The famous Egyptian beating proverb was propaganda to make boys accept the cane

Evidence

Niv Allon — the Egyptologist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art who has done some of the most important recent work on this material — has put it this way, in a 2019 paper: the famous line is not a description of how to teach a child. It is a description of how to make a child accept teaching. It is rhetoric. It is persuasion. It is — in modern terms — a sunk-cost argument. You are going to be hit. The hitting is going to be unpleasant. But what you will get in exchange — literacy, and through literacy, all the doors literacy opens — is so vastly preferable to every alternative — that the hitting is, on balance, worth it. — , The Rod and the Child, 132

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general theme of recruiting rhetoric and sunk-cost arguments — same genre as modern law-firm recruiting and graduate-program pitches. — connects to: Beating with tamarisk cane symbolically rebirthed a boy like Osiris — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 159

Related

• Beating with tamarisk cane symbolically rebirthed a boy like Osiris (similarity 0.84)
• Wealthy Sumerian fathers bribed schoolmasters to spare their sons the cane (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Beating with tamarisk cane symbolically rebirthed a boy like Osiris #complicates (0.60) — , The Rod and the Child, 159