Welcome, this is Anastasia Yuglova with Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 21st.

A Washington Post article this week drew attention to some ridiculous rules in schools

across the country, such as a middle school in Virginia's Fairfax County that enforces

a strict ban on any touching or contact

between students. That means no hugs, no high-pives, no pads on backs, and certainly

no putting your arm around your girlfriend's shoulders during recess.

I asked Education Policy analyst Neil McCluskey about the no contact trend in this podcast.

This no contact rule at a school in Virginia where a student got in trouble for putting

his arm around his girlfriend during lunchtime kind of read like a story from

the onion did you get that impression it definitely reads like a story from the onion but it

doesn't read all that different from stories that we hear from around the country

almost every day about schools that have rules kind of like no touching but they're more generally it's

the zero tolerance rules where just recently there was a child who brought in a

plastic knife that his mom put in his lunch to help him put cream cheese on his bagel and he got

suspended for bringing a knife to school and so this sort of craziness is all too

common at least anecdotally where schools set down rules that might be

well intended but they take them to absurd heights where they sort of throw

out common sense and they say well here the rules, here's what the regulation says, and we're

going to follow it, the letter of the law precisely, no matter how little logical

sense it might make.

But why is this rule and rules like it in place at all?

It looks like schools are just paranoid about avoiding any liability.

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