More dumb school + police lies.

Yeah, I know I referenced another one of these just recently, but god does this annoy me. To clarify, this isn't the "Every 15 Minutes" program, where a Grim Reaper comes and "kills" a student in class [cheesy, but harmless] but a situation where kids were lead to believe that their friends had actually been killed.

Police pretend students killed to teach dangers of drunk driving - Boing Boing:

"A uniformed police officer went to 20 classrooms El Camino High School in California on Monday and announced to students that several of their classmates had been killed over the weekend in alcohol-related car accidents.

He was lying, and he and the school continued to lie about it for two hours to the grief-stricken students. Why? To teach the kids an important lesson about the dangers of drunk driving.

I imagine the students learned another lesson -- that cops and authority figures are liars."

See, that last line there, that sums it all up. What do kids learn? That the school and the cops and anybody with any authority over you will lie their asses off to you whenever they decide it's for your own good. Screw them.

A couple good remarks from the comments:

"Lie and lie and lie and then wonder why they go apeshit.

...

It has been said that children no longer respect their elders. Children see no wisdom in an adult who is unable to set the time on a VCR. And this is further proof. Lying to children will not teach them. Cognitive abuse will only strengthen their boundaries. This same excercise took place in my high school, fifteen years ago. And yes, some of the students knew it was fake...and disreguarded the authority figure, their message, and their failing ethos. Others, like me, became very distraught receiving the message that another friend had died due to the plauge of drunk driving...

...

"They were traumatised, but we wanted them to be traumatised,"

Right there, you're fired. And in a sane world, jailed.

This exercise teaches children the valuable lesson to not trust anything adults tell them. It teaches paranoia and irrational fear. It teaches children that the best way to instruct someone is to terrorize them.

Yes, drunk-driving is awful, a tragic consequence of bad decision-making. Why not focus on making better decisions in the first place?"