The late nineteenth century brought promotion of compulsory-education laws for all children and youth by the same civic-minded reformers and educators, with the same rationale of securing social order. As one Chicago Board of Education member stated the issue in 1868: “We should rightfully have the power to arrest all these little beggars, loafers, and vagabonds that infest our city, take them from the streets and place them in schools where they are compelled to receive education and learn moral principles. . . . We certainly should not permit a reckless and indifferent part of our population to rear their children in ignorance to become a criminal and lawless class within our community.”3
SCHOOLHOUSE RULES
The one-room schoolhouse that characterized most district schools around the country in the 1800s was distant from the reality of truant Irish youth on Boston or New York streets. But whether in a Midwestern log schoolhouse or in a brick city schoolhouse, student misbehavior and teacher discipline were an ever-present feature of education. By today’s standards, methods of discipline could border on outright torture, and some incidents of student defiance would land such a perpetrator in police custody were he or she in a modern classroom. Imagine the outcome for a student in a contemporary classroom pulling a knife on a teacher as Danny did in that Kansas schoolroom! He would be arrested by school police, suspended for weapons possession, and face criminal prosecution.
Rural students attended school for several months during the winter, when their labors weren’t needed at the family farm, and sometimes for a period during the summer. Depending on the population, forty or more students might be crammed into the room and supervised by one teacher, male or female, who might not be much older than the oldest students. For children and adolescents used to physical activity and the relative freedom of farm life, the constraints of the classroom and its requisite obedience could be as challenging as learning their letters. Sitting rod-straight on hard plank benches, paying rapt attention to their lessons, students had to battle natural instincts to fidget and play or risk the wrath of the schoolmaster.4
Rules of conduct could be straightjacket strict, transgressions almost impossible for youngsters to avoid. As the forerunners to current zero tolerance school discipline codes, the school rules of yesteryear were equally harsh and at odds with youthful natures. Schoolmasters often posted lists of infractions and the punishments they would elicit. In Stokes County, North Carolina, in 1848, one school’s rules listed forty-seven prohibitions, including “Boys & Girls Playing Together,” punishable with four lashes; “Telling Tales Out of School,” eight lashes; “Telling Lyes (sic),” seven lashes; “For Misbehaving to Girls,” ten lashes; and “Making Swings & Swinging on Them,” seven lashes. Playing cards, gambling or betting, nicknaming other students, and fighting or quarreling were also prohibited and would draw whippings.5
The deterrent effect of such disciplinary codes was questionable, and many accounts from early school days tell of brutal punishments freely administered. In an 1833 memoir, Warren Burton recalled his education in a Massachusetts schoolhouse in the early 1800s with less than fondness for Mehitabel Holt, his teacher for the third summer of instruction.
She kept order, for her punishments were horrible, especially to us little ones. She dungeoned us in that windowless closet just for a whisper. She tied us to her chair post for an hour because sportive nature tempted our fingers and toes into something like play. If we were restless on our seats, wearied of our posture, fretted by the heat, or sick of the unintelligible lesson, a twist of the ear or a snap on the head, from her thimbled finger, reminded us that sitting perfectly still, was the most important virtue of a little boy in school.
But Holt’s methods paled in comparison with those of “the particular master,” Burton’s teacher for his fifth winter school session.
The first morning of school he read us a long list of the regulations to be observed in school, and out. . . . Half the time was spent calling up scholars for little misdemeanors, trying to make them confess their faults, and promise stricter obedience or in devising punishments and inflicting them. Some were ferruled on the hand, some were whipped with a rod on the back, some were compelled to hold out at arm’s length, the largest book that could be found, or a great leaden inkstand, till muscle and nerve, bone and marrow were tortured with the continued exertion . . . Another mode of punishment, the anti-whispering process, was setting the jaws at painful distance apart, by inserting a chip, perpendicularly between the teeth . . .” Burton noted that the particular master’s punishments were not unusual because “the prevailing opinion among both teachers and parents [was] that boys and girls would play and be mischievous at any rate, and that consequently masters must punish them in some way or other.6
In another bloodcurdling account, a writer in a teacher’s monthly tells of his experience in a school held in the basement of a Gothic church in 1829.
Before there was any Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, it was my misfortune to be a school-boy in the city of New York. I mention this last benevolent institution, since if there then had been such a thing, there also might have been some society, or some law, for the prevention of cruelty to school-boys.
The schoolmaster delegated instruction to an older boy known as the “Dictator” but reserved the dispensing of punishment for himself.
On the wall, behind the master, in full view of the whole school, to keep the scholars in perpetual remembrance, hung a cat-o’-nine-tails of enormous size. The handle had the dimensions of a farmer’s flail. The lashes were of corresponding length and as thick as your finger; it took both hands to wield it. This was taken down to be used on extra occasions only; but a single-handed one was in constant service. . . . In addition to these, erected on the platform to the right of the master, was another apparatus of the system, called “The Iron Bar.” This was a rail of iron, about three feet long and about an inch square at its transverse section . . . The offending boy was made to mount upon it with his bare feet. He was allowed no means of balancing himself . . . If he fell off, or let one foot touch the platform, the master, sitting within striking distance would lash him on again with a savage stroke of the “Cat.”
Like Warren Burton, this writer forgave the schoolmaster’s classroom cruelties: “[He] acted in accordance with the opinions and desires of those to whom he was immediately accountable. He no doubt thought he was doing his duty.” But as to the effectiveness of the methods, the writer was dubious and suggested that the harsh school environment had only prepared some of his classmates for more of the same as adults: “And the hundred and fifty scholars, where are they? I have never heard that any one of them rose above the common walks of life. Many grew up to be hard cases. Having graduated at the severest of penitentiaries, they found no terror in the idea of State-prison.”7
By the late nineteenth century, draconian punishment by schoolmasters was no longer unquestioningly accepted in an atmosphere of educational reform. Educators debated the limits of school discipline in their journals, and the courts joined the fray by considering the legal limits of a teacher’s physical authority. By 1865, for example, courts in Vermont and Massachusetts had found permissible the use of the ferule, while Indiana’s Supreme Court had outlawed it. An article in the American Educational Monthly published that year noted that “Discipline, school discipline, government, —the words are heard at every gathering of teachers and school commissioners from Maine to Mexico . . .” The shifting standards meant that “From some schools the rod is banished, while in others it is considered that the sparing of the rod is the spoiling of the child, and a contempt of the Holy Writ . . .”
REBELLIONS AND SHOWDOWNS
In a time when police officers patrol public schools and effect arrests for pushing and shoving—now defined as disorderly conduct—it’s astounding to learn just how disorderly students could be back in the supposedly bucolic days of the one-room schoolhouse. Yet student-teacher confrontations over authority and punishments were not only common, but almost a tradition. The practice of “turning the teacher out” was a test of strength and wills in which older, usually male students tried to boot the teacher out of the classroom. There were rarely serious repercussions, and certainly no arrests. Loulie Ayer Beall wrote of a memorable incident from