The Experience of Corporal Punishment in Schools, 1890–1940

Abstract

Corporal punishment was an important part of the educational experience of many children educated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has often been assumed that it was an uncontroversial and widely accepted means of maintaining school discipline. This article questions these assumptions, using autobiographical accounts produced by individuals educated between 1890 and 1940. Working from common themes in these accounts, it presents a reconstruction of how corporal punishment was viewed by the child. Whilst educationists of the period encouraged the sparing and impartial exercise of school discipline, the accounts demonstrate how, in practice, the use of corporal punishment was often seen as arbitrary or unjust. Corporal punishment was, as a result, to become a major source of tension between pupils and teachers within the early twentieth‐century school.