American society still features a fair degree of freedom and respect for the individual. We’d all be pretty shocked were a public-school bureaucrat to dredge up Plato’s old notion of forcibly removing babies from the care of their parents and letting the state raise them communally.
We’re not that far gone. Nobody advocates the utter communization of the care and feeding of the young.
Instead, we confront more incremental yet ever-bolder assaults on parental responsibility and rights in favor of such Grand Liberal Ideas as Puritanical State-Subsidized Nutrition. Thus, the educrats at a Chicago public school, Little Village Academy, prohibit kids from bringing lunch from home.
Yep. Not only are students prohibited from toting squirt guns and pictures of paper knives, at LVA they’re now also prohibited from importing such dangerous products as Coca Cola and Twinkies. It’s all about “healthier choices,” blathers a Chicago Public School spokeswoman, who stresses that it’s up to individual schools whether to adopt such bans. After all, what could be “healthier” than training families to be dependent on the state for homogenized sustenance?
Not surprisingly, some Little Village kids dislike the cafeteria food. Sometimes they throw it in the garbage. “We should bring out own lunch! We should bring our own lunch!” they shout when asked about the policy.
They should do more than chant. They should flout the ban en masse.
They can’t all be arrested for smuggling in peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.