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".