School Rules

Jacob's new school is a school of rules; most of these rules start with DO NOT.  Now I know that schools are home to the arbitrary rule - from the narrow strictures of what can be worn as uniform to whether you can whistle in the corridors or take crisps in with your lunch.  At my school, girls were briefly banned from wearing ankle socks on the grounds that it made them look like sluts.

At Jacob's school on Friday he was told he couldn't ride his bike nor Sam scoot his scooter along the largely car-free access road between the Juniors and Infants.   It's possibly the safest road in the area, hardly the M1 on a Monday morning.

My reaction on having this rule explained to me as being "for everyone's safety" (general WTF-age, followed by irritation, derision and truculence) made me think - and not just about the fuckwittery that seems to infect the leadership of Junior School.

If you think about it, the arbitrary rule goes out of your life around the time you leave school.  When you get to Uni, there are deadlines to be met and expectations about your attendance; when you start work, you encounter the seemingly arbitrary rules of our Health & Safety culture, but only rarely are you told that you cannot do something for no good reason.  I guess this is probably because you're an adult, with an adult's reasoning powers - if someone presented you with an arbitrary rule, you could probably defeat them with the sheer power of your contempt.

Doing a training course as a post-grad in a college that also taught 16 year olds, I was ordered out of a lift by a tutor as the rule was that they weren't to be used by students; I told her that I hadn't got an upper second degree in English and Medieval History to be ordered around by someone who was teaching an HND course in hairdressing.  You see?  contempt, arrogance (and considerable pomposity) defeat the arbitrary rule in a Scott Pilgrim-stylee battle where the tutor explodes in a puff of smoke and I get 548 XP (as well as a ride to the 9th floor in the lift).

But then you become a parent and your kids go to school - and once again, sooner or later, you are exposed to the arbitrary rule.  If my reaction on Friday afternoon was anything to go by, there needs to be Family Learning courses available to all parents to enable them to deal with these rules in ways that don't involve being utterly contemptuous of the people responsible for your children's education.

Perhaps I'll suggest it as a future course to the people from the local council.  And in future, on being told that my children have to stand completely still in the playground for the 10 minutes of breaktime, "for everyone's safety", I'll be able to smile brightly and say "right you are!" without blinking an eye.