News alert, folks — the Department of Education has just announced a ban on Christmas trees in schools. “Too many prickles,” a spokesman said. “A child could choke on a pine or spruce needle and possibly die.”
Nah, I’m joshing ya — but only just.
Big Nurse is on the loose and She’s determined to protect the little ones, even if it means you go to jail.
Ask the ladies who were enjoying donuts and coffee on a bench in one of New York City’s public playgrounds last spring.
Busted!
The cops who gave them tickets also took down a notorious ring of seven senior male citizens operating inside the confines of yet another city playground. Their offense? Playing chess. Adults in New York are forbidden to even enter public playgrounds unless accompanied by a child.
Might be pedophiles, you know.
Several American libraries have caught the paranoia bug, banning unaccompanied adults from entering the children’s’ book sections. There’s one library in Pennsylvania which bans adults from using the rest rooms ‘unless accompanied by their children.’
So it’s verboten for a solo grandpa to go to the john but it’s okay for a pedophile to take a kid in with him?
I’m confused.
It’s just as dopey on this side of the border. Last summer, a bunch of teenagers got together to play a game of pickup baseball on the grounds of Eagle View Elementary school in Victoria, B.C. Why not? It was summertime, there were no classes being held, the field was empty. That’s when the Bylaw Officer came over and asked them if they had a permit. They hadn’t. He kicked them off the property.
Just how safe do we want our kids to be? Bubble-wrap safe.
Parents of children attending an elementary school in North Brookfield, Mass. recently received a letter informing them that henceforth, students were not to bring pens or pencils onto school property in pockets, binders or backpacks. Writing utensils would be handed out by school officials as necessary. Sixth-grade teacher Wendy Scott went on to say that if any student was caught with a pen or pencil, he or she would be assumed to have stolen it from school with the intent “to build weapons.”
Not that school kids need dangerous armament-building material like pencils and ballpoints to wreak havoc and destroy society as we know it. Alert teachers at a junior school in Bridlington, England, have ordered their students to stop raising their hands to answer questions. Head teacher Cheryl Adams explains that the tradition of hand-raising to respond to questions “creates too much excitement.”
“Some children put their hands up at every opportunity,” Adams says, “while others won’t, even if they know the answers.”
But the Bridlington Brain Trust has a solution. They want students to respond by giving a ‘thumbs-up” instead.
(I hope they warn the kiddies not to try that in Australia, Argentina and especially in Iran, where a thumbs-up means a thumbs-up-yours.)
They also better not try it any schoolrooms in Ionia, Michigan. Schools there have a ‘zero tolerance policy.’ Translated, that means they are politically correct to the point of insanity.
A student by the name of Mason Jammer made the thumbs-up sign to a classmate in an Ionia public school recently. His teacher decided he was ‘imitating a revolver’ and had him suspended and sent home. Mason Jammer is six years old.
Sad, sad, sad. I’m with author Ellen Gilchrist who said: “All you have to do to educate a child is to leave them alone and teach them to read. The rest is brainwashing.”