Sunday, February 04, 2007

Silence!

What do you think about this rule at a Rhode Island elementary school?

A Roman Catholic elementary school adopted new lunchroom rules this week requiring students to remain silent while eating. The move comes after three recent choking incidents in the cafeteria.

No one was hurt, but the principal of St. Rose of Lima School explained in a letter to parents that if the lunchroom is loud, staff members cannot hear a child choking.

Granted that children are probably too loud at lunch and that elementary schools have a right to ask them to be quiet, this rule strikes me as altruistic in principle. Normal behavior is penalized in the name of safety. As the nannies strive to create a risk-free world, they force people to live in unnatural restraints. Wouldn’t it be better to ask students to alert the staff if someone at their table chokes?

4 comments:

Dismuke said...

Hmmmm. There still seems to me to be a risk involved. Even if the adults in the lunch room hear the chocking - what if they are still unable to save the kid after doing everything they can and should?

Perhaps they ought to require each child to dump his plate of food into a blender and whirl it around for a few seconds. The results could be poured into a bowl and the kids could spoon it up into their mouths. And since it would look gross and yucky it would also help solve the problem of so many modern kids being fat.

Let's hope for the kids' sake that nobody from that school reads these comments.

Anonymous said...

Silence!

I concur with your assessment, Myrhaf.


(that makes more sense, if you've seen Futurama...?)

Myrhaf said...

Haven't seen it. The last TV show I watched regularly was -- get ready for it -- "All In the Family." We're talking like 1973, when I was 16.

Anonymous said...

1973!

Wow. I... wow.

Well, there's this bit where the "robot elders" keep saying "Silence!" before they speak. At first, they're actually reacting to stuff they disagree with, but then, one of them interrupts another with, "Silence! ...I concur."