In response to The Nanny State Ruins Everything:
Some of my fondest childhood memories were of bookmobiles and book fairs. I was in love with books from the first moment I stepped into a bookmobile and saw all those wonderful covers and enticing titles arranged around me.
I liked bake sales, too. And trick-or-treating on Halloween. There was a sense of whimsy, of joy, to school that has been clubbed into submission by nervous unionized teachers pushing the latest book-cooking educational fad, administrators substituting ham-fisted zero-tolerance policies for reasonable discretion, and now the school nutrition mania, which is acquiring some ominous cult overtones to go with the bureaucratic malaise.
The more our education establishment moves away from time-tested methods and serious performance evaluation for both students and teachers, the less room there is for whimsy and the love of learning. Kids are treated like hand grenades with the pins pulled. The education establishment is, like other bureaucracies, more concerned with protecting itself from criticism than teaching. Good teachers doing their best in such an environment are forced to find ways of appeasing a system they cannot control.
But it’s not all Big Ed’s fault. It’s society and parents, too. It’s our fault for tolerating this rot, ignoring decades of clarion-call warnings about what was going on, and where it was all heading. One hears a lot of excuses for why school performance keeps slipping even as class sizes shrink, and cost per student rises. I’ve always been interested in the assertion that today’s children can’t be educated as well as their predecessors, even though they have access to fantastic information technologies, because their home environments have degraded so much. Too many of them come from what we called “broken homes,” back in the day. Parents don’t spend as much time helping kids with homework. They’re too eager to treat school as a massive day-care system that relives them of responsibility for the child’s development. That dovetails with a decades-old left-wing agenda for separating children from their parents as early as possible. Maybe that’s become more of a voluntary transaction than we’d like to admit.
That’s all a very big argument involving millions of people, and tens of thousands of communities, each different in their own way. Broadly speaking, this child-obesity “epidemic” wasn’t caused by school lunches, or bake sales. If we accept that the solution is turning the First Lady into the Lunch Czar and letting her outlaw everything that looks like it would be fun to eat, we’re implicitly agreeing that parents cannot be trusted to manage the diet and physical activities of their own kids. That’s a significant moral and practical victory for the Collective over individual families.
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