob, or any similarly modern morons."

One lad squealed, "What about the Road Knights?"

I responded, "No, they are morons, too."

"My dad is a Road Knight," he replied.

If the children's laughter had a certain mocking ring to it before this revelation, it's derisive edge seemed substantially heightened after it.

"Class dismissed," I said.