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CHAPTER 1
PUNISHING CHILDREN WITH WRITING
Writing lines is the penance Harrovians [students at an all-boys school in London] do for all their sins, in and out of school. If a boy is late for school, he writes lines; if he misses "bill," he writes lines. If the lines are not finished at the stated time, their number is doubled. There was one clever boy who escaped writing half the ordered quantity; and the master tells the story of how he did it to this day.
— Elizabeth Robins Pennell, 1887, "Harrow-on-the-Hill"
It is a curious fact that writing has long been used to punish schoolchildren. I say that it is curious because teaching students to write effectively has simultaneously been held up as an important educational goal. Writing-based punishments do not aim to make better writers, and yet, they are one way some teachers use writing in schools. Learning to write effectively is often described to students as "necessary later in life" for communicating and performing any number of workplace tasks, and yet, writing-based punishments model very different purposes for writing: according to these punishments, writing is a process of submitting to authority and something that promises to change you against your will. In a world where written works by authors such as William Shakespeare and Jane Austen are celebrated and the "language arts" of reading and writing are seen as potentially sophisticated, challenging, and redemptive, schoolhouse discipline via writing as punishment seems to give writing a more sinister quality.
In this chapter, I explore how the writing-based punishments used to control and discipline students reveal particular beliefs about the capabilities of writing as a means of discipline and control. These classroom punishments also reveal that punishment writing can become involved in the power dynamics of the classroom, mediating between teachers who believe in the potential of nonconsensual writing and students who are forced to engage in carefully orchestrated acts of solitary writing.
I begin this book with this chapter on the use of writing as punishment in schools because the classroom is a sort of birthplace for how and why writing is thought to work so successfully as a tool for punishment, shame, ridicule, and humiliation in and across the many other contexts and situations I describe in this book. The long tradition of punishing children with writing, and calling them out on the chalkboard, serves as a constantly renewed source for the much wider cultural belief that writing has the coercive ability to punish. Understanding the mechanisms behind the use of writing as punishment in schools provides a foundation for understanding similar uses of writing that take place far from the classroom. For most of us, we were schoolchildren ourselves when we first encountered the idea that writing can be used not only for learning but also for discipline and punishment. Even if you were not made to write something like "I will not chew gum in class" fifty, one hundred, or one thousand times yourself, you may have witnessed one of your classmates writing lines of some kind or being punished by having to craft a mandated letter of apology or punitive essay. Seeing and experiencing these uses of writing teaches lessons, I argue, about the imagined powers of writing.
As the chapter develops, I avoid the unanswerable question of the effectiveness of the use of writing as punishment and instead explore such uses of writing as social practices that reveal a good deal about cultural and rhetorical beliefs. Punishing children by having them write actually makes visible a widely held belief that writing can exercise a kind of power over writers that is not found in spoken discourse. The uses of writing as punishment in schools suggest that particular acts of writing, if orchestrated in just the right ways, have the power to transform writers. So, I set out in this chapter to explain why this message has been propagated for so long in our schools through the persistent use of writing as punishment. Why would writing be figured as so transformative, disciplinary, and powerful — particularly when using it for punishment tends to strike many as not really that effective? Many forms of punishment writing have been satirized and critiqued as emblematic of sham forms of schoolhouse justice and control. And yet, the practice continues.
I say that writing is special in having a mystique of disciplinary power because, when compared against the many other educational activities students engage in on a daily basis, writing has been most elaborately adapted and repurposed for use as punishment. As the epigraph to this chapter indicates, over a hundred years ago in the 1800s, writing resided beside the paddle and the dunce cap in the arsenal of punishment tools used by many teachers. Even as paddles and dunce caps have fallen from favor, punishment writing has remained a viable disciplinary technique. In one study from the 1980s, over half of teachers polled indicated a familiarity with the use of writing as punishment in schools. Writing as a form of punishment has survived as long as it has because, in part, it has an aura of civility and because it is still seen as at least marginally effective. In the course of any given day, across the many academic subjects students pursue, they are asked to do such things as complete math problems, create graphs, conduct science experiments, draw maps, give speeches, conduct research, make art, play, exercise, and write. And while I have come across some examples of students being required to complete math problems as punishment or do physical exercise as punishment, no other single academic activity has been repurposed as punishment to the degree that writing has. Think about it: having a student create a piece of art or make a graph as a form of punishment seems absurd in comparison to having that same student write an essay or compose a letter of apology about what he or she did wrong. It is easy to take for granted that writing, of all things, is viable as a form of punishment, and my purpose here is to explore why.
I am not the first person to point out that getting students to appreciate writing does not exactly jibe with punishing them with it. I spend some time in this chapter describing how, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, arguments began to be made against the use of punishment writing in schools. Critiques of teachers who use writing as punishment in their classrooms have gone on for over a hundred years, with various self-appointed "protectors of writing" having tried hard to do away with this particular use of writing. As I describe, some scholars of rhetoric and writing have framed writing instruction in particular as having a moral component and see writing's very nature as being about ethical deliberation. Writing-based punishments (especially ones based on composing tedious, repetitive, involuntarily selected utterances) challenge these moral and ethical perspectives on writing. But despite attacks on the use of writing as punishment, these punishment methods continue to appeal to some teachers.
In schools and across our cultures, there are a wide range of entrenched cultural beliefs about writing. There is the belief that literacy is an essential component of good citizenship, the belief that learning to write well can help lead to success later in life, and the belief that becoming literate is essential to higher-level reasoning. Another set of less thoroughly examined beliefs about writing are encrypted in and reproduced through the use of writing as punishment, and these are the beliefs that writing is a viable tool for disciplining, controlling, brainwashing, shaming, demeaning, subjugating, and humiliating others. Forcing someone to write particular things in particular ways establishes power and control in a seemingly simple use of compulsory literacy. In schools, the sordid history of using writing as punishment has long marked writing as having the potential to undermine the power and authority of writers, and this has positioned writing as having a special kind of power and mystique. And as I describe, some of the basis for using writing as punishment involves the idea that the act of writing something down on paper is believed to act back on writers as if by magic not just rhetoric.
CEREMONIES OF PUNISHMENT WRITING IN SCHOOLS
Of the many methods described in this book for punishing, shaming, humiliating, and controlling with writing, only a few of those methods are used on children. Very particular writing rituals have been adapted and fine-tuned for the use on children in schools. I use the word ritual here to make the point that the ways writing has been used as a punishment are, like other rituals, imbued with cultural meaning. There are many descriptions of what cultural rituals are and how they function, but my thinking about punishment writing as having ritualistic aspects is best captured in Jeffrey Alexander's explanation of ritual. He writes: "Rituals are episodes of repeated and simplified cultural communication in which the direct partners to a social interaction, and those observing it, share a mutual belief in the ... communication's symbolic contents and accept the authenticity of one another's intentions. It is because of this shared understanding of intention and content, and in the intrinsic validity of the interaction, that rituals have their effect and affect." To translate this definition of ritual over to uses of writing as punishment, the "simplified cultural communication" is the scene of a student being punished by having to write in some way; and the "partners to a social interaction" and "those observing it" are the teacher, punished student, and other witnesses (typically students). The act of punishing a student with writing is not simply an exercise in writing something down, "the communication" has "symbolic contents" that resonate because of a "shared understanding" of what punishment writing means. As Alexander describes, "rituals have their effect and affect," and both resonate through the use of writing as punishment, informing shared views on what writing is and how it works.
In the ritualistic use of writing as punishment, how writing is coupled with discipline is not random. Very particular orchestrations of writing tap into what are seen as the less resistible, more controlling powers and capabilities that writing is imagined — through the function of ritual — to have. These writing rituals have been developed and maintained over time for the use of writing as punishment, and the use of established, long-lasting rituals has helped maintain the beliefs that writing in certain ways can actually discipline, redeem, and alter the writer. This is at least what the use of writing as punishment, as a ritual, expresses to those who experience and witness it. Encrypted in the particularities of these schoolhouse traditions are core beliefs about writing as a potentially dark, magical rhetorical art capable of punishing, controlling, and transforming writers.
Elizabeth Robins Pennell did not see students writing poems or short stories for their punishments in the 1880s, and they certainly were not engaging in free-writes about their innermost feelings. They were not drawing, dancing, or reciting lines. Instead, students writing lines caught her attention, and this type of writing is the most iconic and recognizable form of ritualized punishment writing. I could fill this entire book with anecdotes about students having to write lines in schools over the past 150 years. In the interest of space, I will give just a few examples of the use and adaptation over time of this particular form of punishment writing.
In 1898 in the British periodical Public School Magazine, an anonymous student describes the punishment this way: "Some masters have a wonderful aptitude for inventing long lines with curious words, while others content themselves with picking out five or six of the longest words in the language and give you such a line as 'Incorrigible irregularity necessitates drastic treatment,' and then, with that cool impudence which only masters possess, they insist on your doing 600 of them because there are only five words in the line, and that is what they call being lenient." In a remembrance of going to a private Catholic school in California in the 1950s, a former student describes how "if we did something horrid, like writing a name on the wall in the bathroom, we had to 'write lines' during lunch, which meant we ate in the classroom, could not go outside to play and had to write 100, 500, or 1,000 times." And in a 1994 court case involving a legal appeal by a dismissed teacher, one witness's testimony claimed that, after the teacher accused an entire seventh-grade class of "talking in the lunch line," the teacher made all of the students write lines. In an even more recent account from the UK in 2014, a twelve-year-old schoolgirl reports being "forced to write 'decent people take pride in their appearance' 40 times after turning up to school in the wrong shoes." Writing lines has even been updated for technology-savvy millennials: in a widely shared news story from 2016, students in a school in Chengdu, China, were reportedly made to write out one thousand emojis for arriving late to class. So writing lines has existed across time and place with little variation, and while this particular punishment technique does not seem to be as common now in schools as it was in the nineteenth century, it remains a form of punishment used by some teachers.
Having to write lines — also referred to as "rote writing" or having to complete "a writing imposition" — is also the most frequently satirized form of schoolhouse punishment writing. Each episode of The Simpsons television show begins with Bart Simpson writing lines on a chalkboard at the front of his classroom, as rote punishment writing has become a symbol of futile, old-fashioned, one-size-fits-all schoolhouse discipline. Writing in the 1980s about this form of punishment, Linda Brodkey suggests that "the task itself seems designed to make nonsense out of writing, for the punishment usually consists in writing the same sentence a set number of times. Children, of course, are inclined to enact the punishment in ways that call attention to its absurdity. It is not unusual, for instance, for a child to complete the task vertically rather than horizontally. Thus, the punishment sentence, 'I will not talk in class,' is reproduced in columns: a column for 'I,' a column for 'will,' and so on." Even while writing lines is easily mocked in popular culture and thwarted by students who are punished this way, decoding how this practice is thought to work reveals several key beliefs about writing as a tool for social control.
When made to write lines, the student is typically forced to compose (usually with a pen or pencil; seldom via a typewriter or word processor) simple, declarative sentences that relate to the violation. So talking out in class is met with sentences about respecting others, and tardiness is met with sentences about punctuality. This relationship between what is written and the punishment stems from a core belief that as we write on the page, what we write is written back on us. This is the almost magical power I have been referring to: the belief that there is an inherent bidirectionality to writing.
Now, if writing has a bidirectional power, it is not thought to be perfect. This is why students who are punished in this way do not have to craft long sentences with complex structures such as dependent clauses and hedging (e.g., "I will not chew gum in class, unless it is a day when we have a test and ..."). In rote writing, simple sentences are imagined to be more likely to transfer back onto the writer, and they are repeated over and over again because the marks that writing leaves need time, apparently, to "sink in." No one believes that writing "I will respect my teacher" just once will do the job, but can such a message be resistible after five hundred or one thousand times? With enough repetition, what is written down just might sink in.
This belief in writing as working almost magically in two directions at once — upon the page and back on the writer — is satirized and explored in two pieces of fiction published almost a century apart. These fictional accounts vividly show a power dynamic in which the punisher believes in the bidirectional capabilities of writing and the punished resist this pseudomagical power. In a 1919 short story by Czech writer Franz Kafka, titled "In the Penal Colony," an explorer visits a penal colony to find that convicted criminals are routinely strapped to a large "apparatus" that violently cuts written punishment sentences into their bodies. The apparatus uses a writing implement that is as sharp as a knife, and the condemned eventually bleed to death. In Kafka's story, "the Officer," a champion of this gruesome process of writing on the bodies of the condemned, insists that being sentenced in this way brings about a kind of cathartic transformation before death. In a similarly bloody scene from J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003), the young wizard Harry Potter is unjustly accused of lying and made to write lines with an enchanted quill. As Harry Potter writes out his punishment lines, the magical quill cuts into his hand and extracts his blood, using it as ink. Magically, the pen also carves the words back on Harry Potter as he writes "I must not tell lies."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Writing as Punishment in Schools, Courts, and Everyday Life"
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