Abstract

Punitive culture in nursing education has been documented for over four decades. Interventions have proliferated, yet the problem persists. This paper argues that persistence is not an implementation failure but an epistemic one. Drawing on nursing's own critical tradition, particularly Roberts's application of Freire's oppressed group behavior model and the Foucauldian scholarship of Gastaldo, Holmes, and their successors, I trace three historically specific disciplinary logics that converge in a professional epistemology experienced as natural rather than constructed: religious moral formation, which naturalized obedience as virtue; biomedical hierarchical subordination, which naturalized hierarchy as scientific authority; and gendered labor discipline, which naturalized self‐sacrifice as caring. These logics persist through what Bourdieu termed habitus: durable dispositions transmitted through intergenerational socialization, the hidden curriculum, and clinical evaluation structures. Behavioral interventions fail because they target outputs without making the generating logics visible. What is needed is not better behavioral management but genealogical consciousness: the capacity to recognize the profession's disciplinary inheritance as historical construction rather than natural order.