What an odd entry on the work blog but you can't divorce an education system from the workplace from life as we know it  in 21C America. I can't see this making for a  sane future workplace ( though it's odd that there's a place for knowledge workers   where people  that can't handle interactions without proscriptions on their demeanor to guide them that weren't learned but  indoctrinated , the chance that any  other kind of thought could be greatly diminished.

 One of the  times I get the oddest of looks is when I suggest that  my kid is going to be home , or privately schooled, since  well they see that as being  a poorer experience in terms of learning to live and get along with their peers.   Poorer than this?

 A school in Virginia, I'm   has banned all  kinds of physical interactivity within their system for the purpose of,    Oh here's the Principle,

"You get into shades of gray," Hernandez said. "The kids say, 'If he can high-five, then I can do this.' "

She has seen a poke escalate into a fight and a handshake that is a gang sign. Some students -- and these are friends -- play "bloody knuckles," which involves slamming their knuckles together as hard as they can. Counselors have heard from girls who are uncomfortable hugging boys but embarrassed to tell anyone. And in a culturally diverse school, officials say, families might have different views of what is appropriate.

 Seemingly non coercive  interactions are a gateway hug, er drug, to enacting violence on other people then again I wasn't educated in the USA, or arguably by the UK state either, and I missed that lesson. From Butler Shaffer's  article "The War against Learning" over at Lewrockwell.com 

No more telling admission of both the absurdity and the failure of vertically-structured learning can be offered. No better expression of the need for children to learn how to negotiate their relationships with one another on their own, without state-licensed school teachers and administrators patrolling the halls on the lookout for “delinquents” who hug! (Will the offense be refined to include “suspicion of intent to show affection”?)

 ......

Children who stay away from school because they do not find it consistent with their interests are labeled “truants,” to be hunted down and – along with their parents – criminally prosecuted. Children who attend school, but find the teacher’s pedantically-delivered agenda of less interest than a subject-matter of their own choosing, are diagnosed as having an “attention-deficit disorder,” the remedy for which may include behavior-modifying drugs. In trying to figure out why so many children find forced-schooling not to their liking, the child becomes the focus of the problem. It is never the school system that is at fault, or whose underlying premises need questioning.

Indeed they do.   It's odd that in many states you can be prosecuted for educating your child as poorly as the state that's prosecuting you for not letting them do it.

The War Against Learning by Butler Shaffer