Spare the Rod: Punishment and the Moral Community of Schools by Campbell F. Scribner and Bryan R. Warnick, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2021

Nothing, perhaps, illustrates better the absurdity of current punishment practices in schools and the urgent need for reform than the events surrounding the murder of Samuel Paty, the French teacher who was shot and beheaded for showing controversial religious images in his civics class. The online smear campaign that led to the attack was eventually traced back to one student who, it turned out, was not even at school that day. Why? Because she had been suspended for truancy. As that punishment was handed down by the principal, that student must have almost died laughing. That punishment practices in schools have become disjointed from the educational mission of schools is the central thesis of Campbell Scribner and Bryan Warnick’s book, Spare the Rod. The book, which is part of the University of Chicago’s highly regarded history and philosophy of education series, has an easily discernable argumentative structure. From the early colonial period to the late 19th century, punishment practices in American schools coalesced into three primary forms: corporal punishment, public shaming, and “moral suasion,” or leveraging students’ allegedly natural propensity for sympathy to encourage good behaviour by appealing to the negative impact of their wrongdoing on others. According to the book’s narrative, these forms of punishment emerged successively in historical terms and each was embedded in a sort of Weltanschauung comprised of basic assumptions about human nature, authority, and the reasons for obeying moral obligations. Being conceptually embedded in this way, punishment had meaning and coherence as much for those meting it out as for those receiving it. Scribner and Warnick document how, through the first half of the 20th century, as the unprecedented expansion of the education system and the professionalization of teaching and administration rapidly and radically transformed American schooling, the same basic punishment practices persisted in schools but became gradually detached from the conceptual frameworks that had once given them meaning. Instead of being aimed at instilling in young people such things as unconditional obedience to established authorities (corporal punishment), internalizing social expectations (public shaming), and awakening natural sympathies (moral suasion), punishment came to be seen as serving an overarching and singularly bureaucratic goal: creating a school environment favourable to the delivery of instruction. This is a deeply impoverished conception of punishment, Scribner and Warnick suggest, because it neglects the educational role that punishment typically plays in human communities. Punishment is not just a tool of social control, the authors insist. It also has an important symbolic function of communicating messages of strong disapproval of certain actions in a way that cannot be captured adequately by mere verbal expressions of disapprobation. The challenge for American schools, then, is to reinvest punishment practices with meaning by finding and prioritizing a new paradigm for punishment that aligns with the moral aims and purposes of contemporary schooling. Just such a paradigm can be found, Scribner and Warnick argue, in the “restorative justice” approach, which, as the label indicates, emphasises repairing the damage done to relationships by transgressions through dialogue, mutual recognition, and the involvement of both victims and perpetrators in solving a community’s problems of justice. Given the emphasis that the authors place on the need to consider the historical context of punishment practices in schools to fully understand them, it is ironic that the book’s presentation of the historical shift in the way punishment practices are conceived of in American schools is somewhat historically decontextualized. The book is centrally concerned with portraying how the massification of educational systems and the professionalization of teaching have elicited a groundswell movement away from educators viewing the pursuit of more noble goals …