Björn Norlin

School jailhouse: discipline, space and the materiality of school morale in early-modern Sweden

Abstract This paper uses a specific phenomenon of early-modern education in Sweden, the school jail, as a point of departure for a broader analysis of educational policy in the areas of discipline and moral instruction. The paper demonstrates how the jail evolved as a part of a wider network of objects, pedagogical technologies and social routines in this area and how this gradually came to change. From being part of a disciplinary rationale leaning on public corporal punishment, the prison was successively set aside in favour of new symbolic and more productive forms of discipline. This process of modernisation also enforced spatial and material reconfigurations, as the classroom acquired a more prominent role as an arena for regulatory practice. The paper also suggests a shift of the general scope in formal policy from a religious frame of reference towards a more secular and independent positioning of schooling.