During the summer my school installed metal gates

Gotta train them kids to become familiar with prison environments. There's a whole industry waiting for them.

My first thought is that's crazy and way overboard. My second thought is what have y'all been doing to the bathrooms??

being an adult now, it's so weird seeing how schools were so overly punitive. why not treat kids decently like in college early on? even in kingergarten i'd understand 'you can use the bathroom now if you want but either way you have to learn the alphabet'
- Because students take advantage (i mean we all did im one way or another). The younger the kids, the more parents (and the law) treat the school as responsible for the student and their supervision. That being said, in my opinion access to a bathroom is a basic human right.
  
  What kind of stuff did your classmates get up to? I'm from Europe and we don't have hall passes or gates at doors (etc.) and the students don't get up to bad stuff. The worst I've seen is wet toilet paper on the walls. Or is this some kind of an "If you're treated like a prisoner, you will act like a prisoner" kind of thing?

..... Why? How is this a better choice than a door?
- Teaches kids about the 13th amendment
- Extremely charitable guess: they want it to be open to prevent the spread of germs slightly (so nobody has to touch a door), but need the option of closing it after school hours to prevent vandalism.
- It can still meet barrier free when open? That's the only thing I can think of. Not sure why they need to lock it in the first place though

This started happening in my high school a few years ago, Everyone seems to think that they did it to make it easier to catch people doing weed by closing half of the bathrooms at any given time. It's super annoying because the bathroom closest to my classes are always the ones to be locked for some reason so I have to walk across the entire school (the school is really big) to get to an open bathroom and when I do get there it's usually so dirty and crowded that it's almost unusable.
- If thats the case I think someone needs to call the fire marshal. No way I'd feel safe in a building which could lock me in like that.
  
  not escaping to a bathroom and not escaping the building are two different things entirely

I'm definitely choosing this school to hide during the zombie apocalypse
- Just what a guy with a bunch of bite marks would say.

kids today have it tough that's for sure. I'm curious to see how this affects society as a whole in 20-30 years.
- Sadly in 20-30 years climate change will be in full swing with natural disasters on the weekly and crop failure to boot, to say nothing of desertification and water shortages. Kids will have much bigger problems than school shooters.

That's when you familiarize yourself with the locations of the teachers' lounges / bathrooms. When the need strikes you march in like you own the place and declare that they can either let you piss in the toilet or you're going on their crappy industrial couch with its 1970s cigarette burns.

what about fire-safety?
- I guess, as long as they're not locking people in the toilets?