20 School Rules From History That Seem Unthinkable Today

When a child arrived at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879, their hair was cut off, their traditional dress was removed, and they were given a new English name, like some sort of rebrand. Captain Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the school, outlawed the use of native tongues, backed by the threat of corporal punishment. As he put it in an 1892 address, the goal, in his words, was to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Carlisle closed its doors in 1918.

On January 9, 1942, West Virginia’s state board of education ruled that the flag salute and Pledge be required in every school. To refuse was to show insubordination, and expelled students, mostly Jehovah’s Witnesses, became truant. Their parents could be fined or sent to jail for up to 30 days. The Supreme Court overturned that ruling in 1943.

Until the 1950s, children in North America and Europe who were born left-handed were often forced to use their right hands. Some children even had their left arms strapped to their chairs with cloth, some had splints on their wrists, and others had rulers laid across their knuckles to prevent them from picking up a pen with their left hands. The practice was known as forced dextrality. Bad time for my left-handed friends!

By 1933, the Reich Education Minister, Bernhard Rust, mandated that all classrooms begin and end lessons with the Hitler salute. Jewish pupils were separated onto “Jewish benches” and then excluded altogether from state schools by November 1938. Calipers were used on school children in “Racial Hygiene” lessons to measure their skulls and faces. Teachers who refused ran the risk of Gestapo arrest and dismissal.

In English boarding schools such as Eton and Harrow, school rules from the 18th century through the mid-20th century allowed older boys to be in charge of younger boys. Once in charge, they could get the young boys to do pretty much anything, from completing chores such as polishing shoes, carrying coal, and cooking, to even warming the outdoor toilet seat. To disobey was insubordination. It was punishable by caning at the headmaster’s discretion. This system was endorsed in the 1864 Clarendon Commission report.

The 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education also required public schools to erect Hōanden, shrine-like buildings where students would be required to bow deeply when passing, housing a photograph of the emperor and empress and a government-issued copy of the Rescript. Principals found misquoting or otherwise mishandling the Rescript were liable for dismissal, and some principals perished attempting to retrieve the portrait during school fires. This rule was abolished by the Diet in 1948.

Between the late nineteenth century and the 1950s, school boards in the US, Britain, Canada, and Australia imposed marriage bars that prohibited women from working as teachers if they were married. According to a 1939 survey conducted by the National Education Association, 87 percent of US school boards would not hire a married woman, and 70 percent required a woman to resign immediately upon getting married. But male teachers were actively encouraged to marry as evidence of their stability. Make it make sense! Fortunately, these bars were eventually lifted. Britain’s went first in 1944.

From the 1790s to the 1870s, some Welsh schoolmasters tried to stamp out the Welsh language in their classrooms using a punishment known as the “Welsh Not.” Any child caught speaking Welsh was given a wooden plaque to wear around their neck, and the only way to get rid of it was to catch another student speaking Welsh and pass it along. Whoever was stuck wearing it at the end of the day could be caned. This actually reminds me of my own school, where we were required to speak English and could be punished if we were caught speaking in our native tongue. Thankfully, there was no wooden plaque or caning involved! Even government inspectors at the time called the Welsh Not cruel in an 1847 report on Welsh schools.

The 1921 state constitution called for only English to be taught in public schools, which was strictly enforced by local boards of education against French and Creole speakers. The penalty for breaking the rule included kneeling on rice without husks, writing lines, and/or being caned. Some scholars believe this rule contributed to a drastic decline in the number of native French speakers able to read and write in subsequent generations, though it wasn’t the only cause.

Beginning in 1902, New York school nurses required students to participate in morning inspections where they examined children’s necks and scalps for lice. Schools throughout the United States and Britain soon followed suit. Infested children were often subjected to public ridicule by teachers, classmates, and inspectors or had their hair washed with kerosene or shaved bald. This was a genuine effort at disease prevention because lice could spread typhus. They could have done this without the public ridicule, though!

In 1943, Soviet schools got a much stricter rulebook when the Russian Soviet government issued Resolution No. 861, better known as the Rules for Pupils. The compulsory 20-point code told students exactly how they were expected to behave: sit upright without resting their elbows on their desks, stand whenever an elder entered the room, carry an official student ID, and wear a standardized uniform. Basically, there wasn’t much room for slouching or forgetting your ID at home! The rules marked a shift toward a more disciplined, military-style school system compared with the relatively relaxed Soviet classrooms of the 1920s.

Girls were not allowed to wear trousers, slacks, or jeans in North America in the early to mid-1900s, even when temperatures were freezing. In some areas, girls were permitted to wear snow pants under their skirts on their walk to school, but had to take them off once they entered the building. A girl caught wearing slacks could be sent home or suspended.

Ireland’s National School system started in 1831, and only English was allowed in the classroom. Teachers would strike the bata scóir, a wooden stick, every time a child was caught speaking Irish, then later cane the child for the number of times they struck the stick. Some destitute parents, however, accepted the edict because fluency in English would be beneficial to their children’s ability to make a living following the Great Famine.

The Jim Crow laws extended beyond schools. In North Carolina, children weren’t allowed to exchange books between white and Black schools. Each textbook was assigned to the racial group that first used it. In Mississippi and Florida, schools had to store books intended for Black children in a separate building, ostensibly to prevent “contamination.”

Slouching was deemed a character flaw that needed to be corrected in girls’ academies in Britain and America from the 1780s through the 1890s. As a sloucher myself, I would’ve been doomed! Educators strapped students into wooden posture backboards, flat planks held against the spine with side-bars that hooked over the arms and pulled them backwards, squeezing the shoulders together. The girls could sit in these apparatuses for hours while they read or wrote.

Today, there are hundreds of fidget toys on the market, targeted to kids who need a little help focusing. But in 19th-century British elementary schools and ragged schools, fidgeting was a big no-no. A list of disciplinary rules included wooden fingerstocks, contraptions consisting of carved holes where a child’s fingers were locked behind their back. A child could remain motionless in the fingerstock for up to 30 minutes at a time if they were restless. An attempt to get out resulted in a caning.

According to the French regulations governing schools in 1851 and 1880, Breton, Occitan, Basque, and Catalan were banned from schools. In every classroom, there was Le Symbole, a wooden clog or token that would be handed to any child caught speaking patois. A fellow student might report the person speaking, and the person holding Le Symbole when school was dismissed was punished or made to do manual labor.

From 1910 until 1945, when Japan occupied Korea, education law mandated that boys have their hair shaved and wear military-style Japanese uniforms; girls had to swap their long hair for bobs and wear Japanese sailor suits. Students with braids might be barred from school or beaten by colonial teachers.

During much of the first half of the 1900s, school boards across America routinely expelled or suspended girls for “immorality” if they became pregnant or got married. They usually weren’t offered any way to earn a diploma from a regular public school again. Nothing required that schools readmit those expelled girls until 1972, when Title IX was passed.

The 1909 Aborigines Protection Act of New South Wales gave state boards power of guardianship over Indigenous children, including the right to remove them to facilities such as the Cootamundra Domestic Training Home. Many children would come to be known as the Stolen Generations. At Cootamundra, speaking Indigenous languages or practicing Indigenous customs or visiting family were forbidden. Those found breaking the rules were placed in isolation, given less food, and subjected to corporal punishment. These practices were described by survivors in the 1997 report Bringing Them Home.

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