I’ve heard plenty of stories of how back in the old days teachers and nuns would often hit students who were left handed. They did this as a way of getting them to use their right hand instead. Is this really true?

33 comments

  3. Americans in Louisiana would be slapped with a ruler and made to kneel on rice for hours, among other punishments, for not speaking English. I’ve not heard of anyone being hit for being left handed though.

  4. You’re looking fairly far back at this point to get to a point where it was common (it still happens but its pretty isolated) but yes, there are still people alive that remember that. If you look at the rate of lefthandedness over time, it was as low as 3% of Americans born in the early 1900s before slowly rising to the apparently biologically natural level of ~12% for Americans born after about 1950.

    [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/22/the-surprising-geography-of-american-left-handedness/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/22/the-surprising-geography-of-american-left-handedness/)

  5. One of my 8th grade teachers (he was in his 50s or 60s in the late 90s) told us stories of when he would get hit by nuns at a catholic school when he would use his left had to write instead of his right.

  6. I’m not even 30 yet and I remember my little sister having her hand smacked in kindergarten for writing with her left hand.

  9. My grandmother was apparently born left handed but was forced to learn how to write with her right hand. I don’t know about the specifics, but corporal punishment in schools was not exactly uncommon when she was growing up. It would not surprise me if she told me she got her knuckles smacked with a ruler for writing with her left hand.

  10. I went to private “Christian” kindergarten as the local school didn’t offer it. They tied my arm down to my body (think sling) and forced to me to write with my right hand. For some reason I didn’t tell my parents for months. I ended up being right handed. My folks transferred me to public school for 1st grade.

  11. Happened to my dad, at Catholic school. Ended when his big brother had a ‘conversation’ with one of the nuns and ‘enlightened’ her. Expectations were set, and consequences were delineated.

  13. My great grandma was ambidextrous but was told to write with her right hand. This would probably have been around the 20s. Idk if she was hit for not doing so but she was def at least told not to.

  14. I and two of my sisters are left handed out of 5 siblings and neither of my parents are left handed, so clearly we’re children of the devil in our family.

  15. I don’t consider myself old per se…. in my 40s. But I do remember teachers being extremely irritated that I was left-handed. They used to force me to hold crayons in my right hand until they gave up around first grade.

  17. I’m sixty, and not during my lifetime. But people older than me (in their 80’s or 90’s now), yes, and they were forced to learn to write with their right hand.

  18. Never saw such a thing, but an interesting somewhat related thing was, my school offered Basic Guitar as an elective course. All of the school guitars were right handed, so on the first day, the teacher had to basically be like… if you’re left handed, too bad, you’ll just have to play on a righty guitar

    I guess they could’ve flipped it upside down and learned Jimi Hendrix style, but nobody went that route

  20. I’m a lefty in my early 30s, and it never happened to me. I did hear stories of that happening in Catholic schools in the 50s and 60s.

  21. My grandma told me about how her teacher would slap her hand with a ruler when she wrote with her left hand. It was eventually slapped entirely out of her.

  22. Lived in a conservative area growing up, heard stories of hitting but I only experienced conditional reinforcement to use right hand. Think items only handed to my right hand, teacher changing my tool to my right hand when she saw me using my left, and peer pressure verbally against using left handed. I’m assuming my area was the last as none of my peers from liberal, urban, or suburban areas recollect that. I do know all these attempts topped when parents stopped kowtowing to schools and held them accountable via lawsuits. I support public schools and don’t see them as enemies, but damn did they get away a lot in the 80’s and 90’s because of parent’s ignorance.

  23. According to my grandma she would get hit in the hand with a ruler if she was caught writing left handed.

  24. My mom told me that when she was in school the teachers would hit her hand with a ruler if she wrote with her left hand and even tied it behind the chair so she couldn’t. This was at a public school in IL in the late 50/60s

  26. Yup. There were a few ancient holdout teachers doing that when I was little and I’m in my 30s

  27. My mom was lefty until the nuns changed that with repeated raps on the knuckles with a ruler.

  28. My mom has a story of a classmate having the webbing of his left hand between thumb and forefinger getting stapled to a desk by a nun. I haven’t heard it in 20 years, so I should probably ask to hear it again. This would have occurred in the 1960s.

  29. They never bothered me when learning to write left handed and I’m 66. I learned to write with my right hand when I twice injured my left hand. Learned to throw darts equally well with both hands; I won a lot of free beer at the local bar

  30. I’m left-handed but not older… however, my left-handed grandfather said his school teachers would smack his hand. I’ve seen him write with both. Poor guy.

  31. My (left-handed) SIL has such tales from her youth. Except that it wasn’t the students at some Catholic school doing the hitting – it was her own grandmother.

  32. There was definitely a time when this was common. My grandfather had teachers tie his left hand to his chair to force him to write with his right. Public school in the 1930s

  33. My uncle is in his 60s, and he was forced to read and eat right-handed. (Knowing my grandpa, pretty sure there was some hitting involved.)

    However he did bat and throw left-handed. (Left-handedness has always been an advantage in baseball.)

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