The Theory of Medieval Torture and the Modern School:

or the Scarlet C-

A. LeGrand Richards Brigham Young University, Provo, UT

This summer, I had the opportunity to return to German to hold a seminar and my
daughter was able to accompany me. While there, we visited the medieval city of
Rothenburg. One of the attractions in Rothenburg is an entire museum dedicated
to the artifacts of torture and punishments used by the medieval Church and
State to maintain social order.

We were amazed and horrified at the remarkable creativity shown in the variety
of ways in which human beings were tortured, maimed, and executed. The
museum also attempted to explain the theoretical and legal justifications for using
these instruments. It was declared that the Kaiser (Emperor) and the Pope were
given the keys of the judgment by God. This, of course, became a sacred
responsibility. Those with the authority to establish justice felt required to define
very precisely what is and what is not in accordance with the divine will and those
found in violation of the law were, therefore, to be treated with a form of justice
that would demonstrate Gods power given to secular authorities.

Medieval society turned to the public spectacle to show this demonstration. The
legal codes that were established were detailed and specific, but only the most
deviant or symbolic representatives were held publically accountable. Mans
justice as only symbolic of the inescapable justice of an omniscient God.
Therefore, it was swift, brutal, ritualized, and very public in order to leave the
deepest impression on those who viewed it. Such punishment was directed as
much to the potentially guilty as to the actual transgressor.

Hanging, quartering, burning at the stake, beheading, breaking on the wheel

were only a few of the ways executions were performed. For lesser crimes,
branding or maiming, beating, and whippings were not uncommon. Of particular
interest were methods of shaming used to bring penitence and to deter others

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from minor offenses such as the drunk tank (a barrel they would lock on a person
caught over-drinking), the stock (where prisoners were locked head, hands, and
feet), and shame masks (grotesque or foolish masks locked on a persons head
for such violations as gossiping, fighting, nagging, cheating at cards, or playing
bad music).

Since confession played an important part of the legal process, torture became a
respected form of investigation, not as sufficient evidence itself, but as one
important part of a larger case. Techniques for inflicting the most pain possible
were invented from the rack to thumb screws, from shackles to branding irons.
There were also very specific rules to be followed in exacting a confession.
Incompetent or ineffective executioners or tortures were often treated worse than
their victims.

Michel Foucault has made a career out of examining the history of social
institutions and how power is exercised by those institutions. He noticed that
within a very few decades in the late 18th and early 19th centuries European
society rejected the spectacle of the scaffold.1The spectacular scenes of legally

sponsored brutality almost entirely disappeared, but the exercise of social power
was hardly abandoned. Instead, a new, more secular, more ambitious, and far
more thorough physics of power was invented. The physics extended beyond
the physical body to the modern soul.

The spectacle of the scaffold and pillory was substituted by the extensive
establishment of disciplinary institutions, carceral institutions: the prison, the
school, the hospital, and the factory.2 These institutions based their power, not on

great scenes of physical violence, but on a technology of subjection, a

machinery that was both immense and minute. This technology promised
simultaneously to increase both the docility and the usefulness of the individual.
Hence, the history of public schooling is inherently entwined with the
development of the penitentiary. He would argue that it is not by chance that

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schooling and prisons developed at the same time, nor would it surprise him that
in the United States, Horace Mann is considered a founder of both.

As I was about to drop her off as school one day, another daughter, then in third
grade exclaimed, Dad! Doesnt it look just like a prison for children? How could I
argue with her? The best I could offer her was to remind her how much she liked
the particular prison guard assigned to her class (her teacher), but the
comparison extends far more powerfully than the outward facility of the simple
songs at recess, Spring is sprung, the grass is risen, only 53 more days and
were out of prison!

The most common question asked of students are not so different from those
asked of prisoners. How much time do you have left? Are they treating you
well? What are you going to do when you get out?

It is not uncommon for police officers to patrol the grounds to pick up any stray
truants. One of the most important records kept is the number of days the
student is present (seat time). No matter how much a student know, if they
havent spent enough time in their seats, they cannot graduate. Money is
distributed not my any learning criteria, but by the average daily attendance.

Gideon Haynes painted a picture of prison life in the early 19th century that
sounds too much like school life. Work was assigned to prisoners as: a means
of keeping the prison population reasonable under control by occupying
prisoners time in a structured fashion during the dayOrder and submission
were always among the highest priorities of the prisonThe convicts mind, it
was believed, ought to be reduced to a state of humiliation and discipline. In
short, convicts were to ne like clay in the hands of the potter.3

In the 1850s Dorothy Dix wrote that the prisoner was to be seen as a child a
willful being whose spirit had to be crushed. It is with convicts as it is with
children.4

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Perhaps, then, it should not have surprised me to see a school desk on the top
floor of the German Torture Museum, with a whole section dedicated to the types
of punishments used in schools. There was a traditional school desk was placed
in the same context as the Iron Maiden (a wooden case covered with iron where
girls were placed to shame them for some indiscretion), the rack, the stock, the
pillory, and shame masks. Of course, they included such favorites as the
Eselbank (the donkey bench), the dunce cap, willow branches, ear slapping, the
cane, and the whipping post.

Long after corporal punishment was forbidden in our prisons, schools were still
being built with whipping posts permanently embedded in the floors. In 1979, just
after the Supreme Court had declared it legal for schools to continue beating
children, Hyman and Wise wrote:
All over America, Public schools permit corporal punishment. Children are
beaten with rattans, straps, fists, belts, and boards; they are slapped,
forced to eat cigarettes, pinched, and thrown against walls. For what
crimes? Not paying attention, talking without permission, chewing gum,
smoking, refusing to leave the cloakroom, not trying enoughand now,
playing kickball after the school bell has rung.5

But as with the scaffold of old, society has found far more powerful ways to
exercise control and power than by threatening physical pain. As early as 1693,
John Locke argued that physical punishment should be avoided in the education
of children. Instead, psychological rewards and punishments are the great secret
of education:
The rewards and punishments, then, whereby we should keep children in
order are quite of another kind; and of that force, that when we can get
them once to work, the business I think, is done, and the difficulty is over.
Esteem and disgrace are, of all others, the most powerful incentives to the
mind, when one is brought to relish them. If you can once get into children
a love of credit, and an apprehension of shame and disgrace, you have

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 out into them the true principle, which will constantly work, and incline
them to the rightthe great secret of education.6

Foucault argues that the reign of institutions rejected the old, dualistic principle of
guilt/not guilty and replaced it with the notion of continuous gradation and
constant surveillance. This concept soon found itself in all major social
institutions. Intentions suddenly became important for social power. Therefore,
the examination or interrogation became the ritualized symbol of power and the
executioner was replaced by a myriad of professional experts and technicians
who assess, monitor, assign, observe, supervise, and prescribe treatment.7

It naturally followed that schools also began to emphasize and subsequent

gradations of rank. Interestingly, when Yale first introduced examinations in 1762,
the students simply refused to take them. In 1790, when Harvard attempted to
introduce them, the juniors and seniors went on a rampage, stoning the
examination building. When it became apparent that this would not stop the
process, some students spiked the kitchens water supple with 600 grains of a
strong emetic on the day of the examinations, but the institutional drive to control
soon overpowered the resistance and the ritual of the exam became an inherent
part of schooling.

In 1785, Yale introduced the first marking system that ranked students into four
Latin categories. By 1813, they changed it to a 4-point scale. Harvard used a 20-
point scale that was changed to 100 points by 1837.8 Letter grades began to be

introduced by the latter part of the 19th century, but did not receive widespread
adoption until the 1930s and 1940s.9

From the very outset of the idea, grades have been shown to be notoriously
subjective, arbitrary, and unreliable as a measurement of learning or
performance. In 1912, Starch took two English papers that had received an 80
from a mid-western high school and circulated it to 200 English teachers. They
were scored evenly from 57 to 97.10The next year, he compared the scores given

to a similarly scored geometry paper. They ranged between 27 and 97.11 We

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cannot show solid evidence that todays grading practices are anymore reliable
that a century abo. Grading criteria vary from teacher to teacher, class to class,
department to department, school to school, and even by the same teacher over
a period of time.

Grades do not predict future career success or even college grades beyond the
first semester very well.12 They do not provide a lasting assessment of learning

attained (they are not changed when the recipient forgets what was learned).
They do not indicate how up-to-date the knowledge was or whether the
assessment was affected by issues totally irrelevant to performance. Grading has
shown to inhibit intrinsic learning,13 provides very poor feedback to the learner,

reflects socio-economic status, tends to be affected by gender, race, school,

region of the country, and by the academic discipline.14

Somewhere, in the process of recording grades, someone, probably an

administrator (though it is remarkably difficult to identify who), decided that a
single composite grade would be helpful, so the Grade Point Average (GPA) was
invented. As an average, it is strange indeed.

If Dressel is right by defining a grade as an inadequate report of an inaccurate

judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has
attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite
material,15 then the GPA is the average of these ambiguous reports carried to

the second and sometimes third decimal and kept in sacred vaults where they
can be accessed indefinitely for future reference.

We have found that, individually, it is difficult to trust the reliability of our won
judgment beyond about five categories or ranking.16 To multiply the number of

judges makes the reliability even more doubtful. But to pool the separate
judgments of numerous judges across all academic subjects, gathered over a
significant period of time, using incredibly diverse criteria, is to propose a
reliability nightmare. Because we can reduce such judgments into a number that
appears minutely precise only masks its inherently questionable character. When

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this number is carried to its second decimal, it presumes to discern 400
meaningful distinctions among individuals for purposes of awards, scholarships,
admission to further learning, employment, ect. Who thought this was a good
idea?

I suppose it could be argued that by averaging grades, the most extreme teacher
assessments are smoothed out. Therefore, the average is more meaningful than
any individual judgment. In that case, median would be a more appropriate
measure than the mean, but it would give us too few categories to legitimize the
fine distinctions we want to make. What I find amazing is how so many teachers
and professors, who boast of being societys strongest advocates of rationality,
allow their assessment to be used so irrationally. Show me another innovation in
the US that has received more universal adoption than the GPA. More schools in
America compute GPAs than have televisions or computers.

Within their own classrooms, teachers are given remarkable latitude to develop
the criteria for assessing their students, and it is seen as a crime for an
administrator to change or even put pressure on a teacher to change an
individual grade. At the same time, however, if a teacher refuses to brand his or
her students with the label of a grade, it is viewed as insubordination, sufficient to
justify the termination of their contract.

Grade inflation is also viewed as irresponsible teaching, an act of sabotage,

insubordination, or injustice. It seems to be presumed that the further grading
departs from the sacred image of the bell-curve of normal distribution, the less
rigorous it has become. Therefore, the teacher who assigns too many high
marks, regardless of the amount of learning students gain, is acting irresponsibly.

To further this assumption, test items are evaluated not by how important it is to
know the answer, but by how well the item discriminates the good and the
poor student. it is much easier to sort students on trivia than on issues of major
importance, so teachers are tempted, and in fact reinforced for writing nit-picking
test items on useless details. However, as long as such teachers sort their

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students into sufficiently distributed labels, regardless of how arbitrary the
labeling criteria may otherwise be, little concern is raised by administrators.
Grading has much more to do with power than with learning.

Foucault argued that part of the massive influence of modern institutional power
lies in the minute; the slightest deviations from the norm call forth systematic
reaction.17 Grading in schools illustrates this point better than most other social

examples. Professional concern for minute assignments, assessments, and

classroom order can be so demanding that the aggregated, or universal
consequences, or uses of grading are easily overlooked. Conscientious teachers
spend great time and energy trying to make their grading practices fair and
precise without concern for how future administrators may use them. The overall
influence of the grading system seems far too big to be of any practical concern
to the individual teacher, even if, at some level, they know that the composite is
grossly unreliable and invalid.

As mundane and uninterested as it may be for the philosophers to consider,

however, no adequate description of modern social power is complete without
grading. The GPA hypocritically embodies most of the myths of our time
objectivity, scientific precision, competition, equality, democratic participation,
individual effort, technology, control, discipline, certification, and the American
dream.

Jencks and Riesman argue that whether American colleges want to admit it or
not, their central purpose may be to sort and certify students. Virtually every
college course culminates in an examination and a grade, and virtually all college
curricula lead to some sort of diploma or degree. A college that does not sort and
label its students in this way evidently cannot find a clientele.18

Suppose we asked a teacher, What do you enjoy most about your job? And this
teacher said, I love grading and ranking my students! What would we think of
that teacher? Surely, they must be joking. But if they really meant it, wouldnt we
have reason to thing such a sadist should not be allowed into a classroom?

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Of course, we dislike gradingto dislike grading is an important part of our job.
The medieval age had the same problem with the torturers and executioners. It
was imperative that they not enjoy inflicting pain upon their victims. A sentence
was to be carried our efficiently and objectively. So sign of compassion,
arbitrariness, or prejudice. Elaborate techniques are often invented to make the
grade appear as just and objective as possible. Or particular interest to me are
those teachers who believe that the rigid and inflexible adherence to the grading
policies the arbitrarily generated protects the integrity of the process. In spite of
the extenuating circumstances, interruptions, or peculiarities of a students life,
some teachers believe that rigidity guarantees fairness.

Psychologists tell us that there is a process by which a normal person can be

transformed into a torturer.19 For them, the victim must become a faceless object.

The process can begin by labeling an in-group and an out-group. By defining an

individual as a member of the out-group, discriminatory treatment can begin
almost immediately. Some perpetrators have been subject to torture as a part of
their preparation. This allows them to see violence as natural and gives them a
type of euphoria for enduring it successfully. They then told how superior they are
to ne a part of such an elite unit. It helps if they share a common ideology and if
they learn to blame the victim for the violence they receive. In this was, torturers
disengage themselves from the morality of their actions.

Likewise, desensitization is necessary to transform teachers into graders.

Teachers learn to split their personalities onto to incompatible roles; they both
nurture and rank learners at the same time. If students were not viewed as
students by those labeled teachers, then the very people making the
judgments would feel it immoral to rank them. Young men who decide to rank
women on a scale of 1-10 are considered crass and vulgar, unless they are
assigned by some institution to be judges in a beauty contest. Teachers must be
convinced that students are almost a different species in order to treat them as
students.

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Of course, those who survive the ordeal, or are declared superior, enjoy the
realm of the blessed.

The only thing reliable about a grade is that once given, it is permanent. While
absolute knowledge in any academic field has become less and less defensible,
grades continue to stand as if they had been elected to the canon of scripture.
They represent the fixed truth, a permanent record of the students future
potential. The criteria for the original assessment may have been arbitrary, even
whimsical; teachers of the same subject may find it impossible to agree on what
would be learned, even in total disagreement about the truths they teach. But
every good student soon learns to act as if their teachers opinions were the
voice of God. Truth may not be absolute, but information needed to pass the final
appears absolute and everlastingat least until the next semester. What if
teachers were allowed to teach only knowledge that would last as long as the
grades the give their students for learning it?

I can almost hear the voice of society declaring to my 3 year old grandson:
Buddy Noorlander, you have been found guilty of being a child in the United
Statesyou are hereby condemned to the custody of the state for a period of at
least 12 years of hard labor. Every hour will be carefully recorded and a
permanent record will be kept of your attendance. Furthermore, each of the
taskmasters you will be assigned will record their individual assessment of how
well you performed the tasks they will require of you. These assessments will be
accumulated and this average will be permanently recorded and used to
determine your social status and the opportunities you may receive upon your
release from state custody. There is no way to alter or expunge these permanent
records.

High school students are regularly required to read the barbaric treatment of
Hester Prynne, who was compelled to wear a scarlet letter A on her chest this
letter labeled her transgression which was considered so serious that she was
forced to wear it throughout her life. forcing students to read this novel is

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assumed to five them exposure to great American literature as well as an
appreciation of out history and the progress we have made in the treatment of
social deviance. It is more than ironic that the grade these students receive for
how well they please the teacher assigning this novel will stand on their
permanent record as least as long as Hesters letter was to be borne on her
chestexcept that their letter isnt fictional and most would be happy with an A.
Few things in modern society are more difficult to repent of than a poor semester.

As barbaric and psychologically damaging as it would appear to force a student

to wear a dunce cap or a shame mask for a few minutes, the long-term
consequences for receiving a poor grade may be far worse. I could well imagine
a modern student coming to a teacher who had just given them a grade lower
than they felt they deserved and pleading with them, Oh teacher, couldnt you
just beat me instead?

Foucault is right in calling out attention to the minute ways in which social power
has bee n universally exercised, but he is wrong in claiming that this change
occurred because society went from a concern for the physical body to a concern
for the soul. It is a strange concept of soul that does not allow justice to be in the
hands of God and that denies a fundamental concept of responsibility and
agency to man. The Puritans came close to such a denial because they adopted
the concept that man was inherently evil, but Christians could also have seen
man as a child of God, responsible and accountable to Him for the choices they
make. The teach a child correct principles is one thing, but to assume the
authority to control even the minute behavioral actions of every child does not
find its justification in the New Testament. If man is devoid of any spiritual
qualities, truly a tabula rosa, which even Locke (who coined the term) was
unwilling to admit, then a social institution could assume the responsibility for
total control of the individual.20

I would suggest that the comprehensive control of the minute is a direct result of
denying the soul of man. Grading and our current preoccupation with a new orgy

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of tabulation and testing are based upon a fundamental mistrust of the human
person and denial of the divine agency in the human spirit. To suppose that
education must be aggressively imposed upon every individual by social
institutions in minute ways reveals a will to control and an obsession with power.

I pray for the day when educators will believe in the dignity of the human person,
when they will respect that the right to choose is as important as choosing as the
right. When they will inspire their students to perform because of the highest
within man, not because of some new coercive technique or fear of some social
label. I pray for a day when each person will be seen as a soul with divine
mission and not as an object, a number, a test score, or a product of social
manipulation. I pray for a day when educational institutions will treasure the
pursuing and sharing of knowledge more than sorting individuals into
discriminatory social strata.

References
1Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, New York:
Vintage Books, 1977.

2 see Foucault, pages 293-308.

3Hindus, Michael Stephen, Prison and Plantation: Crime Justice and Authority in
Massachusetts and South Caroline, 1767-1878, Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1980, quoting Gideon Haynes, Pictures from Prison Life, a report
of the directors, [1815] p. 166.

4 Hindus, p. 168.

5Corporal Punishment in American Education, Irwin A Hyman and James H

Wise, ed., Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979, p. 33.

6 Locke, John, Thoughts on Education, no. 56.

7 Foucault, p. 42.

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8Presley, John C., What does Grading Mean, Anyway?, paper presented ay
Southeastern Conference on English in the Two-year College, 1981, ERIC
ED198559, pp. 4-5; for a historical view of grading, see M.L. Smallwood, An
Historical Study of Examinations and Grading Systems in Early American
Universities, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935, and L.W. Cureton, The
History of Grading Practices, Measurements in Education, 1971, pp. 2 (4), 1-9.

9Geisinger, Kurt F., Marking systems, Encyclopedia of Educational Research,

Vol. 3, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1982, pp. 11039-11040

10Starch, Daniel and E. C. Elliot, Reliability of Grading High School Work in

English, School Review, Vol. 20, 1912, pp. 676-681.

11
Starch, Daniel and E. C. Elliot, Reliability of Grading Mathematics, School
Review, Vol. 21, 1913, pp. 445-457.

12see for exampleHoyt, Donald P., The Relationship between College Grades
and Adult Achievement., A Review of the Literature. American College Testing
program, Iowa City, report #ACT-RR-7, 1965, and Nelson, A., Undergraduate
Academic Achievement in College as an Indicator of Occupational Success,
Washington D.C.: Bureau of Policies and Standards, P.S. 75-5, United States
Civil Service Commission, 1975.

13for a review of a meta-analysis of 128 studies, see Edward L. Deci, Richard

Koestner, and Richard Ryan, Extrinsic Rewards and Intrinsic Motivation in
Education: Reconsidered Once Again, Review of Educational Research Vol. 71,
No. 1 (Spring 2001), p. 1-27.

14 see for exampleGoldman, R.D., Grading Practices in Different Major

Fields, American Educational Research Journal, 1974 11, 343-357; Geisinger,
K.F., Marking Systems, The Encyclopedia of Educational Research, 1982, p.
1139-1149; Geisinger, K.F. and Rabinowitz, W., Individual Differences Among
College Faculty in Grading, Journal of Instructional Psychology, 1982, 1, 20-27;
Duke, J.D., Disparities in Grading Practice, Somme Resulting Iniquities, and a
Proposed New Index of Academic Achievement, Psychological Reports, 1983,
53, 1023-1080; Koetz, Daniel and Mark Berends, Changes in High School
Grading Standards in Mathematics, report for the College Entrance Examination
Board, Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001; Ferguson, Ronald F., What Doesnt
Meet the Eye: Understanding and Addressing Racial Disparities in High
Achieving suburban Schools, November 2002, retrieved from NCREL.org/gap/
ferg/index.html

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15Dressel, P., Evaluation in Higher Education, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1961, p.
12.

16Milton, Ohmer, Howard R. Polio, and James E Eison, Making Sense of College
Grades, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1986, p. 28.

17 Foucault, p. 220.

18Jencks, Christopher, and David Riesman, The Academic Resolution, New

York: Doubleday & Co., 1968, p. 61.

19Gibson, Janice T., Factors Contributing to the Creating of a Torturer, in Peter

Suedfelds Psychology and Torture, New York: Hemisphere Publishing
Corporation, 1990.

20 Locke, No. 190.

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