1950s onward, popular culture was increasingly marked by a tendency toward less and not more social uniformity, more and not less interrogation of social authority.
More will be said about the consequences of such tendency for the structure of society. For purposes of the present research it is to be noted that an important venue of encounter between opposing views of social organization and power was public education. Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down the speciousness of racially segregated education, prominently figured in some two decades of court challenges to integration. Over the course of the second half of the 20th century, less high-profile judicial and legislative activity was also under way that was to influence the character of public education no less decisively. Corporal punishment of students as a mechanism of school discipline turned out to be a core issue in that regard.
A working definition of corporal punishment is provided by a longtime researcher into the issue: "the use of physical force with the i
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