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 her school days in Webster County, Nebraska, in 1880, when students ganged up on a “stern and dictatorial” teacher who was whacking a classmate with an eighteen-inch ruler.
[T]he boy positively refused to obey, saying, “I won’t do it!” before an assembly of forty pupils. Quickly the teacher snatched up the long black ruler and stalked to the boy’s desk, declaring, “We’ll see about that!” A hush pervaded the room; all eyes were turned in the direction of the scene about to be enacted. A calloused hand was outstretched before the teacher-dictator . . . the strokes numbered five. “Now will you go?” “Never” was the only word spoken. Again the ruler was raised . . . a dozen boys sprang from their seats as if by signal, seized the uplifted arm, wrested the ruler from the master’s hand, and thrust the hated ruler into the stove. . . . The larger boys caught up the teacher and carried him out of doors, rolled him over and over in the snow, and admonished him to “study his lesson” for the rest of the afternoon.
Beall noted that school was held as usual the next day, with no mention of the incident, and “little comment was made concerning it in the neighborhood.”8
There was almost an expectation that students, especially boys, would challenge the schoolmaster as something of a rite of passage. In his recollection of school days in 1815 in “the wilds of Clearfield County, Pennsylvania,” I. L. Kephart wrote of “barring out the teacher” six days before Christmas to persuade him to buy holiday treats for the students. Barricading the door of the log cabin schoolhouse, armed with wooden slabs, Kephart and his classmates repelled the master when he returned from his lunchtime.
The conditions of surrender were presented to him. He read them, indignantly pronounced them outrageous . . . and declared he was coming in if he had to pull the house down . . . the master started for his boarding-place, and soon returned with an ax on his shoulder. We knew this meant business, and the excitement from within was rapidly rising to a white heat. Some were crying, some were alternately pleading and demanding that the door be opened, while the more courageous were loudly asserting their determination to keep him out at all hazards. . . . At this juncture, the teacher vigorously assaulted the door, pounding it with the ax until he split it in several places. This availing him nothing, he climbed the roof and commenced tearing away the clapboards . . . we sent the end of the slab through the roof with such force that, striking him in the breast, we sent him clear over the eaves to the ground. This caused a shout of triumph to ascend from below which was almost deafening. True, he might have been killed by the fall, but that was a secondary consideration for us.
The student takeover ended after several days and, as in Beall’s account, there were no consequences for their rebellion. The schoolmaster was “in a jolly good humor, and everything proceeded as if there had been no ‘barring out.’ ” He even bought them ten pounds of loaf sugar at the term’s end.9
THE BATH SCHOOL DISASTER
No history, brief or otherwise, of school violence would be complete without the tale of the Bath, Michigan, school tragedy. Most people consider the Columbine High School incident of 1999 to be the worst-ever example of school violence, with its total of fifteen deaths. But the 1927 Bath incident, in which forty-four died, had the highest human toll and perhaps most diabolical plot. The former school board member and farmer Andrew Kehoe dynamited the district school, killing thirty-eight pupils. Kehoe, who’d spent months plotting, was angry about soaring school taxes and the impending foreclosure on his farm. He aimed, according to newspaper accounts, to destroy the whole school and kill all 260 students. Kehoe dynamited his own car, with himself in it, as the school burned, but not before murdering his wife and setting his farm ablaze. The terrible scale of Kehoe’s destruction and its aftermath are recounted in minute detail in an eyewitness account titled The Bath School Disaster, self-published by the Bath resident Monty J. Ellsworth. If ever an incident deserved the categorization of “school violence,” the Bath Disaster does.
While school violence is usually associated with actions carried out by students against other students and teachers within the schoolhouse—the Columbine scenario—it encompasses a wider array of actions and perpetrators. The outside intruder, like Kehoe, who targets students, teachers or other school staff, is also part of the phenomenon. In September 2006, a drifter entered a Colorado high school and held six female students hostage, finally killing himself and one girl. Five days later, in early October, an apparently mentally unbalanced man, not unlike Andrew Kehoe, walked into a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and shot to death five girls and then himself. Charles Roberts, age thirty-two, was a dairy truck driver with no connection to the school, no criminal record, and no apparent reason for wanting to harm the children. These incidents generated headline coverage and much speculation about the attackers’ motivations—never explained—and fears that they were the start of a murderous trend of intruder school violence. No such trend was initiated, and, thankfully, criminologists and school safety experts were loath to forecast any surge in intruder crimes.
JUVENILE DELINQUENTS IN A BLACKBOARD JUNGLE
Post–World War II saw another period of upheavals and shifts in the country’s economic and social order. A mass migration from the south brought new populations of blacks to the northern cities, Puerto Ricans began a major migration to the mainland, and returning veterans came home to a different world. Women who had filled the factory jobs vacated by GI Joe were booted back to the domestic sphere. Cities were bulging and the suburbs were about to become the next latest thing in residential development. An old problem with a new urgency called juvenile delinquency was emerging to the alarm of psychologists and sociologists, and to the vexation of parents and schools. The 1950s, for all its veneer of nuclear family normalcy, was also a time of youth gangs in urban areas and of the alienated youth immortalized by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Delinquency was blamed for rising crime rates in New York and other cities by “youthful offenders.” New York’s police commissioner reported a 32 percent increase from 1955 to 1956 in arrests of youths under age sixteen, and the FBI estimated similar national trends.10
Researchers of this era cranked out volumes on the causes and characteristics of delinquency, calling it “one of the most critical problems confronting the American people.” Social disorganization was to blame, declared the psychologist Martin Neumeyer. “Maladjustments seem to be the inevitable consequences of rapid and unequal changes in the social order. Juveniles, in particular, seem to be affected in an unusual way by these rapidly changing conditions.”11 Viewed as part mental illness and part social disease, delinquency was blamed on such factors as broken homes, poverty, “cultural differences,” and even comic books, television, and movies. The missing mother and father were to blame, according to the psychologist Richard McCann: Delinquent children “have been crippled by an inadequate concept of themselves, a distorted self-image. In many cases it has been caused by a lack of stable, meaningful relationships and a consequent deficiency of love.”12
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