One can only conclude that British people hate their children.

Or, at least, that British teachers do.

MSG Tripps wrote:

Is this worse than the Duck and Cover routine American school children in the fifties and early sixties dealt with?
Hell, it was the possibility of the whole world ending then.

I dunno.  I never heard of teachers lying to American children and telling them the rain of fire really was upon them.

But now that I think about it, it seems unlikely that it didn't happen somewhere, doesn't it?

George Orr wrote:

I dunno.  I never heard of teachers lying to American children and telling them the rain of fire really was upon them.

But now that I think about it, it seems unlikely that it didn't happen somewhere, doesn't it?

If memory serves, it was not explained to students other than if instructions were not followed the country may well be fucked.  The teachers did not know any better.

The truth is the former USSR would not have been able to launch that kind of attack at the time.  Ike knew that and played the public in order to fuck the Russkis [and help keep the balance of power under American control].
I think he did what had to be done.

fnord wrote:

I went through the duck and cover routine in grade school.  However, the teachers had the decency to present it as a drill only and told us it was something mandated by the school board that they didn't feel was necessary.

Edit: I heard several teachers commenting that we wouldn't survive a blast anyway, and when I asked my parents about it they said the whole point was to make the kids feel better by giving them the false hope they would survive a nuclear blast.

One of my earliest memories is being home and my mum and I hearing the sirens... we would always head to the center hallway in our house and huddle there... and I can distinctly recall crouching down with my head against the wall, while holding my little baseball glove over the back of my head. 

Duck and cover.

We didn't do duck and cover during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Instead, there was a different bell than the fire alarm, and the drill was to all line up and go into the gym, since improved radar gave some warning time. Look at a lot of schools built in the '60's and many will have gyms with 1' thick reinforced concrete walls and smallish windows equipped with heavy, closeable blast louvers. So perhaps the kids could survive the initial blast and die of radiation later.