13. Two Approaches To Discipline: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Two Approaches To Discipline 

Rules of the Stokes County School November 10, 1848 
Wm. A. Chaffin, Master 

OFFENSE LASHES 

1 . Boys & Girls Playing Together 4 

2. Quarreling 4 



3 . Fighting 5 

4. Fighting at School 5 

5. Quarreling at School 3 

6. Gambling or Betting at School 4 

7. Playing at Cards at School 10 

8. Climbing for every foot over three feet up a tree 1 

9. Telling Lies 7 

10. Telling Tales Out of School 8 

1 1 . Nick Naming Each Other 4 

12. Giving Each Other ILL Names 3 

13. Fighting Each Other in Time of Books 2 

14. Swearing at School 8 

15. Blackguarding Each Other 6 

16. For Misbehaving to Girls 10 

17. For Leaving School Without Leave of the Teacher 4 

18. Going Home With Each Other without Leave of Teacher 4 

19. For Drinking Spiritous Liquors at School 8 

20. Making Swings & Swinging on Them 7 

21. For Misbehaving when a Stranger is in the House 6 

22. For Wearing Long Finger Nails 2 

23. For not Making a Bow when a Stranger Comes in 3 

24. Misbehaving to Persons on the Road 4 

25. For not Making a Bow when you Meet a Person 4 

26. For Going to Girl's Play Places 3 

27. For Going to Boy's Play Places 4 

28. Coming to School with Dirty Face and Hands 2 

29. For Calling Each Other Liars 4 

30. For Playing Bandy 10 

3 1 . For Bloting Your Copy Book 2 

32. For Not Making a bow when you go home 4 

33. For Not Making a bow when you come away 4 

34. Wrestling at School 4 

35. Scuffling at School 4 

36. For Weting each Other Washing at Play Time 2 

37. For Hollowing and Hooping Going Home 3 

38. For Delaying Time Going Home or Coming to School 3 

39. For Not Making a Bow when you come in or go out 2 

40. For Throwing anything harder than your trab ball 4 

41 . For every word you miss in your lesson without excuse 1 

42. For Not saying yes Sir or no Sir or yes Marm, no Marm 2 

43. For Troubling Each Others Writing Affairs 2 

44. For Not Washing at Play Time when going to Books 4 



45. For Going and Playing about the Mill or Creek 6 

46. For Going about the barn or doing any mischief about 7 

Whatever you might think of this in light of Dr. Spock or Piaget or the Yale Child Study 
folks, it must be apparent that civility was honored, and in all likelihood, no one ever 
played Bandy a second time! I've yet to meet a parent in public school who ever stopped 
to calculate the heavy, sometimes lifelong price their children pay for the privilege of 
being rude and ill-mannered at school. I haven't met a public school parent yet who was 
properly suspicious of the state's endless forgiveness of bad behavior for which the future 
will be merciless. 

At about the same time Master Chaffin was beating the same kind of sense into young 
tarheels that convict Hobby had beaten into little Washington, Robert Owen, a Scottish 
industrialist usually given credit for launching Utopian socialism, was constructing his 
two-volume Life. This autobiography contains "Ten Rules of Schooling," the first two of 
which show a liberalization occurring in nineteenth-century educational thought: 

1st Rule — No scolding or punishment of the Children. 

2nd Rule — Unceasing kindness in tone, look, word, and action, to all children without 
exception, by every teacher employed so as to create a real affection and full confidence 
between the teachers and the taught. 

The Owenite colony had what we now call a theory of holistic schooling as its 
foundation, Owen was a genuine messiah figure and his colony operated in a part of 
Indiana which was removed from prying eyes. New Harmony, as it was called, was the 
center of the transatlantic upperclass world's fascinated attention in its short existence. 
Yet it fell apart in three years, slightly less time than it took for John Dewey's own Lab 
School to be wrecked by Owenite principles unmistakably enough to suggest to Dewey it 
would be the better if he got out of Chicago. And so he did, transferring to Teachers 
College in Manhattan, where, in time, his Lincoln School carried on the psychological 
traditions of New Harmony before it, too, ultimately failed. 

The Schools Of Hellas