A whole new meaning to “school lockdown”

God made the Idiot for practice. And then He made the School Board. - Mark Twain The reality of the term “school lockdown” is a fairly recent phenomenon. It is a practice that is put in place to prevent students from leaving their school if there is some immediate threat of violence or a dangerous person who is thought to be in the vicinity.

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Given the nature of today’s societies, these so-called institutions of learning cannot be faulted in their attempt to protect their young charges from harm. More often than not, these threats come from fellow students or other young people. What was unheard of a few years ago is now as common in big city schools as the fire drills of old. But the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) wants to give a whole new meaning to the term “school lockdown”. Some board members are proposing that students in middle schools be “locked down” at lunchtime to protect the little dears from the dangers of walking to the mall, eating junk food for lunch and falling victim to the scourge of obesity. Lock them in and force them to eat food from the school cafeteria. Great idea – we all know how tasty institutional cafeteria food is. The kids will become healthier, health care costs will come down and everyone will be so happy. There is actually one middle school that has already implemented the practice of not letting students leave the school during lunch. Not only are these kids protected from blades and bullets; now they are kept away from deadly trans fats and calories. In another time and place, those trustees who sat around and discussed an issue like this would have been charged with defrauding the taxpayers of their salaries. The idea of a lunchtime lockdown is so ridiculous that even a child can figure out how it will fail to accomplish what it sets out to do. Come to think of it, a lot of children have figured it out. Surprisingly even a couple of trustees have figured out why it won’t work. It will deter students from ever entertaining the possibility of going home for lunch. Those that crave junk food will simply go to the nearest burger or pizza joint when school lets out rather than for lunch. Instead of having a Big Mac and fries for lunch, they will have their fill after they have already eaten lunch when school lets out. There’s no maximum age that a kid has to be before he or she can outsmart a school trustee. And in an age of the Internet, video games and 500 TV channels, children don’t get a lot of exercise like kids got in the past. At least they get some exercise when they walk to and from their junk food palace of choice at lunch time. If kids can’t be trusted to be out on their own for lunch, perhaps they shouldn’t be allowed to go home for dinner either. Their parents surely can’t be trusted to provide a nutritious dinner for them. Many students have parents who are not home at dinner time forcing them, that’s right, to get dinner on their own at the same places that the noble trustees are trying to prevent them from eating at during the day. Perhaps the solution is just to lock the children in their schools 24/7. Parents can take their kids to school in September and pick them up in June. After all the school board and the teachers’ unions can take care of the children a lot better than parents can. And this is really what it’s all about. The proposal of the TDSB about lunchtime lockdowns has nothing to do with children. It’s about control and power. It’s about brainwashing children into thinking the same politically correct way that these trustees do. It’s about utter contempt for parents and the family unit. School kids are nothing more than pawns in the social experiments of a bunch of left wing school trustees. It’s mindboggling to think what Mark Twain would say if he were alive today.