Slavery constrained the paedagogus’s violence where clerical freedom did not

Evidence

The paedagogus’s slavery was, perversely, one of the few constraints on his disciplinary discretion. The medieval schoolmaster faced no such constraint. He answered, primarily, to the church and to God. And neither the church nor God, in the medieval European understanding, opposed the cane. — , The Rod and the Child, 648

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why does expanding an agent’s legal freedom here produce more brutal treatment of children? Worth probing the inverse perverse-incentive dynamic.
• XREF: Parallels the argument that external accountability structures — even oppressive ones — can restrain abuse; echoes street-level bureaucracy literature.

Related

• Christian doctrine alone did not produce medieval classroom harshness (similarity 0.82)
• Christian pedagogical cruelty was doctrinally contingent, not theologically fixed (similarity 0.78)
• The cane was a bracketed backstop in ancient pedagogy, not its engine (similarity 0.78)
• Corporal punishment was not the engine of medieval intellectual achievement (similarity 0.78)