In fairness to today's administrators, there were some differences between now and then:
1) Drop outs: A lot of kids, particularly boys, simply dropped out of school when it got too boring or onerous. While there was encouragement to stay in school in those days, there wasn't the pressure like today and there were plenty of good jobs available if the kid had half a brain or a strong back. In those years American industry was humming along very nicely and a big demand for labor. If you had some smarts and could learn skills and worked hard on the job you would get promoted even wtihout a HS diploma and make a nice living.The point is a lot of the trouble makers in school today would simply have been out of school in those days.
2) Guns: Our country has gone nuts with guns. People had guns in the old days. But they had only one or two and they weren't as powerful as today. A kid recently murdered his girlfriend's parents and he was loaded for WW III; likewise with the kids who shot up their schools. 3) There were bad kids and bad schools: School administrators were always fanactical about keeping bad news out of the paper, but inner cities and tough rural neighborhoods had their share of violence. There was a film on that, The Blackboard Jungle. During the "good years" of WW II, schools set up in temporary construction camps for war industries were pretty rough, the boys caring little and the girls running off to "take care" of soldiers. At the end of the war there were many very bewildered 16 and 17 year old girls sitting in front of a squalid room waiting for their partying husband. Some had a baby with them. Today we'd put a man who did that in jail but back then as long as they were married it was fine.Back in the war and postwar years authors who wrote about this stuff were criticized as unpatriotic or were banished to heavy-duty college textbook status that few people would read. When Hollywood attempted (very rarely) to cover this social problems the films didn't sell and Hollywood was criticized as being commie for putting them out.
Fortunately many books on this subject have survived in large libraries. The Natl Bldg Museum in Washington did an exhibit on wartime construction, incl wartime housing, and included the family and social issues therein.
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