Banned wagon
A weekly survey of the things our rulers want to prohibit TEENAGE rebellion is widely accept- ed as a natural stage in the evolution of the individual. But then again it might simply be a reaction to the authoritari- anism of those who run modern educa- tion. The proposed ban on musical chairs, put forward last week in a pam- phlet by the Forum on Children and Violence, recalls numerous acts of bossiness on the part of educationists in recent years.
There is the case of St Andrew's School in Burnham on Sea, Somerset, which has banned football on the grounds that it encourages that root of all evil (and success outside the rarefied air of the classroom), competitiveness. Boys and girls alike are being encour- aged to play hopscotch instead, a game which has the added advantage of not discriminating against one-legged pupils.
At Trinity School in Aspley, Notting- hamshire, it is Brylcreem which has been banned: a pupil was banned from gelling his hair on the grounds that he constitut- ed a fire risk. One would have thought that fire-safety rules ought to be more concerned with getting pupils out of the school faster than the speed at which they would burn if they didn't get out. 'Mobile phones, sweets, crisps, yo-yos have all regularly fallen foul of head- teachers, but Monmouthshire County Council has succeeded in sniff-mg out a hazard of which schools elsewhere seem to be blissfully unaware: home-made food. Last Christmas the council ordered a ban on pupils bringing into school sausages on sticks, fairy cakes and mince' pies on the grounds that they might con- tain E.coli or salmonella; supermarket foods were deemed to be acceptable. Fortunately, the spirit of deregulato° is in the air in one sense, however: the Independent Schools Advisory Service, which has examined the European Char- ter on Human Rights, due to he incorpo- rated into English law later this year, has come to the conclusion that school balls on gay sex in the dormitory and Chang' ing-room will no longer be tenable.
Ross Clark
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