I was reading a P.G. Wodehouse story about two (teenaged?) boarding school students who started a dorm-room business to supply pre-written “lines” to their classmates for 3-6 pence per sheet. In context, it seems that “doing X hundred lines” was a common punishment for classroom misbehavior at this (and other?) boarding schools in England during the early 20th century…. But it’s not something I’ve ever encountered in American suburban public school in the 90s/2000s.
I’d love to learn more about how common “doing lines” was in English boarding school culture, and how some of the details worked. Eg if you got assigned 500 lines from Virgil, could you pick any 500 lines, or was it one specific line repeated 500x? And was “one line” predefined in the book you were copying from (like how the Bible does), or does it literally just mean one line’s worth of handwriting on a notebook page? Why were Greek numerals worth including as an option for lines? Etc. And is this still a common punishment today, or when/how did it become abandoned? Any other relevant info welcome too!
Doing lines was absolutely common practice and still is across England (I’m not sure about the rest of the UK). However, the exact punishment itself has shifted to repetition, rather than copying lines from a section of a text. This question does open an interesting avenue into the state of the British educational system.
Given that you used Virgil as an example, you seem to be aware that the works of antiquity were commonly used, due to their complexity, but also their general educational relevance. The study of Latin was essentially ubiquitous in any reputable school in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The study of Ancient Greek, while not as ubiquitous, was still certainly widespread, as was wider study of Classics. The renewed interest in antiquity endured from the Renaissance period as a mark of academic stature. It was essentially a given that a foundational understanding of Classics was necessary to understand literature, philosophy, and, to a lesser extent, the Romance languages. The lyrical complexity (both from the density of poetic language as well as natural difficulty coming from translating antiquated literature) made the classical epics perfect forms of tedious punishment, while still claiming a grounding in the staples of good education.
Throughout the twentieth century and into the present, however, the relevance of the classics to general education has rapidly decreased. This has created a huge divide between state-funded schools, who do not offer Latin as a subject, and privately-funded schools (Lister, 2007). The latter tend to have dedicated Classics departments, with Latin, Ancient Greek, and Classics as subjects available for study before university. Even then, however, classical literature itself has been de-emphasised in favour of the study of the languages themselves, so lines have evolved to just be a repetition of a single sentence, even in those private schools.
Hopefully that answers your question, but at the risk of addressing more recent events, I think the impacts of this change of attitude towards classical education has further effects. The teaching of Latin is a contentious point in British education, due to its connotations of elitism that draw from that history of boarding school to university classism that defined, and in many ways still does define, British further education. In elite universities, for many humanities subjects, a passing understanding of the classics is expected, even at undergraduate level. This creates an obvious academic advantage for those private school pupils, who are already disproportionally represented at top universities. Just last year, the government announced that 40 state schools would start to offer Latin at GCSE level. Many university classics departments are campaigning for an increase in classics education in state secondary schools, with particularly convincing/successful arguments in Goodman (2017) and Hall and Holmes-Henderson (2017), both of which I have listed below if you’re interested in reading more.
Lister, Bob. (2007). Changing Classics in Schools. Cambridge University Press.
Goodman, Penelope. (2017). ‘Bridging the gap: teaching and studying Ancient History and Classical Civilisation from school to university’. Journal of Classics Teaching 18 (35), 48-53.
Hall, Edith, and Arlene Holmes-Henderson. (2017). ‘Advocating Classics Education - A New National Project’. Journal of Classics Teaching 18 (36), 25-28.
https://amp.theguardian.com/education/2021/jul/31/latin-introduced-40-state-secondaries-england
it’s not something I’ve ever encountered in American suburban public school in the 90s/2000s.
Surely you're familiar with the opening credits of The Simpsons, where each week Bart is being punished by having to write some sentence on the blackboard a certain number of times. Of course, few schools now have blackboards, but both the artifact and the practice of repetitive writing as a punishment would be familiar to Baby Boomers in the US.