Teacher here, in the high schools Iāve worked until now in Spain.
1. Children and teenagers canāt go whenever they want to the bathroom cause it would became the perfect excuse to be there hunging out with friends, uncontrolled (which means if something bad happens the teacher is to blame for not controlling them: bullying, accidents) and loosing lessons. In high schools, the bathroom is the usual place to smoke, which is forbidden by Law, and teachers are supposed to teach to follow the laws.
2. They canāt eat in class because you are supposed to educate in healthy habits. Healthy habits include eating at a propper time and healthy cooked food, not chocolates or sandwiches at random, and not every children comes to school taught to clean after eating at home or if they are donāt feel the need to do it unless you force them to, which means more work for the teacher or leaving the classroom a mess, more of a mess they are right now. Also the different smells of food would mix in the air and add to the human natural smells that populate a closed space, causing a very stinky atmosphere.
3. Children and teens are allowed to drink from a water bottle, unless they use it in bad behavior like throwing it to a classmate āfor the laughsā.
Most classroom rules are there to ellude the chaos, not just randomly enforced because we feel happy about that. We would so much prefer that children could behave as adults, so that we could leave all of this aside and dedicate more time to science, math, history, English or whatever we teach. We actually canāt.
