Out to Lunch

There has been a lot of talk lately about public schools banning homemade lunches.  Most of the controversy surrounds a Chicago area school which has already started this practice. The principle says that this policy is “common” among the city’s schools. The philosophy behind this rule is that many parents don’t always pack the most nutritious options for their children.  The principle said that she felt compelled to implement the ban after watching students pull cans of soda and bags of chips from their bagged lunches.  While I believe that most of us would agree that the principle is, at best, a bit too nosy, I think that many people look at this as no more than an inconvenience.  And maybe if this policy was an isolated incident and maybe if no other schools adopted the ban in the future (which we all know how these sort of “innovative” policies spread like wildfire), that would be true.  However, I think that when you look at this relatively small issue in the light of other trends in education it takes on an entirely different nature.

Under the current administration in Washington, efforts to increase the power of school officials and decrease the authority of parents have been taken to a new level.   The recent “anti-bullying” initiative has instructed school officials to listen in on student’s lunch room conversations, teachers have been encouraged to stop children from sitting with their friends too often, and principles have been directed to monitor their pupil’s online activities even when they are in their own homes.  The “anti-hate” campaign has brought a  push to start a far more explicit brand of sex education, as early as kindergarten, in an effort to combat “intolerant” ideas taught in the home. Couple these with suggestions made by the President  and the Secretary of Education that the schools ought to move to “longer days, longer weeks, longer years” and you have serious cause for concern.

I know there are many people who say that these sort of programs are an unfortunate necessity, but I would like to explain why I believe that the negative consequences of these initiatives far outweigh any possible benefits.

1. These programs don’t work…..ever!

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter established the Department of Education.  He believed that a strong federal agency that would oversee all public schools would help to raise the level of education across America.  Since the development of the DOE, parents and local officials have lost influence in all but the most superficial aspects of their children’s schooling.  Despite the seemingly endless list of expensive teaching initiatives developed by the Department of Education, this one-size-fits-all style of public education has managed to produce the first generation of high school graduates who are less educated than their parents.  Similarly, every election cycle has brought cries for more sex education in schools.  The rise in unmarried teen pregnancies and the spread in STD’s have led many to say that students need better access to information in the public schools (you know, for all those girls who got pregnant because they didn’t know where babies comes from).  Today, 34% of women become pregnant at least once before the age of 20, about 30% of those pregnancies end in abortion and 75% of those resulting in live births will be to an unwed mother.  The latest numbers, according to the CDC, show that 1 in 4 teenage girls has an STD.   While some distort the facts and say that there have always been teen pregnancies, they ignore the fact that people used to get married much younger.  In fact, until the “sexual revolution” of the 60′s, less than 1/3 of teen pregnancies were even conceived out-of-wedlock and only 15% of teenage mothers were still unmarried at the time of the child’s birth.  Clearly, there is a difference between the married 19 year-old mothers of the 50′s and the single 15 year-olds giving birth today.  And although it is obvious that replacing human reproduction classes with Sex Ed has been an abysmal failure, our politicians think the solution is to make the classes even more graphic and start them at an even earlier age!  And what about all of those programs intended to “keep kids off the streets” (babysit them)?    These initiatives were supposed to curb violence and drug use. But after almost two decades, teen drug use is on the rise and our children are committing violent crimes as at a jaw-dropping pace. The lesson is simple, giving parents an excuse to let someone else do their job is always a disaster and an expensive one too.

2. These policies are harder to kill than roaches

Once we put government officials in charge of these areas, it is almost impossible to fire them.  We can all see that schools have gotten worse since they were turned over to a federal agency, but the popular solution is to give even more control to the Department of Education.   When testing shows that our children are falling behind in fundamental subjects like reading and math, no one says “hey, let’s spend more time teaching the fundamentals and less time reading Suzie Has Two Dads.”  Instead, we are told that we should just keep our kids in school around the clock.  Everyone laughs at the gargantuan failure of the “midnight basketball” programs of the 90′s,but, instead of accepting that no one can “keep kids off the streets” except for parents, we keep introducing new initiatives to turn our teachers into afterschool babysitters.  The same can be said for programs to build self-esteem, encourage “peer mediation” (quite possibly, the dumbest idea ever), curb teen sex, stop underage drinking, and fight bullying.  Yes, there always have been and always will be neglectful parents, but once we stop expecting parents to care for their own children the problem gets even worse.  Now, if  your child is held back because he never studies or doesn’t completes homework, it must be the teacher’s fault for failing to inspire him. So, let’s start a program for that.  If your teenager gets pregnant, the school must have failed to explain how those things happen.  Let’s double the funding for sex education.  And if your son is arrested for dealing crack out of your living room, it is surely because the school failed to “keep him off the street.”  Let’s start an after-school self-esteem poetry jam program.

While these initiatives are always sold as small projects to compliment at-home parenting, they quickly become a replacement for parental instruction.  Most Americans now view all of these things as responsibilities of the public school system, even when they have failed miserably.  The ideas of schools being run by the community and students being raised by their parents have become somewhat radical notions because it is almost impossible to get someone to do the job that the government has offered to do for them.  The same will happen with these new programs.  In Chicago, lunch room supervisors have noticed that more students are skipping lunch altogether.  They would rather eat nothing than eat what the school has to offer.  Children whose parents were previously packing them organic and natural foods are now forced to eat cafeteria food which is actually less healthy than their previous arrangement.  Clearly, this is not helping to fight malnutrition.  But, as parents become accustomed to the schools handling meals, they will adjust their grocery shopping and budget accordingly.  Soon, they will have come to rely on the schools to feed their children.   When longer school days and year round education fails to produce results, it won’t matter because parents will have come to depend on the schools as a form of childcare.  And when students are still getting bullied by their peers and still behaving irresponsibly online, most parents won’t take it up on themselves to pay better attention.  They will just demand that the school step up its efforts.

They set a frightening precedent

I hate to be overly dramatic, but if you’re a parent these programs should terrify you.  For one thing, they give schools power to interfere into areas where even our law enforcement officers are not permitted. Imagine that a police officer knocks on your door and says that you, your spouse, and your children are being ordered to attend sensitivity training classes.  When you ask for an explanation, the officer says that one of your children was making remarks on his Facebook page that could be construed as hateful.  You ask if he had violated any laws. Harassment? Slander? Making violent threats?.  The officer says, “No” in fact, he says that your sons comments weren’t even directed at a particular person or group.  He was just concerned that should someone may come across the comments and feel like they were being attacked, hence the need for full-family re-education.  I think most of us would struggle to stop laughing long enough to call a lawyer and file one heck of a lawsuit.  But if the idea of an uniformed officer doing this (who actually has the authority, in certain situations, to intervene in our home lives) is so ridiculous, why in the world would we allow some busy-body from the local school to do it?  Why would we grant them the authority to do something that we would consider to be a major violation of our rights if an actual civil authority did it? But this is precisely what principles have been instructed to do in order to stop bullying.   How about if the police told you that you weren’t allowed to make your kids lunch anymore because they didn’t like watching them eat potato chips?  Would that be OK with you? Of course not.  The fact is, our law enforcement officers have numerous restrictions on the scope and power of their authority as well as oversight committees and internal investigators to make sure that they don’t overstep their bounds.  Those safeguards are there for a reason.  We understand that it is a dangerous game to allow someone to intervene every time they disagree with your life.  Allowing a school official, who doesn’t have those same safeguards, to do the same thing is even more dangerous.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of these programs is not just the way that they undermine the limits placed on government officials, but the way that they undermine parental authority. They promote the idea that the school grants authority to parents and not the other way around.  Up until recently, most people viewed the public school system as a place where teachers educated the students on behalf of the parents. The school was to teach academic topics (reading, biology, math, etc) and parents were responsible for the moral aspects (politics, sexuality, religion).  The parents granted the schools the authority to teach certain things, within certain parameters.  School officials would not have dared to interfere with what children did at home or undermine the moral teachings of the parents because it was understood to be none of their business.  Today, the government believes that the schools get to dictate the manner in which students are raised.  If they don’t  think the parents are feeding their kids “properly,” they will take that authority away from them.  If they don’t think that parents are teaching their children a “tolerant” approach to sexuality, the teachers will do it for them.  If they don’t think parents are wisely scheduling the kids free time, they won’t allow them to have any free time.  The argument that these things are necessary because “some parents” are doing a bad job is foolish.  As long as the parents aren’t breaking the law, it isn’t the any of their business!!!!  When you look at the radical left-wing loons running the Department of Education, do you really want to set the precedent that they have the right to intervene if parents aren’t raising their kids the “right” way?  The founding principle of the DOE is that parents are too stupid to oversee their own children’s education.  To the people on top, I doubt that many of us would be deemed good enough to raise our own children.

It is easy to look at any one of these initiatives alone and think of it as no more than nuisance, but when taken together a disturbing picture begins to take shape. Not only have we wasted billions on worthless programs that only make things worse, but the schools have taken every opportunity to elbow parents out of the way.  From controlling what our kids eat, to disrupting the friendships that they make, to teaching them that the only acceptable moral outlook is a relative one, to going so far as to monitor their activities at home, our elected officials have used the public school to drive a wedge between parents and children. Now, they want our children 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, 12 months a year  and some people are actually considering this to be a good thing?!  Have we lost our minds? Our we really willing to let the schools take over parenting entirely for us?  Because once the small amount of time of that children spend at home is eliminated,  that is exactly what will happen. So, before you embrace one more program designed to help children with “bad” parents, consider how much of your own power you are giving up.  Ask yourself if  you are really willing to let some fresh-out-of-college-22-year-old teacher do your job for you?  Do you really think that the radical progressives running the Department of Education ought to have even more influence over your children?  And when all is said and done, how long will it be before someone declares you a “bad” parent too?