So, it was the third day of school, and in our daily assembly, the teachers told all of the students to come to school the next day in their work clothes, and not in the normal uniform of blue and white. They also told them to bring all of the knives, cutlasses, and axes they could get their hands on. What kind of mayhem was planned for a large number of elementary-aged students and implements that could kill or maim? That’s right. We’ll clear the school grounds.
The next day, students came, as directed, wielding all of the large, sharp, and could-break-at-any-moment tools that they had. And to my surprise, they got to work. They removed as many weeds as they could, and all the girls swept the dirt school grounds (which I don’t think I’ll ever understand). Despite all of them having deadly weapons in hand, the student to teacher ratio probably hovering around 50-1, there were no serious problems. The usual wrestling, punching, and threatening still went on between students, but now with a potentially fatal twist.
While the day passed relatively uneventfully (students and teachers both called it a day around noon), I can’t help thinking what the equivalent would be in America, and what the outcry would be among the community.
Maybe a school wide hunt would be a comparable event in America? Can you imagine the note home to parents? “Please allow your child to bring all instruments of death to school tomorrow. We will need guns and large knives. There will be no instruction, save that in the valuable art of tracking and killing.”
I would have loved to have taken something as cool as a cutlass to grade school. Knives and axes - so pedestrian. But a cutlass - now that shows some style. Alas back in the early 1960s for some reason in northern Illinois there was a severe shortage of cutlasses, making it virtually impossible to buy one for a kid to take to school. I had to settle for taking a pocket knife to fourth grade class.
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