[ChuckNorris89]

He's not exaggerating at all.

I was in school in roughly the same period as you and although beatings from teachers to pupils were very rare, they did exist and happend if the pupil was very unruly and caused trouble in class (I had one classmate who nearly assaulted a teacher during class because he didn't like the bad grade he got), but usually the teacher had the "blessing" from the pupil's parents to perform such "corrections".

Beatings were much more common in the poorer parts of the cities/country with poor performing schools and broken families (alcoholism, domestic abuse, poverty). At top schools in big cities like the one you probably went to with alumni that go to Harvard and Google, beatings were not common at all because usually the children came from mid/upper-class families. But that's very small percentage of the pupils in Romania that are in such a performant environment.

When my dad was in school in the 60's, from what he told me, receiving beatings in school from teachers was very common all around even for stupid reasons as some teachers would go on aggressive power trips if you stepped on their nerves.