Set the kids Free!
From New Zealand comes a study showing kids are better behaved on the playground and in the classroom when the playground rules are done away with.
"Principal Bruce McLachlan rid the school of playtime rules as part of a successful university experiment. 'We want kids to be safe and to look after them, but we end up wrapping them in cotton wool when in fact they should be able to fall over.'"
posted by Fred Mangels @ 8:36 AM
6 comments
6 Comments:
Comparing schools falls apart at the geographic border. New Zealand is a different culture with different influences on youth.
America is simply a more violent, more divisive, more argumentative culture. Travel the world and you'll see it in the children. Then turn around and look at the media that children and adults consume in those cultures.
I've been reading a few news items lately of American schools starting to back off on their nanny state policies. At least some of them. More specifically, they're starting to think twice about their "zero tolerance" policies for various infractions.
It might have been in the news today or yesterday that some schools in the Bay Area are doing away with draconian suspension and expulsion policies, as well.
But I do appreciate the nanny state perspective being posted here.
There are many reasons for the policies you dislike. For example, you'll never see skateboarding or similar activities on an American playground for one simple reason: they're more likely to produce minor injuries and most schools no longer employ school nurses due to annual budget cuts.
My kid's school has a nurse who show up for a couple hours a week only to do paperwork. If my kid needs medication, I'm expected to come to the school however many times a day is needed to administer the medication myself. There are legal, and practical, implications to the drastic cuts to public education that have been occurring, especially in California 9 years running. Federal funding has been cut by more than 75% as well. There's a lot missing from our schools than just school nurses. Many have closed their school libraries, and so on.
To clarify... in the skateboard scenario, students would come into the school office crying, needing comforting, and needing bandaging... by a school secretary who also has to answer phone calls and deal with people coming into the office off the street and dealing with other students and staff who come into the office needing something. Basically, students already get neglected when they have a physical injury, so the school isn't about to allow playground activities that make the office situation from really horrible to really, really, really horrible.
Yes, it's a one-person office, plus the principal. The principal spends most of his time in mandated meetings and mandated observation of classrooms (due to insane school reforms trying to fix problems that never existed). So, hopefully, the principal's schedule overlaps in such a way that the secretary gets a bathroom break and a lunch break, but not always.
Over the past 20+ years, I've seen the same dramatic increase in rules at our local YMCA summer camp. Almost all of them have come from the insurance companies.
There's many school districts around the country that are even banning running at recess not to mention playing with balls but if your a little boy and you decide you want to go pee pee in the little girls bathroom that's perfectly acceptable this government is crushing our children spirits and trying to turn them into mindless drones and in many states and districts parents and students aren't even allowed to have bake sales anymore because of insurance problems between the lawyers and the politically correct politicians our children are being brainwashed that normal activity is not normal and unnormal activity is normal ther are even cases of school districts spending children for playing with nerf guns in their own yards outside of school hours not to mention kids being suspended for wearing NRA t shirts to school or biting pop tarts in what a teacher perceived as a shape of a gun there's even a case of a 6-year-old girl being suspended for bringing a Hello Kitty bubble gun to school she was charged with terrorizing fellow students meanwhile all the major banks for laundering billions of dollars of coke money for the Mexican cartels and our marines are busy protecting opium fields in Afghanistan more and more America is starting to resemble ancient Rome before it fell.
" He alone that owns the youth,controls the future." power monopolies throughout history new this fact to be true
THC
Post a Comment
<< Home