The Hazards of Teaching

The indisputable reality of classroom disorder presented a valid case against appeals for an end to birching. Birching was a form of discipline used by school teachers in which a birch rod was used on a bare bottom. Many frontier school houses were not a stable of docile lambs as television and motion pictures about that time period would like us to think. Many of the children were downright brats-hostile, ungovernable and prone to violence. In addition, the assembly in one room of pupils ranging in age from five to sixteen, with some strays even in their twenties, was an invitation to trouble. Under these circumstances the teacher was more warden than instructor, their routine more physical than intellectual. Some school boards in selecting new teachers made it a rule to pick a strong, stoutly built individual because they believed “baseness and vulgarity prevailed among the older boys.” Biting, eye-gouging and slug and scuffle matches were favorite sports, but boys saved the most barbaric excesses for strangers. “Let a boy from one town visit another and he was fortunate if he escaped with his life. The intervillage feuds made it incumbent upon the boys of one town to stone, beat, thrash such a casual visitor.” Faced with such ruffians, many teachers did not last a week, some not even a day. “In the Coloma, California district,” one pioneer noted, “the boys have driven off the last two schoolmarms and liked the one afore them.” Some parents and school board members took macabre delight in the encounter between a new teacher and the “boys,” some of whom were 175-pound six-footers. For schoolmarms such confrontations were a horrific ordeal. Margaret Banes, a school teacher in the San Bernardino area recalled: “I stormed up and down… This pathetic pretense of courage, aided by the mad flourishing of my razor strap, brought forth… the expression of respectful fear on the faces of the young giants.” However, while Miss Banes’s pantomime succeeded in cowing heavyweights who were old enough to go to sea, other schoolmistresses encountered continual discipline problems. One of these, a Miss Vega, taught public school in Sacramento. On October 8, 1870, the young woman, said to be in feeble health, punished four boys for unruly behavior by shutting them in the school building after class was out. Finally, when she released them, Miss Vega is said to have given the boys “a slight reprimand.” Their response was immediate; they stoned her to death.