There is a kind of grandeur in the Toronto school board's recent bulldozing of half the city's playgrounds. The board's decision, taken this summer and put into force before parents or principals were even aware it was under consideration, was so splendidly obtuse, so bravely ill-informed, so majestically arrogant as to recall the last days of Ceausescu.

By now, with their children returned to school to find empty shell-holes where their slides and swings used to be, the city's parents have been told the reason why. You see, it was for the children's own good. The equipment on which their kids had happily hung, swung, swooped and slid for years on end -- perhaps the parents themselves had, when they were little -- had lately been declared unsafe. Therefore, it had to go. All of it. At once.

To come to such a bold conclusion was, you may be sure, more than a little difficult for the 22 members of the Toronto District School Board. They had first to overcome a dire lack of evidence: There has not been a single death, or even serious injury, on a Toronto playground since records were first kept. Even the number of minor injuries suffered on the impugned equipment is but a fraction of the schoolyard total.

On top of that, there was opposition from the very organization whose guidelines were the basis of the board's finding that the schoolyards were unsafe: the Canadian Standards Association. The chairman of the CSA committee that drew up the new (1998) standards against which the old equipment had been found wanting insisted that the standards were never meant to be enforced retroactively, but were intended only for new equipment. To make matters worse, the same gentleman had been in charge of Toronto's playgrounds for the past 33 years.

Undaunted, the board went ahead, ordering the removal of 384 pieces from 172 schoolyards across the city. It did so in spite of the massive cost of replacing the equipment ($27-million, not counting the $700,000 cost of demolition) and with no plan to put anything in its place. Not only did the trustees act without consulting parents or principals, but, it was later reported, without having even read the report of the inspectors on whose recommendations -- themselves based on a faulty interpretation of the CSA standards -- they had supposedly relied. Nor had they accepted the advice of a rival inspection agency, to the effect that the "hazardous" pieces could be replaced over a number of years, rather than ripped out all at one go.

Oh well. The kids will find something to do. The essential thing in this farcical episode, rather, is to understand how it came to be. What climate of opinion, what institutional culture surrounds the school board such that apparently sane individuals could together come to such a loopy decision?

There is, of course, that morbid aversion to risk, any risk, that is a distinctive feature, not only of schoolboards, but of contemporary society. "I'm not interested in statistics. They are irrelevant here," the schoolboard's chairman, Shelley Laskin, snaps. Why count the cost, when even one child's safety is at risk, or might be? "Which child are you prepared to have fall?" the board's director of education challenges doubters.

The board was encouraged, needless to say, in this stance by its insurers, which is fair enough: The same parents who now complain of the denuded playgrounds would themselves be the first to launch a lawsuit if their own precious toddler were to catch a returning swing in the chops. The very notion of "play" has itself been denuded, so insistent are today's parents on organizing and supervising and generally protecting their safely helmeted offspring from any conceivable harm.

But still: The chance of serious injury is slight, and the chance of a successful lawsuit, on the grounds that dubious standards of recent invention were not retroactively applied to some perfectly safe jungle gym, even slighter. It is hard to imagine the principal of an individual school, in constant contact with parents and responsible for managing his own budget, acting with such reckless disregard for both. And if one did, chances are he would be alone.

Such gargantuan acts of lunacy are only possible in particular institutional settings. School board trustees are just powerful enough to be able to order such measures, and just removed enough from any real authority to be wholly unaccountable for the results. They are only notionally elected, yet are entrusted with spending millions of dollars of other people's money.

And to what end? Today's boards are the vestiges of the Harris government's school reforms, which were designed to take power away from the trustees and, it was promised, return it to parents and principals. The monkey-bar madness is surely proof that the reforms were left half finished. Rusting, disused school boards, built on a narrow base and often full of loose nuts, are not just unnecessary, but dangerous. It is time they were taken out.