For Your Own Protection
Children are so cocooned by their parents that they rarely venture far from home and have little concept of space, volume and how the world actually works, David Willetts, the shadow education secretary, said yesterday.
All touching — not only fighting or inappropriate touching — is against the rules at Kilmer Middle School in Vienna. Hand-holding, handshakes and high-fives? Banned. The rule has been conveyed to students this way: “NO PHYSICAL CONTACT!!!!!”
This seems like the perfect way to raise a generation of profound neurotics.
I wish I could say these were relatively isolated phenomena, but I remember this sort of silliness beginning even late in my own High School career (e.g. bringing a plastic butter knife in your lunch could land you a suspension under the knife ban, and the school incrementally approaching a state of continuous lockdown), and by most accounts it’s only gotten worse since.