ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the abolition of corporal punishment and its replacement with suspension from school attendance as the central plank in education departments’ school discipline regulations. It overviews the international and local progress toward the abolition of corporal punishment. Foucault depicts the ‘spectacle of the scaffold’, emanating from secret judicial processes which were ‘the privilege of the prosecution’ alone, as meticulously choreographed affairs not interested simply in state retribution, but in the ritualized regulation of the innocent. The tripartite theatre of the ‘condemned’, the state and the participant audience represented an expense not devoted simply to dispensing with the condemned; this was but one aspect of the economy of power aimed at ‘normalizing’ the population. By reviewing and identifying such a vein within the literature, research and programs, one can look to other analyses in an attempt to consider the diminution of disruption in schools consistent with the principles established about differences between the control and discipline paradigms.
