Willful Disobedience
Willful Disobedience
Young People and School Authority in the Nineteenth-Century United States
This chapter examines the issue of corporal punishment in schools and how it was challenged by both children and parents in the courts during the nineteenth century. Focusing on court cases pitting and their families vs. schools and school teachers, it considers questions about school authority and how these clashes shaped daily expressions of power in the modern school system. It also suggests that these litigations reveal conflicts embedded not only in class and gender but also in contested notions of the role of education in a democratic society. Finally, it explains how student and parent resistance to corporal punishment led to increasing reliance on suspensions and expulsions as means of school governance by the early twentieth century.
Keywords: corporal punishment, schools, children, parents, court cases, school authority, education, suspensions, expulsions, school governance
NYU Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
