[light whimsical music] [electrical buzzing]
- Do you know that there was a time
when your school bus driver was also your classmate?
- They set these teenagers up for success
the best way they knew how, with a three-day driving course.
- So they go from driving this bus in the dark
to getting out and taking a math test.
- Or when the school board was made of wood?
- The paddles were branded with our school's crest on there.
If they hit you with it, it would, like, bruise the logo.
That's messed up!
- Or when gym class was more like basic training?
- Nobody's wearing a harness.
If you lose your grip,
it's like falling out of a second-story window.
Even if you're in a burning building,
firefighters will tell you not to jump
from a second or third story
unless you have absolutely no choice.
And we're telling kids to do this in gym class.
- These are the things we used to do.
For fun,
for money,
or maybe out of boredom
that we'll never see again.
Were they dangerous?
Certainly.
Deadly?
Occasionally.
But boy, wasn't it exciting?
[intense dramatic music]
[light whimsical music]
Remember high school science lab?
Powerful gases, open flame, chemical reactions, sharp tools,
all in the name of education,
until we learned it was not so smart after all.
[bright thoughtful music]
- After World War II, science is king.
After all, it won the war.
The atomic bomb, radar, computers.
- There is a great emphasis in the United States
on developing scientific knowledge
among younger and younger people.
And so, the government authorizes
the construction of science labs
in schools across the country.
- [Henry] These labs are built to turn teenagers
into the next generation of scientists
by throwing them right into the fire.
- [Martin] Suddenly, you're sitting at a desk that's got
burners, and there's masks, and there's equipment, and there's
gear, and there's strange smells,
and you have knife-like instruments,
and you're going to dissect things.
Oh, man, it was amazing.
- The craziest thing about science lab
is the chemicals they let you use.
There's sulfuric acid, which will burn the crap out of you.
There was formaldehyde, chloroform,
which bad guys use in movies all the time
to knock people out and abduct them.
There's just jars of it in science lab.
- [Henry] But there's no bigger draw
in the high school science labs of old than mercury.
- [News Reporter] The great density of mercury,
atomic weight 200.61,
is known when heavy objects are dropped into it
or, better, onto it.
They float almost magically.
- Mercury is a metallic element
that remains liquid at room temperature.
That's really rare for a metal.
Do you remember the T-1000 from "Terminator 2?"
It's exactly like that.
But in your science lab.
- [Hakeem] Mercury is cool for many reasons.
Number one, it's the only liquid that's not wet.
The second thing is, it looks really cool,
and it beads up and makes these nice little balls, right?
You combine them and separate them.
- I don't remember any reason I had
mercury in the palm of my hand,
except to look at it, move around, like, it's fun.
- [Hakeem] The teachers at this time
encourage the kids to play with mercury.
There's jars of it.
They can roll it around, throw it at your friend.
It is mayhem in those classes.
- [Henry] But all these budding young scientists
are playing with poison.
- If there was a toxic chemical hall of fame,
mercury's gonna be in the inaugural class.
- [Don] Experts think it's only intense,
prolonged exposure to mercury that causes health issues.
Like the tremors and hallucinations suffered
by hat makers using mercury in the 19th century.
That was the inspiration for the Mad Hatter
from "Alice in Wonderland".
- [Martin] Exposure to mercury can cause headaches, paranoia,
neurological decline.
It's very, very bad for you.
- [Austin] But people at the time
think that low-level exposure is fine.
Also, no reason to argue 'cause high school chemistry labs
are doing a bang-up job.
Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the number of scientists
and engineers in the United States nearly triples.
- [Hakeem] But in the 1980s, we became concerned about
high mercury levels in fish like tuna,
but kids have already been exposed to it for decades.
It ain't the sushi, it's the school lab.
- By the mid-'80s,
evidence of the dangers of mercury exposure
start to pile up, but it takes some significant accidents
to get the attention of the government.
- [Dan] In a Connecticut high school lab in 1986,
mercury vapors are accidentally released
during an experiment.
22 kids and their teacher get briefly exposed.
- The researchers were shocked to learn
how long this toxic metal remained in people's systems.
We're talking months or even years.
- [Dan] The mercury residue stays on tables.
It collects in the floor cracks where it might have spilled
and then eventually just vaporizes into the air.
Plus, students are tracking it on their shoes.
Maybe they don't get all of it off their fingers
when they're playing with it,
and then at lunchtime, they end up swallowing some of it.
- If you think about all of these experiments
using mercury over decades,
they're accumulating a lot of mercury in schools.
- Eventually, though, things change.
Some states step in
and outlaw the use of mercury in schools.
- [Austin] Today, mercury in school labs
has been almost completely phased out.
- [Don] In the last few decades, any kind of mercury exposure
that happens in school it's a total holy crap moment.
Some kids bust open an old thermometer
and hazmat suits come out.
- In 2004, a kid in Nevada found his grandfather's mercury,
brought it into school, and shared it with his friends.
They played with it, not knowing the hazards.
- [Don] More than 60 kids have to be decontaminated.
Their clothes disposed of as hazardous waste,
just because they were briefly exposed
to something we used to play with as kids.
- Remember the school paper cutter
that was more like a guillotine?
That was nothing compared to what they gave us in wood shop.
[light whimsical music]
- [Hakeem] Back in the day, a lot of high schools
and even middle schools had wood shops.
And they really got big in the '50s
when America was having this construction boom.
- I mean, they're the real deal.
They've got real machinery.
There's real wood.
There's sawdust everywhere.
- [Brian] We would make clocks.
We would make key chain holders.
Like, Christmas was covered.
'Cause all you had to do was bring in,
like, a little block of wood, and this crusty old guy
would teach you how to cut it and leave you to it.
He would be like, "Go ahead and have fun cutting wood,
and then you go out and smoke a cigarette."
- [Rutledge] I loved wood shop.
We would build these sheds
that the high school would sell to the community.
So sometimes when I drive around the town,
I can see sheds in people's backyards,
and I know I helped build all these years later.
- [Hakeem] For some kids, it's just fun, right?
They can go in there and build a birdhouse or whatever.
But for others, they want to go directly from high school
to a trade school and then have a career at it.
So this is early job training.
- [Henry] Of all the tools in the school wood shop,
one looms larger than the rest: the radial arm saw.
- So the radial arm saw is invented in the 1920s
by a guy named Raymond DeWalt of DeWalt Tools.
That same guy.
[saw whirring]
- [Hakeem] The radial arm saw can cut through two-inch lumber
like a hot knife going through butter.
And by the 1950s, they're everywhere,
including thousands of high schools across the country.
- [Henry] But it turns out
it just might be too much saw for kids to handle.
- The radial arm saw was no joke.
It was on an arm,
and you sort of pulled it towards you and worked the wood.
- [Hakeem] Sometimes it kind of lurches forward.
So because of the way it's operated,
you're automatically in harm's way.
- It'll slice your finger off just like that,
and there's really no time to react to it,
especially if you're a kid.
So you're not just talking about,
like, cuts and bruises here.
You're talking about amputation.
- [Brian] When you have 12-year-olds unsupervised in a
wood shop with dangerous tools, it's not a question of if.
It's a question of when some kid's gonna get hurt.
- My number one goal in wood shop was don't lose a finger.
If I come out of this with something higher than an F
and 10 digits, I'm gonna consider it a success.
- [Don] These amateur wood shop kids
are lucky to keep their extremities intact,
but some of them aren't so fortunate.
- And there are some horrible stories.
There's this one 13-year-old kid in 1985
who actually cuts off his entire hand at the wrist.
- [Rutledge] The kid survives, but these kinds of stories
give the radial arm saw a really bad reputation.
- [Ricky] It's pretty wild when you think about it
that we would actually go to school
and they would put us in situations where losing a finger
or even an appendage is on the table.
- [Henry] Between injuries, rising insurance,
and more focus on different school subjects,
eventually the funding for wood shops gets cut off.
[saw whirring]
- [Rutledge] By the late 2000s,
only 30% of schools still have a wood shop.
I mean, that's such a bummer.
- [Brian] I'm 50.
When I was 12, I made a key chain holder that, to this day,
hangs on the family wall.
And I still look at it today!
[saw whirring]
- [Rutledge] There's something to be said for shop class.
I mean, the things that it teaches you,
whether it's trying to understand
how something goes into a wall
or measure twice, cut once, all of those things you learn,
they're actually great life lessons
that really help you a lot.
Also, keep your arm out of the saw.
You know?
Invaluable lesson.
- In the 1990s and 2000s,
many schools cut their shop programs,
and those wood shops were converted to technology labs.
Suddenly, the most dangerous thing in the room
was the internet.
- It's an old cliche.
You know, in my day,
I had to walk 10 miles to school in the snow.
And kids just rolled their eyes.
But was it actually true?
- In the late 1800s, school in the United States
is a very local affair, and it's kind of slapdash.
Lots of kids are working on farms or factories,
and the law permits them to do it.
- By the turn of the century, though,
progressive reformers in cities,
but also out in the countryside,
are saying, "We need to make school accessible to everyone.
We also need to make it compulsory.
We wanna remove these kids from these harsh jobs
and get them into educational opportunities.
That will maybe give them other options later in life."
- [Natalia] In every single state,
you have laws that are put on the books
that say your kids have to go to school,
usually until about age 14 or so.
- [Henry] Now, millions more kids are marching to school,
but there's a catch.
- In urban areas, there's lots of schools.
A lot of times close enough for kids to go home for lunch.
- But at this point of the turn of the century,
more than half of the United States lives in rural areas.
- [Lance] For rural kids, that means a walk to school.
A long walk.
- [Rutledge] Kids as young as five years old
are walking three to five miles
over all sorts of rough terrain
and busted-up roads every single day.
Five years old!
By themselves.
- [Adam] There are even stories of students who have no choice
but to walk 10 miles each way.
For perspective, that's just six miles shy of a marathon
every school day.
And you thought it was bad
when you couldn't get a seat on the school bus.
- [Lance] It's especially tough in cold, inclement weather,
but these kids do what it takes.
They carry their books in flour sacks to protect them.
They carry their lunches in pails
that are frozen shut by the time they arrive.
They will actually use the fence posts
as a guide in whiteout conditions.
- And springtime's not always easier.
I mean, some kids are having to walk holding their shoes
so they don't lose their shoes in the mud
'cause they're walking in mud for miles.
- [Adam] There are people of a generation that will say,
"I walked seven miles to school uphill both ways."
The truth of the matter is they were walking like that,
and they were made of much tougher stuff than most of us.
- [Natalia] Teachers have left records where they comment
on students.
"He walks an hour and a half to get here."
"He was soaking wet when he arrived."
It's pretty incredible to think kids ever did this.
- [Lance] In January of 1888,
there's a huge blizzard in the Dakotas.
It comes to be known as the Children's Blizzard
or the Schoolhouse Blizzard because so many children die
trying to get home from school in this blizzard.
At least 100 die.
- [Henry] In the 1930s, the millions of kids
marching long distances to school
finally start to catch a break.
[light thoughtful music]
- [Rutledge] The Great Depression actually helped the
kids with the president's New Deal.
So suddenly there were new schools, new paved roads,
and buses to help get the kids to school.
- [Adam] When Henry Ford enters the picture,
state-of-the-art buses
start rolling off of the assembly line,
not only providing transportation to school
for so many children, but also giving parents peace of mind
that they're going in a safe vehicle.
- [Edward] And from there, school buses take off
because Ford is cranking them out,
and pretty soon they become
a ubiquitous part of the American landscape.
- [Rutledge] It's funny when I think about
school buses when I was a kid,
and I thought they were kind of gross and the vinyl seat,
and they'd have tears and graffiti on them.
But for these kids,
I mean, this could be a life-or-death situation.
When they got a school bus, they were like, "Oh, my gosh!
I've arrived alive at school
with a non-frozen lunch, perhaps.
What a novel idea."
- Parents had to feel much better
about putting their kids on a school bus
until perhaps they took a look at who was driving it.
- [Edward] When America plunges into World War II,
suddenly millions of American men are put in uniform
and sent abroad, meaning there's a big labor shortage.
- [Brian] The men are overseas fighting.
The women are in the factories.
You got Rosie the Riveter.
They're making the tanks, the bombs,
they're doing everything, right?
Who's driving the school buses?
Well, we have an answer.
Teenagers.
Yeah, they got teenagers to drive the school buses.
- [Austin] Most people don't blink an eye.
They're doing their part for the war effort.
- [Brian] And these kids aren't necessarily
the worst choice for this job.
They're picking up a lot of slack at home.
They're driving tractors, they're working farms,
they're working with heavy machinery,
but they are still teenagers.
- [Edward] And these school buses are not tractors.
They're 27 feet long,
and they're also loaded with up to 36 kids.
- [Brian] But they set these teenagers up for success
the best way they knew how, with a three-day driving course.
Today, you need, like, seven weeks
and a massive test to get that license.
Back then, it was like, [clicks tongue] "You're good enough.
Get out there."
- [Rutledge] A typical morning for a teen bus driver:
you get to park the bus at home,
so you wake up crack of dawn, go fire up the bus.
You drive all these rural routes
picking up kids in the dark.
Sounds great!
- Once they reach school, they just park the bus,
get off with the rest of their classmates, and go to class.
- So they go from driving this bus in the dark
and wrestling no power steering
to getting out and taking a math test.
- [Henry] And it turns out teens driving school buses
isn't just a temporary solution.
- [Hakeem] During the war, it goes so well
that for several decades after the war, they continue.
In fact, when I was a young man in high school,
we had kid bus drivers.
- [Rutledge] Schools were excited 'cause they could pay
kids less than they were paying adults, but they do, I think,
quickly realize you get what you pay for.
- [Brian] There was a breakdown in quality control
in teenage bus drivers around the '80s.
It's the MTV generation.
It's the kids who watched "Animal House."
There's no sense of patriotic duty.
It's more about getting a paycheck
and getting it over as fast as you can,
and that's what they did.
- [Edward] Eventually, it's impossible to ignore the data
regarding these teenage drivers.
They account for far less than half the drivers,
but more than 60% of the accidents.
- [Brian] So by the 1980s, one by one, the states start making
it so teenagers can't drive the school buses.
I don't know what it tells you about North Carolina,
but they were the last state to withdraw this.
- [Hakeem] But if you're a parent today,
you can have the peace of mind of knowing
that almost all school districts in the country
require their drivers to be at least 21 years of age.
- [Rutledge] It's really hard to imagine a 14-year-old kid
getting behind the wheel of an 18,000-pound bus
with only a couple days of driving experience.
Oh, and, by the way, it's loaded with children.
Like, that is bonkers on paper.
- There was a certain poetic justice to kids driving kids.
Let them deal with those little monsters.
- If you're of a certain age
and you were ever sent to the principal's office,
you remember feeling the pure terror.
You weren't just gonna get yelled at.
You were in for some, let's face it, physical discomfort.
- [Lance] Corporal punishment goes way back.
Honestly, it probably predates civilization,
but there are stories of kids in school
getting some version of corporal punishment, being beaten
in Greek texts from 500 BC.
- [Natalia] Fast-forward to the 20th-century United States,
and this is still happening in schools.
There's the kind of, like,
burst of frustration of a teacher, like,
hitting you upside the head with a math book.
- [Lance] I came from a time when corporal punishment
was perfectly allowed in most schools.
You might be led down the hall, pulled by the ear.
I don't know how I still have ears, you know?
It's not that hard to pull somebody's ear off.
- [Adam] I remember two friends of mine telling me
that they used to have to hold their hands like this
and were whacked with a ruler.
- There were even things they would have people do,
like kneel in gravelly material.
Like frozen peas or rice, you know?
Which doesn't sound that bad, but try it for 10 minutes.
[light whimsical music]
- [Rutledge] My elementary school principal was so mean.
And the amount of times that she walked me into her office
and told me to take a good look at the paddles.
"Paddles" being plural; there was more than one.
They were branded with our school's crest on there.
So that maybe if they hit you with it,
it would, like, bruise the logo?
Like, that's messed up!
That wasn't that long ago.
- [Henry] For most of the 20th century,
corporal punishment at school
isn't some hush-hush off-the-books practice.
In fact, it's quite the opposite.
- [Adam] Some school districts have actually codified
corporal punishment, literally writing regulations
up to and including how many times
you can strike a student's bottom for punishment.
- Schools have specific rooms where this is carried out.
Prisons didn't even have that.
- [Natalia] In fact, when prison corporal punishment
is banned in the 1960s,
school corporal punishment is still legal in all 50 states.
- [Adam] Some companies even manufacture
purpose-built paddles for spanking students.
- [Rutledge] They even started boring holes out
so they could get a better velocity when they hit it
because there was more air going through, so it went faster.
- [Natalia] In the 1970s in Florida, there's one 14-year-old
who is beaten so badly that he's hospitalized,
and his legal case goes all the way to the Supreme Court.
His attorneys argue that this is cruel
and unusual punishment.
- What the court says might surprise you?
They say not only is this not cruel,
it is anything but unusual.
And they claim that a student has no expectation
of due process in school.
There's no more official approval
for beating children in school
than the approval of the United States Supreme Court.
- [Jason] But this decision, it really spurs a movement
against corporal punishment.
- [Lance] Child psychologists and educational experts
start to argue that corporal punishment impairs development
and it normalizes violence.
- And by the mid-1980s,
a number of states have actually now outlawed it.
- [Adam] These days, you get remotely physical with any kid,
you find yourself in a whole lot of trouble.
- [Rutledge] It is weird to think that this is an era
that I lived through.
For kids that went through this,
like, people know, they don't ever forget that stuff.
- Back in the schools of old, rewards were hard to come by,
but there was one that most of us probably remember.
Turns out it was less of a perk
and more occupational hazard.
[light thoughtful music] [chalk tapping]
- The classic chalkboard is a dying feature
of the American school system.
It was the look and the sound of learning.
It's like what we associated with school.
- [Martin] Every surface in the classroom
has chalk dust on it to some extent.
You also have erasers,
and the erasers are bathed in chalk dust.
- [Hakeem] Erasers are cleaned by just going outdoors
and slapping them together
and making big clouds of chalk dust.
It's kind of like beating the dirt out of a rug.
- [Don] And teachers hand out this job
only to the most trustworthy,
well-behaving students like me.
- [Martin] I frequently was awarded with this myself.
And so I had the experience of being able to go out there
and sort of strut past everyone like, "Look at me.
I get to go clap the erasers."
- [Ricky] I love clapping erasers together.
It's like a primal urge that we don't entirely understand.
If there were two erasers handy,
I'd clap them together right now.
- [Don] For kids trapped in school for most of the day,
any chance to go outside,
especially with the rest of the school inside.
This is huge.
So you feel special, you feel privileged, you feel trusted,
and you can make fun of all those poor bastards
still stuck in class.
- [Henry] The kids get a perk.
Teachers get free labor for clean erasers.
Everyone is happy, until we start taking a closer look.
- It seems crazy to say this,
but for a tool that was used for centuries
around children worldwide,
we now know that chalk ain't good for you.
- [Martin] Old chalk is actually dustier than modern chalk is.
And the clouds of dust that are produced by it
contain one of the greatest
carcinogens of them all: asbestos.
And it's the best and brightest student in the class
who is probably getting the greatest exposure.
- [Don] By the 1990s, research indicates that chalk inhalation
can cause long-term lung damage.
We also find that chalk dust is a common trigger
for asthma and allergies.
- [Negin] I mean, and who knows how many eraser clappers
are asthmatic children breathing in this chalk dust?
Because they're being rewarded for being so good.
- [Don] We all know what a big deal
childhood asthma is at the time.
It's being called an epidemic.
It's rising by 75% between 1980 and 1994.
Asthma is one of the biggest reasons kids miss school.
- [Henry] But while the children
start getting all the attention,
who's thinking about the teachers?
- [Hakeem] The teachers are spending day after day,
week after week, year after year
writing on these chalkboards and breathing chalk dust.
And nobody thought to ask, "Is this good for you?"
- [Martin] It's the teachers unions
that eventually push back on this.
They begin to advocate for chalk that produces less dust,
chalk that doesn't contain carcinogens.
And then eventually
they advocate for the elimination of the chalkboard
as a part of the educational experience entirely.
- Which is why the days of clapping those erasers
is essentially over.
- [Ricky] I think kids are missing out
on a lot of the experiences that we had.
I mean, eraser clapping was something that kids
would practically fight each other for the right to do.
I mean, anything to go outside.
So I do feel a little sorry for kids today.
- If I knew then
what I know now about the dangers of chalk dust,
I would still jump at the chance
to skip 10 minutes of class.
- Ah, gym class.
The one period a day where sweating counted as schoolwork.
Some of us look back on it fondly.
Others remember it as "Lord of the Flies" in gym shorts.
[light whimsical music]
- [Lance] For most of the 1900s, what we're doing in gym class,
the fact that we're even having gym class,
is really driven by the military.
- [Martin] During the era of the World Wars and Korea,
the US recognizes that it's requisite.
We have to do something to promote physical fitness,
and we make generations of young Americans experience
either the bliss or the shame
of the experience of physical education in high school.
- [News Reporter] A set of physical achievement standards
has been prepared by the Armed Forces Committee
of the American Association for Health, Physical Education,
and Recreation.
- [Lance] The particular freak out in the 1950s
leads to the infamous
Presidential Physical Fitness Test.
Many of us remember that mile run, pull-ups, sit-ups.
It wasn't really so much a physical test
as an exercise in humiliation.
- [Henry] Among these military-inspired gym exercises,
there's one challenge dreaded by generations of kids.
The infamous rope climb.
- [Jason] The rope climb, this is something that, you know,
soldiers do in basic training.
So it's the natural fit
for the quasi-militaristic gym culture.
- [Martin] For the small investment of a section of 30
feet of rope.
and a shackling system on the ceiling of the gym,
you have an excellent means of evaluating
the physical fitness of the students in the class.
- [Jason] You're supposed to climb all the way up to the top,
touch the ceiling, and make it down,
and you are being timed.
Sure, right.
Like we're all Olympic gymnasts.
- [Brian] And it's a weird thing when you're climbing a rope
as a child in gym class because you have an audience.
To fail at climbing the rope in front of the entire class,
it's a humiliation ritual.
You feel like your entire worth
is invested in how high you can get up that rope.
These are high, high stakes,
and we all went through it, and not all of us did well.
- [Henry] For lots of kids,
the rope climb is like a bad dream.
But the dangers of this test go far beyond embarrassment.
- The rope climb is really insane.
I mean, we're asking kids to do things that soldiers do.
And if you get to the top of the rope,
you're talking climbing 20, 30 feet up.
- Nobody's wearing a helmet.
Nobody's wearing a harness.
There's no safety equipment or anything.
The gym teachers probably haven't been taught anything.
- [Lance] They would put a little mat down,
but it was a really thin mat.
It's clear that that was not there to protect you.
It was there to protect the floor.
- [Edward] And they're just saying, "Who can do it?"
You know, scale 20, 30 feet,
and then hopefully you can let yourself down slowly,
but if you lose your grip,
it's like falling out of a second-story window.
- [Lance] Even if you're in a burning building,
firefighters will tell you not to jump
from a second or third story
unless you have absolutely no choice.
And we're telling kids to do this in gym class.
- [Martin] The week that we struggled through the rope
course, we were all just burned up by the rope,
and that's just the way life was back then.
- [Jason] By the early 2000s,
you start to hear more and more complaints
about rope climbing injuries.
Kids are falling, they're hurting themselves,
they're getting rope burned.
- [Martin] In one case, this girl hits the floor so hard
that it requires pins to get her back together again.
That is too much.
You have asked too much of children at that stage.
- [Jason] This is a generation of parents
who also had to go through this humiliation.
So they're like, "You know what?
I had to go through this, and this was terrible.
This stops now."
- [Martin] In 2013, a journal for physical education
admits the rope climb
into the Physical Fitness Hall of Shame,
and I can see why.
- [Brian] Oh, by the time I even got to the fire academy,
they were like, "Yeah, we don't do a rope climb anymore
'cause too many people get hurt.
It's dangerous."
- [Jason] Today, the rope climb, it's pretty much disappeared.
Or where it still exists,
it's much shorter and with plenty of padding.
We went through it.
Kids today thankfully don't.
But you know what?
Yeah, you kids, you don't know how lucky you've got it.
- Dangling 20 feet up in gym class was bad enough.
But do you remember the free-for-all
that was called recess?
With hundreds of kids and only a handful of adults watching,
the playground was more like a battleground.
[bright upbeat music]
- [Austin] Recess is designed for children to get out there,
get some fresh air, run off some energy
and, you know, just generally enjoy themselves
and socialize.
- [Rutledge] In places like my school,
it was essentially a time for young boys
to just figure out how to assault one another
under the guise of playing a game.
- [Brian] I went to PS 53, which behind the school
had a giant dirt lot next to a giant asphalt lot.
And that was recess.
It was violent, sometimes bloody, but always fun.
- [Austin] Games in the 1980s had names like Suicide,
Butts Up,
Kill the Carrier.
- [J Mack] One of our favorite games was Kill the Quarterback.
One guy had the ball and basically just tried to survive
while all the other kids just tackled him.
- [Rutledge] We would play a pretty aggressive form of tag
where it looked like you were tackling a person,
and then you would say, "I got you."
- [Brian] Oh, I loved dodgeball.
The method that we did on Staten Island
was it was a ring of people around you.
There was just like seven of you in the middle.
It was like a circular firing squad.
It was like a public stoning.
Brutal!
- [Henry] But one recess classic
manages to combine a nursery rhyme, peer pressure,
and a full-speed collision.
- Red Rover is two lines of people
that are holding hands together,
essentially making like a human chain.
And then you pick one person out of the other group,
and you say, "Red Rover, Red Rover, send John on over."
- It's a rhyme.
It sounds like something fun that kids say.
- [Rutledge] And then John has to drop hands with his team
and try to smash through the human chain.
- Red Rover goes back centuries.
One theory says it's based on a taunt by English kids
against Viking invaders who were called Rovers.
So it's literal medieval warfare.
- [Brian] I mean, if you gotta get through the Red Rover line,
you're gonna do what you have to do
to get through the Red Rover line.
Great shame upon you and your family
if you let the Red Rover through.
- [Rutledge] You're either clotheslining someone
or someone is trying to break your wrist.
Like those are kind of the only options
that exist in this game.
- [J Mack] So many potential injuries are at risk there.
You could fracture your shoulder, elbow, wrist,
fingers, deep bruises.
You're just asking for injury here.
That's recess.
Yay! [chuckles]
What a fun time.
- [Henry] Schools largely ignore the Red Rover matches
that break out at recess.
Until the lawyers start showing up.
- No one wants to face lawsuits
like one filed by two San Diego parents in 2011.
That ended with a $15,000 settlement
for their seventh grader injured during Red Rover.
- [Brian] I think the roughhousing at recess,
it taught me that there are worse things in life
than taking hits, you know?
I think there are valuable lessons
in getting hit and standing back up.
- There's been some internet chatter
that Red Rover is banned from some US schools.
Not officially, but sadly, the chain has been broken.
- In the old days,
schools believed students didn't learn anything
unless they really got their hands dirty.
Or in some cases, bloody.
[bright lively music]
- [Natalia] Before World War II, the science of blood
was really a kind of unknown terrain.
When blood transfusion becomes necessary,
a lot of people die
because of cross-pollination of different blood types.
- [Lance] By the 1950s, we've generally figured out
that if you want to give someone a blood transfusion,
it's going to fail unless you match blood types.
So high school biology teachers figure out
the science is really pretty simple.
Hey, here is a learning opportunity,
and thus begins the painful ritual
of figuring out your own blood type.
- [Henry] Schools embrace the idea.
It's useful.
It's educational.
And after all, what harm could come from a little poke?
- [Dan] High school students from the '50s
all the way through the '90s
probably remember this really well.
One day you get to take a break from all the boring stuff
you're doing in science class and go test your own blood.
- [Don] Teachers hand out
these little sharp lancets, they're called,
these little prickers.
So students can then poke each other's fingers
to draw blood.
- [Dan] The students take their bleeding finger
with that drop of blood on it, and they touch a slide,
and their blood mixes with a serum
to figure out which blood type they have.
- I was staring at this little object
that has a point on it.
And I'm like, "I'm supposed to puncture my own skin?"
And it's like a serious point.
That's the thing.
I can remember how it was like a little tiny knife.
I think I might have a scar
on one of these fingers from that.
- [Dan] There's no informed consent here.
Parents are not asked beforehand.
To be fair, it is just a drop,
but by today's standards, this would not fly.
- [Henry] It can be a bit of a bloodbath in the biology lab,
but that's hardly the only issue.
- [Dan] People just aren't very cautious
about blood-borne pathogens, things like hepatitis.
So these lancets are getting passed around
pretty much willy-nilly, shared by students,
not sterilized, just reused.
- [Don] And to make matters worse,
a lot of these test results are just plain useless.
They're wrong.
- [Dan] Today, most schools forbid teachers
from using real student blood in any kind of experiment.
- [Natalia] In 2013, there's an example of a teacher
doing one of these blood typing activities.
Word gets to the principal's office,
and the principal reportedly runs in,
and it's like, "Stop the lab! Stop the lab!"
and basically fires the teacher on the spot.
- High school kids have been sneaking in
beer and pot forever,
but there was a time
when you didn't have to smuggle in contraband to get a buzz
because there were plenty of school supplies
that would do the job for you.
- [Brian] It is an interesting fact
that for most of the 20th century,
kids at school had access to all sorts of things
that can get them high.
- [Jason] There's that old standby glue,
and I'm not talking about white Elmer's glue.
I'm talking about its stronger cousin from art class,
rubber cement.
- [Kavitha] Magic markers come along in the 1950s,
and they're a game changer, and kids love them
because they have these
brilliant colors that don't fade.
- [Dan] You take out your marker, you pull off the cap,
you take a whiff, then you start drawing.
And it's just how you did it.
Even though after a while,
you started to feel a little loopy.
- [Henry] With the all-time classic item
that could send you on a trip,
a freshly printed document from the ditto machine.
- For those in Gen X and older,
you could probably remember a secretary in the office
cranking this machine, and they call it a ditto.
- [Brian] I remember them well.
That transfer ink could get you high.
The first thing you did was you smelled it.
The first thing, 'cause it smelled delightful.
- [Hakeem] When you got those new papers,
the first thing we did as kids is we [sniffing]
[sighs] gave it a smell and got a little buzz.
- [Brian] I remember Mrs. Shea handing out those papers
and just sniffing it.
[sniffs] Smell is like childhood.
It was beautiful.
Also was poisoning our tiny little brains.
- [Henry] What's causing kids to feel euphoric
over freshly printed paper?
It's the ink!
Which is loaded with methanol.
[light inquisitive music]
- Methanol is like ethanol, which is the alcohol we drink.
Only this is way worse.
- [Dan] Once it's in your system, it turns into
formaldehyde.
Small doses can give you a headache or nausea or dizziness,
but repeated exposures to methanol can cause blindness,
seizures, and even death.
- [Kavitha] Schools seem blissfully unaware
that every time they hand out a test,
they're handing out a paper full of toxins.
- [Dan] And eventually, this machine
just kind of disappears in the 20th century.
- [Brian] The reign of the machine didn't end
because suddenly teachers were like,
"I think we're poisoning these kids."
Like it ended because an easier method
for the teachers to make copies was invented.
That's it.
If it wasn't for that, they'd still be like,
"Go ahead, kid, sniff, sniff away."
- Who knew that the gateway drug for an entire generation
would turn out to be a purple worksheet.
- As the legendary Motley Crue sang in the 1980s,
everybody knows that smoking ain't allowed in school.
But looking back,
those guys really didn't do their homework.
- [Natalia] Smoking is so forbidden
and kind of legally regulated today
that it is hard to imagine
how much of a national phenomenon it was.
- [Austin] At smoking's peak in the 1960s,
around 40% of American adults were lighting up.
And a Philip Morris study finds that in 1968,
almost 20% of 15- to 18-year-olds
are current regular smokers.
- [Henry] But in the old days, there's one part of society
really holding the line on youth smoking.
- [Negin] Up to the 1960s, school had a lot of rules about
smoking because it was a fire hazard.
Interestingly, it had like nothing to do
with it being a health hazard.
It was mostly like, "Don't cause a fire at school."
- [Edward] Over time, especially as we get into the 1960s,
teenagers continue to look for ways to smoke.
They smoke in the bathroom, they smoke in the gym,
they smoke behind the school, behind the dumpster.
- [Negin] It's just rampant throughout schools,
and school administrators are like,
"We have to do something about this."
- [Henry] With teenagers smoking anywhere
and everywhere at school,
administrators finally decide to draw that line in the sand.
- Schools do the only thing that they can do to combat this,
and they say, "Go smoke outside."
- [Edward] Administrators come to the conclusion
that they can't stop kids from smoking.
It's just a fruitless task.
So what they decide to do is to say,
"Well, let's manage it."
Let's say to your students, "You all can smoke over there
in a designated spot."
- [Austin] My high school had a smoking section,
which was in a parking lot behind one of our cafeterias,
and kids were allowed to go outside
and have a cigarette during lunch periods.
- [Brian] You can smoke all you want.
Just do it outside.
Just saying that is so wild.
- [Austin] This is the craziest if you can't beat them,
join them move in education history.
- [Henry] And students aren't the only ones lighting up.
- [Negin] Sometimes the teachers
are bumming a smoke off the students.
You know, it's just like one
big cross-generational cigarette fest.
- I wonder how many teachers gave good grades
to students who hooked them up with cigarettes.
I bet you more than a few students got bumped up
to like a B+ or something like that from a B
just for having some extra cigarettes on them.
- [Negin] The teens have these really fun names
for their little smoking places.
They have like The Wall or The Pit,
or literally Cancer Corner was a nickname.
So they knew.
Everybody knew what was going on.
- [Edward] This lasted well into the 1980s,
by which time everybody knows the dangers of smoking.
- [Henry] The high school smoking section
drags on for decades until it too is eventually stubbed out.
- Federal and state governments
ban smoking in public places.
And they also threaten to pull funding
from places that expose kids to cigarette smoke.
- [Austin] And then there's the dangers of secondhand smoke.
It's one thing to allow the kids
who want to smoke their privileges,
but the second they start affecting others,
that's gonna cause some lawsuits.
- [Edward] So these days, the vast majority of schools
are no-smoking schools, not just in the school itself,
but on all the property, including no vaping.
- [Brian] Look at back in the day, it was always the cool,
sexy guys with a cigarette in the side of the thing.
Hanging out, probably on a classic car,
while some like, you know, wimpy little dude
with healthy lungs is getting picked up by his mom.
I was never that person. [laughs]
I was the one getting picked up by my mom.
- Remembering the school days we survived,
whether we were getting paddled, sniffing markers,
or stabbing our classmates in the name of science.
Schools once taught us reading, writing,
and a whole lot of risk.
But somehow we had more passes than fails.
And that's why our hazardous history really made the grade.
[intense dramatic music]