Many practitioners of yoga and meditation focus 
on the chakra point directly above the crown of the 
head, to heighten consciousness and awareness. 
Speedreaders focus on the same point, to help 
them read faster and understand more.

The conical dunce cap was invented by the 
medieval Scottish philosopher Duns Scotus, to 
help students develop concentration by focusing on 
the point of the cap, directly above the crown of 
the head. In the 1300s, the Duns cap became 
popular headgear among the students and 
colleagues of Duns, and at that time the cap 
signified a respected scholar and a seeker of higher 
knowledge. The Duns cap was the scholastic 
version of the wizard’s cap.

But by Shakespeare’s time, two and a half 
centuries later, many considered Duns and his 
conical cap to be hopelessly outdated. In 
Elizabethan schools, a child perceived as 
misbehaving would now be punished by the public 
humiliation of having to sit or stand in the dunce 
corner of the classroom, wearing the dunce cap, 
which had come to symbolize stupidity.

The dunce cap continued to be used for 
punishment in American schools in some places as 
late as late as the 1950s, when it finally fell out of favor, 
although the dunce corner persisted, and probably 
persists today. 

I am a dunce, proud and defiant. I sit on the dunce 
stool, in the dunce corner, wearing the dunce cap 
on my head like a crown.