Thursday, January 20, 2011

DARE to be different?

I've mentioned the school's DARE programme before.  Yesterday the kids in the Girl's class presented essays they'd written in response to several weeks of anti-drugs education.

All very earnest, they were, as you'd expect.  I'll admit I was all for the horrible warnings about the dangers of smoking - nasty, smelly, unhealthy habit.  The potential ill-effects of marijuana were covered in gloriously grim detail.  And then alcohol.  Well, I'm not much of a drinker these days, but I do know, from experience, that the odd glass of wine with dinner isn't immediately going to send me into an alcoholic coma.

I was left feeling a bit concerned that DARE had gone for overkill rather than realism.  It seems to have just been a blanket exercise in trying to scare the kids off everything, rather than addressing the potentially more useful lesson that some things are, for most people, okay in moderation.  A missed opportunity, I fear.

Anyway, having listened to twenty-four eager-faced ten year-olds promising me certain moral degradation and/or death for so much as thinking about booze, I can tell you, even I felt ready for a stiff drink.

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