Educational history has generally been written in terms of Acts of Parliament, examinations, buildings, famous headmasters and changing methods of instruction.
There is another history, seldom entered in official records.
It is the history remembered by the pupil.
A punishment which occupied five minutes of a master’s afternoon might remain in a boy’s memory for fifty years.
What significance that memory acquired depended upon the individual.
For one it became an amusing school story. For another it remained an indignity. For another it became part of a lifelong interest which he could neither entirely explain nor dismiss.
The old school punishment book can tell us who received the cane, on what date and, sometimes, for what offence.
It cannot tell us what the boy carried away from the study afterwards.
