Roleplay (The Situation in Schools)

I know I've ranted and rambled about this before (in person to just about everyone, and in talking about Serious Games by Abt), but it's on my mind again. So here's another sketch/outline/brain-dump thing.

The Situation in Schools:
I've known several teachers to use what they call "role play" in their classrooms, and I was subject to a few of these lessons. I remember two in particular, both from history classes, but I'm only going to talk about the first.
This was an incredible, remarkable teacher, who I learned a lot from. I have great respect for him and continued to take a class of his for a year after I dropped out. I don't mean to offend with any of this.
This was an eighth grade unit on slavery. Our teacher had us all lie down on the floor in a small area of the room and turned off the lights. I think he then read us an account of what it was like to travel from Africa to the Western World as a slave. Not complicated.
Further to his credit, he made a further attempt at using role play in this unit. He suggested to us and to the administration that a slave running away and heading for the Canadian border would be like us middle-schoolers attempting to sneak past various teachers to get off-campus.
(This needs more context. Our school, at that point, was located in a shopping center. The high-school students were allowed off-campus for lunch and would go next store to get pizza, or walk down to the grocery, and no doubt less innocent things. In order to get outside food, mid-schoolers would either convince an upperclassman or teacher to get it for them, or send someone during class, when they weren't being looked for.)
This darkening of an uncomfortably cramped area was clearly supposed to incite empathy from us for the slaves, but to be honest, all I was thinking about was Nap Time and, as ever, "When do I get out of here?". It stuck with me, but that's not particularly unusual.
The suggestion of this second role play fell through with the administration. They couldn't allow teachers to endorse rule-breaking, for what are now simple and clear reasons. Rules aren't made to be broken, they're made to cover one's own ass. But on the whole, endorsed or not, I believe this was the more effective of the two attempts.
Monte students will rebel against anything we see as unjust or idiotic. (I should write some time about the attempt to enforce a dress code.) We're also protective of the teachers we like, and this is one we Adored. So what do we do? We do the lesson anyway, without school sanctity, directly against school rules, and without communication between adults and students. As far as they were concerned, "no" was the end of it.
The motives may have been slightly different, but this is where we became empathetic; when the plight of captivity was equated with our own restrictions on an emotional and personal level. The metaphor doesn't actually work that well (sneaking off campus is better matched to smuggling), but empathy and consideration of the subject were the goals, and empathy and consideration are what arose.


(I'm breaking the entire thing up to take time to make my points, more later.)