When I was around 8 or 9 years old my school teacher would ask me to go to the nearby service station (gas station) to buy cigarettes for her. As long as I had a note from her nobody could care less.
Another thing: I was briefly in Boy Scouts. The initiation was to be forcibly stripped and paddled by the other boys . . . who would then throw his clothes up into a tree. The kid had to climb the tree, naked, to get his clothing back. The troop leaders would just stand there and watch.
Once, after a kid was paddled, he had an erection. A few of the other kids beat the crap out of him.
According to Mom male teachers or staff weren’t allowed to touch a girl. Only the women were allowed to administer CP on girls. Girls rarely got spanked (compared to the boys), usually it was a ruler to the hands (parochial schools didn’t have a monopoly on that). The ruler on hands could be done in class, for a rare spanking the girl would be sent to the office where a secretary or female teacher would do in private. For the boys any teacher or staff member could administer CP, and this often happened in front of other students (boys & girls), but only on a clothed behind. I think bare bottomed spankings were possible, but carried out only without girls present. Most teachers had a “board of education” in their rooms (actually some older one still had these when I went to school, but nobody used them of course). Circa 1960 one of my uncle’s teachers shoved his head into a wall. It made a hole in the plaster and I think he had a concusion. Apparently this was a little extreme even by the standards of the time, but the school thought Grandma was overreacting when she transfered him to another school to avoid that teacher.
Oh, and speaking of skinnydipping; one my uncles had a birthday party at the lake cottage in his early teens. Naturely this involved swimming au naturel. There were no girls there, but Grandma was there to make and serve lunch. To a bunch of naked boys who just came from the lake. Oh, and did I mention my grandfather made a home movie of this?
At age 12, I and a friend of the same age made a week-long canoe trip - just the two of us. We had a great time.
We were totally doing that in the late 80’s. 4 kids, from 13+ to 6. We would unroll the sleeping bags and make a nest back there; me and the two older brothers would lie side by side and our youngest brother had to lie across our feet. We each had Walkmen and books. We drove all over CA and OR that way.
Once my youngest sister was born we couldn’t do it anymore.
Almost forgot: being the youngest in the family, it was my duty to sit in the tiny space between the driver and passenger’s seat when the car was full. Where there was no seatbelt, and I was practically a nose hair away from the windshield. This was in the mid to late 80’s. Everyone was more cavalier about car safety back then. It was a treat to ride along with my friend in the back of her mom’s stationwagon, enjoying laying down backwards as we went over hills and bumps.
Born in 1961, and I share a lot of these experiences … playing away from home unsupervised in the woods and only having to come home for dinner, and catching lunch at whichever cousins house i was playing with, walking or riding my bike without protective gear to get from place to place, going camping overnight without parental supervision, my own key in case mom was out shopping for groceries when I got home after school, you know, being a kid in the 60s and early 70s.
Catholic school for kindergarten, first grade - ruler whacks to the hand while the nuns retrained me to write right handed, making my handwriting craptastically horrible for life and more or less ambidexterous.
Dad and his army buddies letting a 4 year old sit on the table, learning to play craps and poker, and sing army song [I got in trouble for singing along to [My Bonnie](My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean - Wikipedia) with Danang Lullaby a few years later ] and I was allowed to try beer and gin and tonics and peppermint schnaps …
I could read anything the library or my parents bookshelves had to offer. I was 8 when I read Lady Chatterlys Lover, Johnnie Got His Gun and 120 days of Sodom. If I didn’t understand a word, the OED got a workout. If I still didn’t understand it, I asked Mom or Dad. I bet nowadays if any home with an 8 year old had a copy of 120 Days of Sodom sitting on a bookshelf, child welfare would snag those kids out faster than grass through a goose. I was going to link the wiki about it, but I think pretty much everybody understand how obscene the work is, or they can google it themselves. I don’t recommend reading the book, though the edition I read was one of those sets of world publications that are somehow significant.
When I was five I’d go to the grocery store with a note from my father, telling the ther person at the service desk what kind of cigarettes he wanted. Then I’d pay him and take the cigarettes home. No big deal.
In the summer I’d be six or seven and I’d be gone the whole day from 8:30am to it got dark.
My mother was the type of lady if you hung around the house or she FIND stuff for you to do. So you said, “Mum, can you pack me a sandwich, I’m gonna go to the park with Brent and Matt and play all day.”
And that was that.
It was safer that way, you never knew when mum would get into one of her “moods” that could only be solved by me, brushing the dog, or weeding the garden, or cleaning my room or straightening up the garage or trying to get the oil spills out of the driveway 
I remember when I got older around 10 or 11 we’d play by the train tracks. I was playing with my friend Doug and we came back and his mother was at my house talking to my mother. Doug’s mum Lorraine was all upset.
I never forget my mother, she said “Oh for God sakes, Lorraine, I’d like to think my kid is smart enough to get out of the way of a train. It’s a TRAIN, it weighs two tons, it’s not like it sneaks up on you.”
Of course my mother was in WWII so her answer to a lot of things was “Oh good God, when I was his age, I had Nazis shooting at me.”
Very similar stories for me too - 1970s, primary school, walked there and back by myself everyday. Was sent down to the store to buy Camel non filters (cigarettes) for dad. Made my own breakfast lunch and (usually) dinner. Did my own clothes washing. Latchkey kid. Beaten up by teachers at school - I didn’t care back then and I still don’t. Went horseriding on a school camping trip without a helmet, lessons or any instruction. It was a fun childhood 
I went to Catholic School from Kindergarten through Eighth Grade, 1956 thru 1964. The nuns inflicted horrific psychological and emotional abuse on us. They were miserable, bitter women who should never have been left alone with children.
I hope things have changed since then.
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As others have said, I was sent to the shop to buy cigarettes for my parents. It was considered no different from being sent to buy bread or milk.
The other biggie was corporal punishment. I was caned on a regular basis for talking in class.
I was one of the many Dopers who were sent to buy Dad his cigarettes. This was in El Salvador, in the 1970s. When I was in 1st grade, in an all-girl classroom (also in El Salvador) my teacher once lined up all of the girls who hadn’t done their homework the night before and gave us each a whack on the butt with a ruler. I also remember her saying, on another occasion, that we were to sit in the classroom until we finished our assignment, and she didn’t care if we cried tears of blood. Needless to say, we finished on time and no one stayed after school.
When we moved to the States, in the 80s, Dad bought a Camaro. I remember being jammed in the back with my 3 sisters (no seatbelts), and little bro sitting in the front with my parents. Let me tell you, we celebrated the day he traded that Camaro in for a station wagon. I also remember there being a video store near the apartment where we lived and us going to rent movies and watching them, mostly unsupervised - Grandma lived with us, but she mostly sat in her room and left us to our own devices. I still remember the day my parents came home early and caught us watching “Revenge of the Cheerleaders,” or maybe it was “Screwballs” - I know we rented both at some point. The point is, it was a raunchy teen comedy, and thus ended our days of going to rent videos on our own.
When I was in high school in the early 90s, my biology teacher had the idea to let us figure out our own blood type. That’s right, we drew samples of our own blood (or a friend did it if you were too squemish), and performed various tests on our samples.
I’m not even sure that was okay at the time, but I’ve told collegues about this recently and they thought it was crazy.
I did that in 2 different school systems, in public school in IIRC 7th or 8th grade basic biology class, then again in 12th grade AP bio - though the second time around it was more than just blood typing, we did several tests.
What is the big deal? You stick a lancet in your finger or earlobe and use a thistle tube to draw up a drop or two of blood. Of course we did it without gloves at the time, but we washed our hands. 1970s.
When I was 7 or 8, my father let me sit on his lap and steer his car on a public road for fun (and it sure was fun for me!). There was very little traffic on this road, but still… Then again, when my father was 12, his father let him drive his car on his own home from a distance of more than 100 km because he was too drunk to drive himself.
And my father frequently took me with him to a bar, where he drank beer and I drank malt beer (non-alcoholic), ate candy and played video games, pinball or pool. I loved it.
I attended Catholic School in the 1960s. They could be mean. I would’ve thought things had changed, but according to my daughter (who has attended part of a year at Catholic school), they;'re still pretty mean.
In high school chemistry class, our teacher showed us the properties of mercury buy pouring some on the lab table and letting us play with it.
Usual redneck stuff–handgun in the kitchen drawer (although my grandparents kept their rifle in a bedroom closet, where they felt it was less likely to be grabbed by a small child, and they also kept it unloaded), riding along with the drunken step-father to make sure he made to his destination in one piece (although how I was supposed to accomplish this at age 5 is beyond me–I didn’t learn how to drive until I was 14). I also remember my Mom dolling me up in blue eyeshadow (it was the '70’s) and lipstick, a la southern child beauty pageant contestants, for special church events, when I was maybe 7 or 8. And THEN there was the red gingham dress picture. Every one agreed the red gingham dress was adorable. Think farmer’s daughter. Now think…Hee Haw Honey, or Dogpatch. Now think 11-old-girl just starting to develop in this red gingham Dogpatch dress, which is incidentally too short because she got it from her sister who is 3 inches shorter. I remember at the time looking in the mirror and thinking, “Wow, this is kind of…huh. I can’t believe Mom’s letting me wear this. I wonder what else I can get away with.”
This is my favorite story.
I went to Catholic school from 1974-1985 and none of the teachers were mean. Of course some had warmer personalities than others, but none was mean. They kept discipline but none of it was corporal punishment.
The only horrorshow I remember was a crazy old lay woman who taught music.