Violence in the Medieval Classroom

Why do schoolchildren need to be beaten? For much of the history of education, there has been a general acceptance that instruction should be accompanied by violence. The longstanding link between schooling and flogging is attested by a whole host of artefacts, from the whipping stools that survive in many early schools, to the Harrow Punishment Book, in which Edwardian schoolmasters assiduously recorded the punishments meted out to their charges. Even today the association persists. After the riots of August 2011, there were widespread calls to 'bring back the strap' or 'return to a clip round the ear culture', voiced by MPs and journalists alike. However, what these sources and statements fail to reveal is exactly why corporal punishment should make instruction more effective, and how exactly it assists in the acquisition of knowledge. It is the purpose of this research project to account for this strange association. To do so, it will look to a period in which this issue was also current, and no less hotly debated, examining the role of violence in medieval pedagogy. The educational practices of the Middle Ages certainly repay attention. On the one hand beating played a significant part in medieval education, and was apparently considered an innate part of schooling. Hence whenever Grammatica was personified in medieval art, she invariably carried a bat or birch with her, and even in civic pageantry schoolmasters would bear their 'roddes' before them. Yet on the other hand the issue often proves to have been an open question, requiring explicit justification. While the Old Testament may have cautioned that 'he that spareth the rod hateth his son', other powerful authorities, such as Quintilian or John Chrysostom, were less convinced that beating children was efficacious. As a result, medieval teachers and writers were forced to make sense of this contradiction, creating rationales to defend the use of the rod.

The first major focus of my research is the debate that emerged out of these efforts. I will take stock of the various colourful reasons for beating students that were advanced by medieval writers. For instance, my work will analyse the quasi-medical remarks of William de Conches, who claims that beating stirs the blood in order to ward off 'sluggishness of intellect', alongside the psychological theories of Boncompagno da Signa, which see pain as a stimulus to memory, on the grounds that unpleasant experiences are more readily recalled than pleasant ones. Even this does not represent the full range of thought on the subject: other thinkers, such as John of Salisbury, hold that pain is a necessary introduction to 'wisdom', as it compels human beings to assess their thoughts and actions critically, in order to avoid future suffering. After surveying the breadth of ideas on classroom discipline, my research will seek to explain how teaching became linked with cruelty. By the end of the Middle Ages, the teacher is usually stereotyped as a sadistic bully; earlier in the period, however, teaching is usually idealised, and treated as the best possible usage of knowledge. My research will try to make sense of this odd transition by looking at how teachers themselves played up the later stereotype, presenting the school as less pampering than education at home. Lastly, my project will consider the role of students themselves in schoolroom violence. There are several records of pupils carrying out violence against each other, from the statute at Westminster Abbey's choral school which forbids 'breaking the bed of a classmate, or hiding his clothes', to the aggressive initiation rituals at many schools and universities. I will establish whether these episodes were encouraged by the norms of the medieval school, and what wider purposes they might have served. Overall, this project will help to make sense of the enduring link between violence and education, by looking closely at the period in which it first developed.

There are two main groups outside the academic community which stand to benefit from my research. The first of these will be museums and galleries in the UK and overseas, especially those which focus on education, whether as a central part of their remit or during occasional exhibitions. Specific examples will include the Rugby School Museum at Rugby, with which I have already been in contact, or the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden, which currently hosts an exhibition entitled The Material Culture of Student Life, and has in past held a three-year exhibition on Schools and Pupils in Western Europe 1300-1600. Since many of these collections include artefacts and images relating to physical punishment, such as Rugby's birching stool and block, my work will offer a context in which to understand these items: it will help to establish what part punishment might have played within education itself, and whether images reflect the reality of schooling, or are simply produced out of particular cultural traditions. This in turn has obvious implications for presenting and labelling such materials. I am already fostering a working relationship with a number of these institutions, and will ensure that I pass on any relevant findings to them directly.

The second group that will potentially find my research valuable is the general public. It is clear that there is existing public interest in the issues I aim to explore. In the first place, corporal punishment in education is not merely a historical curio, of limited interest only to professionals in the field. Not only did it continue to be used well within living memory, only being officially proscribed under the Education Act of 1987, but it has become an increasing part of the debate on school discipline since the widespread public disorder in August 2011. In fact, according to a survey conducted by the Times Educational Supplement in September 2011, some 49% of parents would welcome the reintroduction of caning in schools. Corporal punishment remains, therefore, an important aspect of public debate on formal education. Further evidence of an appetite for this subject among the public at large is given by two recent documentaries aired by the BBC: Rachel Jardine's 'Crime and Punishment - The Story of Corporal Punishment', broadcast in April 2011, and Helen Castor's 'A Renaissance Education', broadcast the following September. Given this climate of interest, my work cannot fail to attract some level of public attention, especially since it serves to increase knowledge of the reasoning that underpinned classroom violence in the past. Public dissemination of my research is also written into its outputs, as I have been invited to give two public lectures on its findings, one for Literary Leicester and one for the Literary and Philosophical Society. Furthermore, once it is completed, I also believe that my work could easily be adapted into an article for a non-specialist publication, such as the BBC History magazine, History Now, or a similar publication aimed at casual readers.