Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-04T22:55:51.076Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Dilemma of Corporal Punishment at Harvard College

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Kathryn McDaniel Moore
Kathryn McDaniel Moore*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Among the first to give serious attention to the use of discipline as an educational tool was Philippe Aries in Centuries of Childhood. Aries believes the systematic application of discipline in schools and colleges was a crucial factor in the transition from medieval to modern education. While others who have investigated student life during the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries have not accorded discipline such an important role, scholars such as Rashdall, Rait, Thorndike and Mullinger have acknowledged its anecdotal utility for conveying the style and flavor of education at a given institution. A midpoint in assessing the importance and meaning of student discipline is to view it as that part of the educative process whose form and function reflect the values and attitudes concerning student conduct that are held by the educational authorities of the time. The present paper is written in this latter vein in an attempt to understand the use of a particular form of discipline, namely corporal punishment, in light of the circumstances at a specific institution, Harvard College, during its founding century.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , Fall 1974 , pp. 335 - 346
Copyright
Copyright © 1974 by New York University 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. (New York, 1962).Google Scholar

2. Rashdall, Hastings, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, VIII (London, 1936); Rait, Robert S., Life in the Medieval University, (Cambridge, 1912); Thorndike, Lyn, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages, (New York, 1944); and Mullinger, John Bass, A History of the University of Cambridge, (London, 1888).Google Scholar

3. As reproduced in Morison, Samuel Eliot, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, 1935), p. 435.Google Scholar

4. Winthrop, John, The History of New England from 1630–1649, I (Boston, 1853 ed.): 370–371.Google Scholar

5. Ibid., 370.Google Scholar

6. Ibid., 372.Google Scholar

7. The General Court at this time was composed of the Governor, the deputy governor, the magistrates, and twenty or so town deputies.Google Scholar

8. Winthrop, , History of New England, 373.Google Scholar

9. Eaton was the sixth son of the Rev. Richard Eaton, and two of his elder brothers, Samuel and Theophelus, were highly respected leaders in New England. Probably the combination of his family and his education (work at Trinity and advanced study under Dr. William Ames at Franeker) resulted in the appointment. However, there was already some evidence that he was not all the Puritan leadership hoped. Thomas Hooker, for instance, knew him in Holland and did not approve of him and “feared the issue” of his appointment. (Young's, Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, p. 551).Google Scholar

10. Ariès, , Centuries of Childhood and Rouse Ball, W. W., Cambridge Papers, (London, 1918).Google Scholar

11. Records of the Court of Assistants of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, 1630–1692, II, (Boston, 1904), 62–70. The crimes for which these punishments were used were murder, theft, adultery, drunkenness, swearing, and slander, respectively. All of these crimes (with the exception of murder) were committed by Harvard students during the period. See Earle, Alice Morse, Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (New York, 1907) for some other unusual practices.Google Scholar

12. Winthrop, , History of New England, 373. The Puritans generally followed the two-witness rule for conviction, thus Winthrop's careful notation of the number of witnesses served as verification of Eaton's guilt.Google Scholar

13. Haskins, George Lee, Law and Authority in Early Massachusetts (New York, 1960), p. 206.Google Scholar

14. Winthrop, , History of New England, 374–375.Google Scholar

15. Haskins, , Law and Authority, p. 204.Google Scholar

16. Ibid.Google Scholar

17. Miller, Perry and Johnson, Thomas, The Puritans, I (New York, 1963): 8–9, 36–39.Google Scholar

18. Haskins, , Law and Authority, p. 205.Google Scholar

19. Winthrop, , History of New England, 375.Google Scholar

20. The same group rite was carried subsequently into the college. See Moore, Kathryn McDaniel, “Old Saints and Young Sinners: A Study of Student Discipline at Harvard College 1636–1734” (Ph.D., diss., University of Wisconsin, 1972), pp. 194–197.Google Scholar

21. Winthrop, , History of New England, 375.Google Scholar

22. Ibid. The “scandal of religion” is thought to refer to the shame his actions brought on the church, not to any particular heresy or apostasy on his part.Google Scholar

23. Morgan, Edmund S., The Puritan Family, (New York, 1966), p. 10.Google Scholar

24. Deuteronomy 17:7.Google Scholar

25. Winthrop, , History of New England, I, 376.Google Scholar

26. Morison, , The Founding of Harvard College, pp. 237–240.Google Scholar

27. Theoretically mercy, like grace, could not be earned nor even merited by any act of the individual. Here again the Massachusetts Puritans took a more liberal stance than Calvin.Google Scholar

28. Winthrop, , History of New England, II: 106.Google Scholar

29. Winthrop, , History of New England, 11:84–85.Google Scholar

30. Ibid. See also Sibley, John Langdon, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, II (Cambridge, 1873–1875): 121–122, and Coffin, Joshua, A Sketch of the History of Newbury, Newburyport, and West Newbury from 1636 to 1845, (Boston, 1845), p. 41.Google Scholar

31. Winthrop, , History of New England, II: 85.Google Scholar

32. Sibley, , Harvard Graduates, II: 122.Google Scholar

33. Ibid. It was several years before the first native-born American, Seaborn Cotton, graduated from Harvard. Thus, for the early graduates of Harvard, to go to England was to return home.Google Scholar

34. Ibid. The most interesting element of this incident was not Harvard's discipline alone, but the dual trial and double penalty. By so cooperating, the entire proceeding emphasized the close link between the government of the colony and that of the college.Google Scholar

35. All information regarding cases is taken from official college records. It is possible that other cases and other punishments did occur, but the records either no longer exist or were never made.Google Scholar

36. Morison, , Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 402–403.Google Scholar

37. Sibley, , Harvard Graduates, II: 443, parentheses Sibley's.Google Scholar

38. Ibid.Google Scholar

39. Ibid.Google Scholar

40. Shipton, Clifford K., Sibley's Harvard Graduates, V (Boston Boston, 1937): 92.Google Scholar

41. Ibid.Google Scholar

42. Ibid., VI: 504.Google Scholar

43. Ibid.Google Scholar

44. As quoted in Morison, , Three Centuries of Harvard 1636–1936, (Cambridge, 1937), pp. 68–70.Google Scholar

45. Shipton, , Sibley's Harvard Graduates, VI: 504.Google Scholar

46. Ibid.Google Scholar

47. As quoted in Haskins, , Law and Authority, p. 97.Google Scholar

48. Walzer, Michael, “Puritanism as a Revolutionary Ideology,” History and Theory, 3 (1963): 65.Google Scholar

49. Ibid., 64.Google Scholar

50. For analyses of the reforming spirit of American Puritan ecclesiastical and civil proceedings see Oberholzer, Emil Jr., Delinquent Saints, (New York, 1956), and Haskins, , Law and Authority. See also Erikson, Kai T., Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York, 1966) for a contrapuntal view of Puritan penal practices.Google Scholar

51. Mather, Cotton, Magnalia Christi Americana, II (Hartford, 1853): 17.Google Scholar

52. Walzer, , “Puritanism as Ideology,” p. 64.Google Scholar