Dunce

A dull-witted, stupid, incompetent or unmotivated student, whom American teachers routinely punished by ordering the child to sit on an elevated stool, in and facing the front corner of classroom, in full view of other students, with a conical “dunce cap” atop his head. The term is derived from the middle name of John Duns Scotus, the 13thcentury Scottish theologian who founded the scholastic system called Scotism, which held theology and philosophy to be intertwined and that truth lay in a combination of philosophy and divine revelation. For centuries after his death, Scotists, or “Dunses,” constantly debated followers of St. Thomas Aquinas, or Thomists, who ridiculed their challengers as sophists and pedants, for which the title dunce became synonymous. The dunce cap, or clown’s hat for children who misbehave in class, appears to have originated in the early 1800s.