After a week of silence on the matter, the former head of Ireland’s Catholic reform schools, Meeney McSweeny yesterday defended the accounts of humiliation, beatings, rapes and other abuses against students in the institutions from the 1940s until the mid-1990s.
Bishop McSweeny claims that while the controversial treatment of students might appear abominable to outsiders, the actions were actually “enhanced” behavior management techniques approved by the highest levels of the Catholic church.
Furthermore, such enhanced techniques proved invaluable in gaining information from several high value snitches, McSweeny said, adding that the threat of sexual abuse once helped obtain information that prevented a cafeteria food fight.
On a similar note, close to home, former vice president Dick “We Do Not Torture” Cheney has endorsed several proposed enhanced behavior management techniques for American schools. The Department of Education calls the measures Good Behavior by Enhanced Techniques – or Good BETs.
Though students we interviewed said they would consider these ideas torture, Cheney responded that their use is a necessary tool in the war on terror.
“If our students are not well-educated, we cannot be victorious over the enemies of freedom, thus severe approaches must be implemented,” Cheney said.
And Cheney urged everyone to remember former President George Bush’s admonition concerning the war on terror: “If we don’t win, then we’ll lose.”
Good BETs include the following possibilities for modifying student behavior:
- Chalkboarding – Student is forced to listen to a person scratching a chalkboard with their nails.
- Stress position – Student must sit up straight at a desk with a pen in their hand, facing forward for 50 minutes.
- Confinement – Student is locked in a small space with a repulsive, revolting creature – their parent. Both parents in the case of a serious infraction.
- Musical misery – Students caught with MP3 players are forced to hear classical and jazz music played at excruciatingly high volume for 7 consecutive hours.
- Visual nightmares – Students caught kissing on campus must watch the oldest faculty member at the school in a heavy makeout session with their spouse.
- Throwback tribulation I – Students must carry a textbook home and back to school.
- Throwback tribulation II – Student is forced to actually carry a pencil and paper to all of their classes for a month.
- Phone – Students caught with cell phones have their phone programmed to randomly send their text messages to everyone on campus.
- Eye/brain strain – Student must go to the library, check out a book and read it.
- Induced excessive sleep – Students who snooze in class would be forced to take strong sleeping pills at the end of the school day, so that they sleep at least 13 hours before returning to school the next day and find falling asleep in class impossible no matter how hard they try.
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