Who Has the Better Status: Teacher or Pupil?
Rules for Teachers – 1872
Punishments for Pupils
- Each teacher will bring a bucket of water and a scuttle of coal for the day’s session.
- Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they go to church regularly.
- Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed.
- After ten hours in school, the teacher may spend the remaining time reading the Bible or other good books.
Punishments for Pupils
- Boys and girls playing together: 4 Lashes
- Playing cards at school: 10 Lashes
- Coming to school with dirty faces and hands: 2 Lashes
- For misbehaving to girls: 10 Lashes
- Climbing for every foot over three feet up a tree: 1 Lash
“The little schoolhouse with its flagpole on top and its two doors in front, one for boys and the other for girls, stood on the crest of a hill, with rolling fields and meadows on one side, a stretch of pine woods on the other, and the river glinting and sparkling in the distance. It boasted no attractions within. All was as bare and ugly and uncomfortable as it well could be, for the villages along the river expended so much money in repairing and rebuilding bridges that they were obliged to be very economical in school privileges. The teacher's desk and chair stood on a platform in one corner; there was an uncouth stove, never blackened oftener than once a year, a map of the United States, two black-boards, a ten-quart tin pail of water and long-handled dipper on a corner shelf, and wooden desks and benches for the scholars, who only numbered twenty in Rebecca's time. The seats were higher in the back of the room, and the more advanced and longer-legged pupils sat there, the position being greatly to be envied, as they were at once nearer to the windows and farther from the teacher.”
–Kate Douglas Wiggin, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
–Kate Douglas Wiggin, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm