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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
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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 

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References

Notes

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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

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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

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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

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

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

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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

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

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