“Impudent, sulky, spiteful. Played continually with a penknife.”

It was more than a hundred years ago that imps, devilkins, urchins and rascals ran roughshod over Brooklyn public schools, assailing teachers and fellow pupils alike with verbal and physical abuse. A remembrance of this dark time in our city’s history via the February 18, 1912 New York Times:

“A circular of inquiry sent out to Principals and public school teachers by Dr. Frank K. Perkins, Chairman of the Brooklyn Teachers’ Association’s Committee on Probation Schools, to determine whether or not condition in the schools justify his campaign for the segregation of incorrigible pupils in separate disciplinary schools has brought forth a harvest of replies telling of instances of depravity among pupils that renders insipid the charitable phrases that ‘boys will be boys.’ 

These boys boast that they are ‘hard guys,’ shake fists in the teachers’ faces and bid them go where they themselves are, according to the teachers’ intimations, unconsciously destined; they pull the hair of girl pupils and trip them; they throw spitballs and jab pins into the legs of their fellows with the armed toes of their boots, strike their teachers and their mothers, and threaten the teachers in open classroom with knives and other weapons.

Dr. Perkins, who is himself a Principal in an elementary school, believes such pupils should scarcely be allowed to associate in rooms with normal pupils, or under women teachers whose helplessness is the greater in that corporal punishment is forbidden by the school rules, and the wayward pupils know it.

“He frequently complains of pains in the head.”

T.D., 14 1/2 Years–Uses vile language. Told teacher to go to —. Dismissed himself seven times in one morning. Sat on fence adjoining schoolyard and attracted other boys’ attention. Called teacher a fool.

T.S.—Truant for about twenty-eight days. When he came back he was almost intolerable. He with two others in the class admitted to teacher that he frequently got drunk. Whenever any of the girls chanced to pass him, he tripped them, kicked them, punched them, or pulled their hair. He frequently complains of pains in the head. Frequently, at the beginning of the term, when called on to read, he would leave out words and substitute others in order to suggest or give an immoral meaning.

A.W.—Impudent, sulky, spiteful. Played continually with a penknife. Became impudent when I told him to put it away. One day when I insisted, he said: ‘I’ll stick you with it.’ In a quarrel over a book strap on Nov. 8 he stuck the knife into a boy’s arm.

L.K.—Brought a tube to school through which he threw spitballs, striking a boy in the eye. When reprimanded, he threw his books on the floor, stamped and scraped his feet, banged his desk, and in a loud and threatening voice used the most vile and insulting language. Not satisfied with this exhibition of temper, he placed a pin in his shoe and started to annoy the boys in his vicinity by jabbing them.”