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Yet another the way we were document of questionable origin intended to demonstrate by comparison how much better off we are today is the Rules for Teachers - 1872 list: We're expected to take this list in and marvel at the grimness of a late nineteenth century American schoolteacher's lot: the profession was lowly regarded, the work was physically demanding and involved long hours on the job, the position paid poorly, retirement benefits were non-existent, and teachers were expected to be among the most morally upright members of their community. (Some modern teachers would probably agree that maybe things haven't changed so much since then after all.) But the bottom line is that no one has ever been able to verify the authenticity of this Rules for Teachers - 1872 list. The earliest iteration of this list that we've uncovered so far dates from 1959, when it was attributed to a school principal in Manhattan named Winifred Northrup: Rules for Teachers - 1872 28 Feb 1959, Sat Redlands Daily Facts (Redlands, California) Newspapers.com This list has been reproduced in countless newspapers and books over the sixty years since then, and copies of it have been displayed in numerous museums throughout North America, with each exhibitor claiming that it originated with their county or school district. Any evidence documenting the existence of the original list remains elusive, however. Rules for Teachers - 1872 also been also offered in a number of different guises, such as a list of rules for sales clerks at W.T. Stewart's department store in New York, for floor nurses in a hospital, and for the employees of a New England carriage works. All attempts to trace this document to its origins inevitably dead end with a photocopy or printed sheet of indeterminate origin and suspiciously modern vintage. As a point of reference, we visited a historical site in our neighborhood which included a restored 19th century schoolhouse, complete with a preserved contemporaneous list of instructions for teachers. The items on that list were rather mundane, directing teachers to follow protocol by taking regular attendance, using the assigned texts, etc. Nothing on the list involved manual labor or bore on the moral conduct of teachers' private lives. Perhaps this piece tells us more about our contemporary vision of life in the 1870s than it does about life in the real 1870s. Sometimes the document includes a list of equally onerous rules for students: Another similar items purports to be a list of rules for teachers from 1915:
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