[obscurette]

I'm in my sixties and my experience is same. But now we live in the world, where my granddaughter (12) got into real trouble because a birthday present I gave her – a real Leatherman (pink of course). Of course she brought it to the school, it was confiscated, she, her parents and I was questioned by police etc.

[ninalanyon]

In Norway my children sometimes came home from primary school (ages five to twelve) with notes saying things like:

"We've planned a trip to the woods for next week, it's expected to be minus twenty Celsius so please make sure they have appropriate clothing, hats, gloves, boots. Also we will have a fire so make sure they bring some sausages and a hunting knife so they can cut sticks for the fire and to hold the sausages over the fire."

No. 2 son came home with a plaster on his arm after one such excursion, I think when he was about ten, and explained that one of his friends had been careless with his knife. There was no drama, the teacher carries a first aid kit for precisely this scenario, his friend was firmly told to not be so stupid, and the teacher used it to explain to the class why knives need to be properly handled.

[paulryanrogers]

In the 90s I was taught knife safety before being given blades. Had to pass a test before we were given them. Seems pretty reasonable to require that to handle something that could kill another person so quickly, easily, and even by accident.

Also much cheaper than casts, physical therapy, and possibly permanent damage. An ounce of prevention and all that.

[simoncion]

> In the 90s I was taught knife safety before being given blades. Had to pass a test before we were given them.

You can teach kids how to safely handle and use blades. This reduces -but does not prevent- accidents... and some kids will handle them carelessly despite the training. [0]

In other words, the fact that a kid on the trip was cut by his friend doesn't mean that there was no blade safety training prior to the trip.

[0] Source: In another life, I used to teach kids these sorts of safety courses.

[Tade0]

My 5yo got plastic kitchen knives for her birthday which, while pretty dull, are still good enough to go through zucchinis.

A test wouldn't work here as she can't read yet (not full sentences at least).

[adrian_b]

Sad.

When I was a child, I always had with me a multi-tool Swiss army knife, including at school, because I was very frequently building various things, or disassembling others to see how they were made. That early experience was very influential in becoming a successful engineer.

Decades later, as an adult, I was astonished to learn about the so-called "no tolerance" policies of many US schools, where the possession of even a small knife or even of less dangerous tools may be a reason for severe punishment.

Obviously, as a child, starting with the second day of school when 6-year old, I have always gone to the school and back, every day, alone, even if initially that was about a half hour of walking and then the later schools required long commuting by public transportation. Also none of my colleagues have ever been brought to school by someone else, and like me they did not have any contact with their parents since morning till late in the afternoon. All this was considered normal at that time.

[oliculipolicula]

>colleagues

Northern Spain? (Maybe francophone Swiss? Southern France? Belgium?)

(Pardon me for being presumptuous)

Imho school admins need to have skin in the bullying game. Bullying seems to be a natural (=inevitable) outcome of kids exploring social status outside the normative system of rules. I have always been fascinated with how bullies justify (sometimes "subconsciously") their own behaviour, and how these justifications mirror those "adult" rules..

An administration that shows the kids it's willing to place _its own status_ at risk might earn their loyalty.

(By contrast, the American edu system you speak of prioritises maximising its own safety hence the -ism suffix)

I'm hunting for real world examples of such. It seems that you might have encountered them!

[adrian_b]

Yeah, European.

When I was a child, bullying happened, but it was infrequent. Teachers would punish it severely if reported, but snitching was considered rather shameful, so it was more frequent that bullying was handled by the weaker bullied children teaming against the stronger bully.

[oliculipolicula]

Mobbing: weaker children teaming to bully a stronger child

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobbing#Development_of_the_con...

European concept with an explicitly English label, from (the eugenicist) Konrad Lorenz "so-called Evil"

[giantg2]

I accidentally had a pocket knife in my backpack after a camping trip when I was a kid 20 years or so ago. Being a good/naive kid, I told the teacher. Luckily the teacher was cool and said just leave it alone and we never had this conversation. That could have ended very differently with no tolerance policies starting around then.

In high school, many kids had rifles and shotguns in their cars to go hunting after school. Then we were old enough to keep our mouths shut haha.

[9rx]

The high school I attended had a shooting range once upon a time. It was expected that the kids would brings their rifles to school to use it.

How times have changed.

[cucumber3732842]

That has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with "safety" being a magic word that gets way to many people to turn off their brains so the school is using as a pretext to enforce capricious rules and basically teach the kinds "do what the system says, however stupid, or else".

200yr ago they'd have used some Victorian morals bullshit or religion to the same end.

[giardini]

Good for you!

When I was a boy I wanted a pocket knife b/c a friend got one and I saw it as useful. My Dad vetoed that until....I joined the Boy Scouts! Mom paid for a new official BSA knife along with the uniform. I promptly cut myself once with the knife, despite warnings from Dad. Doing so is a rite of passage for a knife-owner, I believe.

Fast forward to today. I've almost always carried a pocket knife and found it enormously useful. For my ~30th birthday my Dad finally bought me an Uncle Henry's 3-blade pocket knife about 3" long. It is finely made, always sharp, but difficult to fiddle with and not really very practical. I think of it as his acknowledgment that I am ready to carry a knife!8-) I'm glad I didn't have to ask him for a penis, though!

That little knife always sits atop my file cabinet. Someday I'll pass it along to someone else to perplex them. And I carry a folder of my own choice in my pocket.

[ctrl-alt-zen]

I think you’re a great grandparent and gave my son the same thing at 10 plus encouraged my daughter to practice knife skills whenever she can with appropriately sized blades and powerful shears. I can’t imagine nerfing the world for kids that age and then expecting them to learn how to gauge risk appropriately a few years later when they start driving and taking on major decisions. I do understand keeping the knives out of school, but that seems like a simple oversight that should have no police involved unless actual danger occurred.

[internet_points]

Here in Norway, my third grader gets to take a "scout knife" on school trips, we sometimes get pictures from the teacher of the kids sitting there sharpening sticks which I guess they use as swords or something because it's always too wet to barbecue.