From the headlines: “Pay Up or Children Go Hungry.” A local school district is refusing lunch to kids who have a balance on their cafeteria bill. This is just the latest outrage that local schools have inflicted on students. Now they’re making kids go hungry and humiliating them in the process. Why do schools treat children like they are the enemy? I could go on and on about the injustices, both arbitrary and imperious, that our own boys suffered at the hands of administrators and others at the local schools that they attended. And the constant throw-downs we had with those schools in defending our children’s rights. It seems like every day there is some story in the news about another abuse of power by a local school. (Not to mention stories concerning fascist behavior of schools in other cities.) But making kids go through the school day hungry? What have we come to? Where is our basic decency?
Maybe this is merely a temporary, intermediate step we should not concern ourselves with? To be followed by extreme cuts in the number of teachers, open classrooms, and ultimately the closing of all public schools no longer economically affordable?
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That's definitely the big picture--a lack of adequate funding for our basic social institutions like schools. And the dog eat dog (apologies to Sam for the metaphor), testing over teaching, attitude that prevails in education drives many competent educators to leave the profession. All of this seems to be part of the basic meanness that his come to dominate our thinking as a society.
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