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We Don’t Need No Education
Ah, the joys of life in post-D.A.R.E. America:
On a Monday morning last month, highway patrol officers visited 20 classrooms at El Camino High School to announce some horrible news: Several students had been killed in car wrecks over the weekend.
Oceanside Unified Schools Superintendent Larry Perondi discusses the DUI program as a student looks on.
Classmates wept. Some became hysterical.
A few hours and many tears later, though, the pain turned to fury when the teenagers learned that it was all a hoax, a scared-straight exercise designed by school officials to dramatize the consequences of drinking and driving.
As seniors prepare for graduation parties Friday, school officials in the largely prosperous San Diego, California, suburb are defending themselves against allegations that they went too far.
At school assemblies, some students held posters that read, “Death is real. Don’t play with our emotions.”
Michelle de Gracia, 16, was in physics class when an officer announced that her missing classmate David, a popular basketball player, had died instantly after being rear-ended by a drunken driver. She said she felt nauseated but was too stunned to cry.
“They got the shock they wanted,” she said.
(link via Badtux)
Man, I am so glad I’m not in high school anymore. Lord knows, they fed us a lot of ridiculous, authoritarian bullshit in school during the Reagan era, but nothing remotely approaching this.
