ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the role of physical punishment in pedagogical theory from the 1580s to the early 1800s. It suggests that the key transformations at work in the period investigated here lie in the attempts by educators, after Rousseau especially, to “hide the hand” of educational power, and in changes in subjects of education, from ruling-class boys to working-class children of both sexes. Mulcaster was addressing the question of the education of ruling-class boys. The material representation of moral character was extended in Lancaster’s punishment practices. Lancaster’s pedagogical practices attracted an enormous middle-class support, and were enthusiastically embraced by the Benthamite radicals. The history of punishment in school government is to read as an element in process of class hegemony and domination. The insistence of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the organization of the pedagogical situation as the means to the internalization of moral character by the student was made in context of a domestic education for upper-class boys.
