This is what happens when you break the first rule.

The website for Adventure Learning Center, a preschool and daycare in St. Louis, Missouri, states that “every child has the right to a safe, nurturing environment where they feel secure and comfortable”.

I don’t know about you, but for me, that would exclude the children being engaged in a ‘fight club’, with kids pitted against one another in a series of head-to-head boxing matches.

The footage, filmed back in 2016, is described as follows by VICE:

Combatants wore oversized foam Hulk gloves and started wailing on each other while the teachers cheered them on from the sidelines—an episode caught on camera by one of the student’s older brothers, who happened to be in a classroom next door at the time.

In since-released footage, you can see one of the teachers jump up and down, like some kind of weird, fucked-up corner man at an MMA match, while the other sets up two tiny fighters with a glove apiece.

Ding ding ding:

I’m sure preschoolers do battle with one another often, but turning it into a sport is a little too far.

My money’s on the kid in the blue shirt.

Eventually, the person who filmed the footage sent it to his mother, Nicole Merseal, and she went into attack mode:

“When I got the video, I was just in complete shock,” she told ABC News. “I immediately left work. I also called the day care immediately and told them to go stop the fighting.”

The center’s director broke up the fighting and fired the two wannabe Tyler Durdens who had put it together. But Merseal said that didn’t make up for the fact that her four-year-old son had gotten “beaten up by his best friends” at school, an incident that left him in tears. She soon filed suit against the place for $25,000 in damages, according to ABC News.

The teachers who set up the fight club have never been charged by the cops, and the preschool is still operational.

[source:vice]