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Dunce is a mild insult in English meaning "a person who is slow at learning or stupid". The etymology given byRichard Stanyhurst is that the word is derived from the name of the Scottishscholastictheologian andphilosopherJohn Duns Scotus.[1]
Adunce cap, also variously known as adunce hat,dunce's cap ordunce's hat, is apointed hat, formerly used as an article of discipline in schools in Europe and theUnited States—especially in the 19th and early 20th centuries—for children who were disruptive or were considered slow in learning.[2][3] In the 19th century, it was seen by some as degrading: in 1831, children's book author Sidney Babcock wrote of the dunce cap as debasing and harsh, and in 1899, historianAlice Morse Earle compared it to other forms of school discipline she saw as degrading and outdated. It became unpopular in the early 20th century.[4] However, some North American schools still permitted caps as late as the 1950s.[3] In modernpedagogy, punishments like dunce caps have fallen out of favor:[5] By 1927, an editorial in theEducational Research Bulletin stated: "The rod and the cap were not eminently successful ... we have our doubts about exclusion being the solution to the problem. ... High scholarship is not produced by students who have their curiosity stifled by their teachers. Curiosity must be stimulated if scholarship is desired, and sympathy is essential to this stimulation."[6]
TheOxford English Dictionary (3rd edition) cites mid-16th century examples of the termdunce used to describe a follower ofDuns Scotus, a person engaged in ridiculous pedantry, or a person regarded as a "fool" or "dimwit".[7] A visual depiction of the hat was first shown in the 1727 edition ofThe New England Primer,[4] and the termdunce's cap is recorded as early as 1791.[7] The first use of the term in literature was in 1840, in Charles Dickens'The Old Curiosity Shop.[4] Scotus apparently believed that the hat would funnel knowledge into the brain, and in the centuries before his followers became unpopular, was a social signal of an intelligent person.[8][9]
The dunce cap has also been connected with donkeys to portray the student as asinine. An engraving featured in an early 1900s textbook depicts a child sitting on a wooden donkey in an "eighteenth-century" classroom, wearing a dunce cap with donkey ears.[4][10]
A similar cap made of paper and called acapirote was prescribed for sinners and penitents during theSpanish Inquisition.[11]
The dunce cap was also used to humiliate intellectuals and officials during theCultural Revolution in China during the Maoist era.[12][13]
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