The authoritarian character of Tudor educational reform, and the social and political world it imagined, is well known. Thus, Richard Halpern observes that in this period we can take it as ‘axiomatic that the primary function of schooling is to reproduce the dominant social order’. He describes ‘the tortures of the Tudor schoolroom – sadistic, arbitrary, sometimes explicitly sexual’ which ‘clearly worked as a political ritual, in which the pedagogue assumed and reinforced the sovereign authority of the monarch or magistrate’. Of course, the whip was not the only tool at the disposal of the schoolmaster. The sixteenth century saw an increase in corporal punishment, but it also saw a debate about more humane ideas of educational method. Roger Ascham's influential The Schoolmaster, written between 1563 and 1566 and printed posthumously in 1570, was openly critical of the standard method of learning Latin: rote-learning backed up by the threat of violence. It recommends instead a gentler method which elicits pleasure: imitation or emulation of the kind, encouraging schoolmaster and the classical text. Halpern, familiar with the writings of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, knows better than to take these ideas as progressive. The ‘mimetic model’ of the gentle schoolmaster shapes ‘a new class culture within the nascent bonds of “civil society”’ and it does so by ‘imparting behavioural discipline, encouraging the stylistic assimilation of cultural authority, and distributing individual differences within a regularized system’.