MICHEL FOUCAULT, info.

Perhaps it would be helpful to strike up a discussion on the 
historical context of the exercise of power and punishment in 
post-reformation England. Lawrence Stone's classic account of the 
history of the family springs to mind as a starting point. He argues 
that in the seventeenth  and eighteenth century school children of 
all ages and ranks were regularly subject to corporeal punishment. He 
identifies two standard practices; the first, to bend the child over 
a bench, and beat them with a bundle of birches until the blood 
flowed, the second to strike their mouth with a a ferula "a flat 
piece of wood which expanded at the end into a pear-shape with a hole 
in the middle." "One blow" , he notes "with this instrument was 
enough to raise a most painful blister". Yet there is a change in 
practice and strategy during the eighteenth century. During the early 
1700s a pamphlet was written "On the Shameful Discipline of the 
Schools Exposed". IT received a hearty backlash by "A Lover of 
Decency and Order in Youth" and his "The Benefit of School 
Discipline". But here the argument is premised on the basis that 
whipping of students was only to be employed in extreme cases. Here 
we are witness to an anxiety to place restraint on the exercise of 
force, to eliminate the perverse sadism which occupied its every 
expression. But it should be noted that such a concern is synonymous 
with the rise of Humanist education, which such luminaries as Erasmus 
rejecting the need for physical punishment. Here, Lawrence notes, an 
important shift in focus takes place, children should be beaten only 
for moral failures, for idleness or obstinacy, not stupidity.What 
does this tell us? Perhaps it is that the point of application of 
domination in the modern school was increasingly moral transgression. 
That it is moral transgression and moral transgression alone which 
now occupies the space of the eruption of physical violence in the 
school room. This, of course, only serves to buttress, concentrate, 
and amplify societies moral imperatives, for by learning to control 
and direct the expression of severe punishment so that it is 
indissoluble with the inculcation of moral interdictions, moral 
conduct becomes invested with a luminous halo of heightened cultural 
significance.

"Of all writings I love only those which the writer writeth with his 
blood. Write in blood, and thou shalt learn that blood is spirit"
Nietzsche. "Thus Spake Zarathustra".