September Artifacts of the Month: A Look Back at School​Corporal Punishment

What is a Dunce Chair?

Dunce chairs were originally used in classrooms alongside the dunce cap— a cone shaped hat often made of paper with the word “dunce” or the letter “D” written on it— to punish a disruptive student through humiliation. The misbehaving student would sit in a dunce chair, a dunce corner or stand on a stool wearing a dunce cap to serve out their punishment.


The word “dunce,” which by definition means “a slow-witted or stupid person,” according to Merriam-Webster, further insulted and humiliated the students in trouble. The word originated from the name of a Scottish intellectual and Franciscan monk John Duns Scotus (1265-1308) who’s philosophical teaching became known as “Scotism.” The followers of Scotism, “Dunsmen,” lost popularity during the Protestant Reformation and, according to The Irish Times, the “Catholic philosophies and teachings were widely criticized, and many adherents of Scotism began to be characterized as slavish followers who were too stupid to think for themselves. It was this association that meant that by 1527 anyone espousing his theories became known as ‘Duns’ and considered intellectually inferior.

In a previous MOTAL article, Two Peas in a Pod: Crazy About Education, we introduced the passionate collector of education artifacts: Marty Raskin.


Raskin told MOTAL in an interview that he collects “not just antiques, but a little bit of life.” He aims to collect anything and everything found in a public school and every kind of thing a student experiences in a classroom, from furniture to textbooks.

After retiring 23 years ago, Raskin began avidly collecting public school paraphernalia amounting to over 1000 pieces, including a dunce chair that he guesses is over 250 years old. Much of his collection hails from New York City public schools, with an emphasis on his K-8 school— Public School 202— which he attended from 1946-1955. However, Raskin acquired the 1850s dunce chair pictured in this article from women in New England who had previously owned it for a while until posting the chair for sale on eBay a decade ago.


“There’s nothing like this,” Raskin said. “I paid a nice penny for it.”


An authentic Victorian era dunce chair is a rare find. What Raskin finds most compelling about the dunce chair are the indentations on the wood where the children would rub their feet on the foot rest of the chair.

The practice of dunce chairs and caps is no longer appropriate and was replaced by other methods of classroom punishment and redirection in the United States in the 1950s. Discipline practices in schools are ever evolving, as the usefulness of in-school suspensions are re-evaluated (EdSource) and the negative outcomes and racial and gender bias of school discipline, suspension and expulsion are considered (California School Boards Association).

Additional Corporal Punishment: Paddle, Soap

The Museum of Teaching and Learning does not have a dunce chair in its collection, but MOTAL does have two other artifacts that remind us of the history of corporal punishment in California. A brief reminder about the meaning of the word corporal: It means physical or bodily, and can include harm done to any part of the body.

Both MOTAL artifacts are props that travel with the exhibition A Class Action: The Grassroots Struggle for School Desegregation in California.

The first is a paddle that was made to represent the kinds of spankings that went on in the1940s. It was said that paddles with holes in them could provide a harder whack on the bottoms of misbehaving students. Paddling was usually administered by the principal or a person in charge at the school, and although the reasons for paddling were varied, the victims were more often boys than girls. MOTAL’s home state is California, where public school paddling was not outlawed in the mid-1980s. However, despite the recommendations of the American Psychological Association and other agencies concerned with the safety and welfare of children, corporal punishment is still permitted in nineteen U.S. states. See the link to the National Institutes of Health article that tells more.

The second MOTAL artifact is a bar of Ivory soap from the 1940s. It travels with a galvanized metal water pail to represent the pails and soap that were used in the segregated “Mexican Schools” of the era for students to wash their hands when the teacher called them out for having dirty hands. It was also used as a punishment for students who were caught speaking Spanish at school. The teacher would make a dose of soapy water to wash out the mouth of the misbehaving student. The practice ended in the mid-20 th century. Childhood experts became aware of the potential toxic effects of soap ingestion and affirmed that “washing your mouth out with soap” is abusive. Refer to the Wikipedia link for further information.


Dunce Chair Researched by
Katie Rutz-Robbins
MOTAL Intern
August 2021
 
Soap and Paddle Submitted by
Greta Nagel
MOTAL President/CEO
 
Learn More!
Read our other article featuring Marty Raskin: Two Peas in a Pod: Crazy About Education


Sources: Dunce Chair
MOTAL Zoom interview with Marty Raskin on August 11, 2021.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-dunce-cap-wasnt-always-so-stupi
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dunce
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/20/nyregion/nyc-schools-collector.html
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/why-the-word-dunce-was-originally-an-anti-catholic-insult-1.3766756
https://edsource.org/2019/in-school-suspensions-the-answer-to-school-discipline-not-necessarily-experts-say/619083
https://www.csba.org/GovernanceAndPolicyResources/ConditionsOfChildren/SafeSupportiveSchlEnvironment/SuspensionAndExpulsion.aspx


Sources: Paddle and Soap
Corporal Punishment in U.S. Public Schools: Prevalence, Disparities in Use, and Status in State and Federal Policy
Washing out the mouth with soap - Wikipedia