In the very early years of the 20th century, my dad attended primary school in a one-room country grade school on the plains of central Kansas. Conditions were still very rustic on the frontier in those days. They had just the basics. There were no phones, no electric lights and no indoor plumbing. The roads were of dirt, and the law was miles away. One teacher taught all eight grades and had to be a fairly tough and self-sufficient individual.
One day when my dad was a very young child, some of the older boys in the upper grades came to school early. They brought a ladder with them and climbed up onto the roof of the schoolhouse with a .22-caliber rifle and a flask of some kind of beverage. When the teacher arrived, the boys on the roof dared him to try to get them to come down. He did not succeed. The schoolboys, not the teacher, pretty well ran the school that day.
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