This is wild to me. In Estonia school lunches are free for everyone, paid by the taxpayer. Doesn't matter if you are poor or wealthy, everybody gets the same food.
In the Netherlands we packed our lunches or we cycled home to eat lunch with our parents and then cycled back to school. Lunch was one of the most favorite times of my day. A break from school during school hours. What a treat!
Meanwhile, in Texas (~2005), we weren't even allowed to leave the building to eat on the patio outside in high school.
Something I thought a lot about when I moved to Mexico and saw kids leaving school at lunch to wander out and eat lunch together in the surrounding part of the city.
Too much dangerous liability to allow going outside during lunch hours in a wealthy part of Texas, but not in Guadalajara, Mexico and nor of the world. Sigh.
In Indiana (mid 90s), we had an open lunch policy in high school. This meant we could all leave campus, so long as we were back by the start of the next class. It was great and we had many choices for quick lunch nearby. I remember picking up something fast, but eating lunch at a park with friends often. The small amount of freedom (and trust) was very nice.
Sadly, I think they stopped allowing that the year after I graduated.
I had that in Southern California. It lasted until two years after I graduated, when a student brought a gun to school and started shooting. The school administration which had ignored multiple warning signs with that student decided open lunch was a security risk.
> Meanwhile, in Texas (~2005), we weren't even allowed to leave the building to eat on the patio outside in high school.
> Too much dangerous liability to allow going outside during lunch hours in a wealthy part of Texas, but not in Guadalajara, Mexico and nor of the world. Sigh.
Do you think it actually was or is the US just really strict about this?
I think there's just liability creep in the US that over time leads to zero-tolerance policies that win over, say, adult discretion.
For example, in the same high school, I had an unopened beer can on the floor of my car from the weekend, and one of our golf cart parking lot cops saw it while doing her window snooping. And I got sent to reassignment school for a month and a minor in possession charge even though various people in the faculty thought it was unfair that I couldn't just dispose of it and go on my way since I was a good student who clearly wasn't intending to drink at school.
Meanwhile my dad said just decades earlier he kept his BB rifle in the bed of his truck when he drove to high school in Houston. Something that would probably get SWAT called on you if they found it in your truck by the time I went to high school.
Their experience is not universal as I also went to High School in Texas in the early 2000's and not only were we allowed to eat on school grounds, if you were old enough to have a license you could drive off campus for lunch as long as you were back before the next period.
Yeah this is the part I don't understand; if a family can't afford a school lunch, can they afford a packed lunch at least? The concept of a school even having the facilities for a full lunch only became a thing in tertiary education for me, before that it was at best a hot snack or some soup. But this is Dutch 90's privilege to a point, elementary school was in cycling range, we had an hour and a half of lunch break, and I had a stay at home parent. Secondary school was only a few hundred meters further away than elementary school. Tertiary was in the next town over, 20 minute bike ride.
Either way, it made no economic sense to pay for lunch, so for most of it I had some sandwiches, this was the norm for most people. I'm nearly 40 now and still (should) bring a packed lunch to the office, because going out for lunch costs €10,- easily. If I went to the office every day like in the Before Times, that'd be around €200,- a month or €2400 a year, which is A Lot.
> if a family can't afford a school lunch, can they afford a packed lunch at least?
More can, but American poverty is harsh for people who haven’t seen it. There are kids who don’t have stable living conditions (my wife has had students who rarely sleep under the same roof two nights in a row, one school in the district had a homelessness rate around 40%), or who might not have access to a refrigerator or rodent-proof storage, or who have abusive/mentally ill parents who don’t give them enough food, withhold it as a punishment, or think that enough Jesus will cure an allergy or other medical condition which means they can’t eat some things, etc. Social services may eventually catch up to this at some point but they’re chronically underfunded even in blue states and that can take a good chunk of someone’s childhood.
At this point, we have over a century of studies concluding that one of the easiest ways to improve education is to make sure kids aren’t hungry and the cost of doing so is cheaper than almost anything else (free glasses probably win there) so, like OP, I basically treat this as a litmus test for human decency.
Read the HN guidelines. I didn't downvote you, as I am giving you the benefit of the doubt, but it reads as a sarcastic snarky comment [1].
It's bread, butter and cheese. Not dry bread and cheese. I didn't eat that as a kid though, I hated cheese when I was young.
The quality of the bread varies, depending on the views of the household. The way I grew up everyone favored white bread but me. I always ate brown bread.
Nowadays, I come to the US quite often and it frustrates me that there's almost no supermarket that sells a good loaf of bread. A lot of bread has added sugar and I don't even want to know what other stuff they add to it. I'm not a fan of the bakeries either as the bread they make tastes alright, but not for $8. So whenever I'm in the US, I make my own bread, because even after a first try, it was better [2] (by an American baker. It's not that they can't - it's just that affordable nice bread is not a pervasive thing in the US).
And if you genuinely think it's dry bread and cheese. You're wrong, I know what dry bread tastes like. Done well, it's called toast.
My school lunch was bread with butter and a fried egg.
Hey, I'm Dutch and that was indeed a snarky comment coming from my own experience. Sorry that it's a big deal for you, or others it seems. That wasn't the intention.
Brown bread is the superior one; white bread just feels like a snack, it doesn't last. Just not the whole grain, seedy, or extra dark ones, plain brown is fine.
The effect of what you argue for would be 1) to make innocent children who have no control over whether or not their parents are too poor to fund education for their children suffer, and 2) to seriously negatively affect society as a whole by reducing the education-level of the public.
Society needs children to remain functioning and stable as people age and can't sustain themselves, and so from even a purely selfish angle, funding the welbeing of children and ensuring that having more children is viable to ensure an ongoing supply of labour to keep society functioning is the rational choice.
Parents would find a way to pay to stay out of jail, same way they do today in finding food to buy their children, or housing, or insurance for their car. Living in our society is not free. Reproduction isn’t either. Socializing the costs of an individual choice to have a child or 8 is not morally defensible.
Not everyone in society cares about and values the supply of labor for the functioning of the next generation. It is fundamentally immoral to use force to compel us to fund your genetic and demographic objectives.
If you think that socializing the costs of children is morally correct, why stop at education? Children need clothing and food, why do we not use tax money to provide free clothing and food to all children (instead of just the poor ones)?
Education could work similarly if you believe that; people able to afford to pay for their children’s education should have the obligation to do so, critically, just like every parent does now for food and clothing. Those that are legitimately unable to pay for their child’s education could then be subsidized.
There is a real problem in our society of people having children (and pets) they cannot reasonably afford to appropriately care for.
Forcing other people to subsidize their poor decisions is morally repugnant; which is completely independent of the suffering of children. In fact, if you believe children going hungry or uneducated is bad, you are also invested in solving the problem of people having children they cannot afford to support. (Support of course including the costs of education.)
Plenty of people would find ways to hide what's going in instead, and plenty would try but fail.
And the notion of imprisoning people instead of simply covering a minor cost, and then harming their children further by taking them out of homes unless there are more serious reasons to that can't be trivially mitigated just comes across as brutally cruel and demonstrating a wildly irrational willingness to harm your own interests just to harm others.
You're not forced to fund anything - you can leave, and find a society that won't make you.
If you disapprove of being asked to contribute to society as a whole, I'd be all for giving you the right to excuse yourself from society, including all it provides. What you can't expect is the ability to selectively opt out of responsibilities and still be free to enjoy the benefits of that society - it goes two ways - it'd be immoral to force society to provide you with benefits and access if you're not prepared to accept the responsibilites that comes with that.
> If you think that socializing the costs of children is morally correct, why stop at education? Children need clothing and food, why do we not use tax money to provide free clothing and food to all children (instead of just the poor ones)?
If parents don't, most civilized countries that can afford to does in fact provide assistance to cover these things, because in most places people find it deplorable to let children go without.
No, you’re conflating two things: subsidizing the poor (eg food stamps) and subsidizing education.
We don’t subsidize the education of children for just the poor - we subsidize the education of children for EVERYONE, including families that can afford to pay for their own luxury choices like having children.
This isn’t about letting children go without. This is about who out of two families, one with kids and one without, both of whom can afford what is needed, pays for the choices of the family that opted to have children.
It’s all too easy to obscure the moral issue here, which is that people who don’t have or want children are being forced to pay for the education of the children of parents who very well can pay for their own children. That’s like making everyone in a city, regardless of car ownership, pay into a public automobile insurance fund that covers anyone with a car (including luxury cars).
I'm not conflating anything. We subsidize the education of everyone because it is important to society and to the children to ensure that all children are educated. Because society then mandates it because an educated workforce is essential to the functioning of society that you too depend on, it is natural that society also shares the burden of paying for it.
That you want to opt out of participating in meeting a critical need in society is indeed a moral issue. You should be free to opt out. But then society should be equally free to deny you access to use all resources funded by society, like public roads, and anything else tax funded. Letting you pick and choose would be equally morally fraught as denying you an out.
But you have an out: You can move somewhere with different policies.
It is important to society that cars be insured and that buildings be built to safety standards, also.
We don’t subsidize those things, we make the people driving the cars and building the buildings pay for it.
Everyone in society benefits from those requirements.
Your arguments here as to why the childfree must pay for the education of children they did not produce doesn’t really hold water. I benefit from the hotel I’m in being built to fire code, yet it doesn’t make sense to build private hotels with tax money.
Why does it make sense for children to be educated with tax money? Children need food, too, and we don’t buy their food with tax money. Why education?
