.... There are television interviews with more than just the headteacher where this detail (that all the teachers were inside) is stated as a fact. I can't see a good reason to doubt this.
That no
teachers were outside may well be, that no
adults (ie. a janitor) were outside keeping an eye around is unbelievable.
It's a different time, and a different place. Comparing it to contemporary health & safety rules of somewhere else is pointless.
You could say this if you know which were the regulations in Zimbabwe at the time (for that kind of high-level school). I personally have no idea, so I use (as others have done) the regulations I'm aware of (and a little common sense). I can assure you that even in the early 60s leaving schoolchildren unattended would have meant jail time for the teachers in Italy in case anybody got hurt (my mother was a primary school teacher: she had a lot of troubles because one
attended child had an accident while playing, had the children been unattended she would have been jailed).
Listen to the way the kids (now adults) speak about their school life in their interviews. They obviously had some kind of mentoring system where the older ones looked after / looked out for the younger ones.
The legal responsibility lies on the teachers, surely not on underage mentors (I bet it was this way in Zimbabwe too). So even if they had a mentoring system they would have had some adult overlooking both mentors and childrens, unless they liked to risk jail time as above.
It's not unusual for kids aged under 11 to walk miles to school unattended by adults. So a 15-30 minute recess seems perfectly plausible.
Same as above: if a child has an accident while walking unattended to school it's his parents who are held responsible of leaving him unattended. If an accident happens on the school premises, instead, the school will be held responsible and will have to foot the bill, while penal consequences will fall upon the chain of command of the school. To reiterate, that's why children are never left unattended at school: noone wants to risk to have to pay reimbursements and/or attend jail time betting on the behaviour of a couple hundreds kids.
Lastly if, for some rare chance, the children were
actually left alone and free ro roam wherever, what do you think is the likelier explanation of what happened:
- That exact moment alien visitors landed there, leaving a little later, before any adult came out to check what the commotion was, or..
- Some of the children enjoyed some really cool playtime, with flying saucers and little spacemen instead of more common dragons and knights?
