You say adults would not stand to be treated this way but I disagree. I think that so often these days, workers are disturbed by emails, phone calls etc during lunch breaks. Often they are cramming in dental appointments etc because they can’t take them in work time. I think what is happening to children’s lunch breaks is a reflection of the adult world just showing up in a slightly different way.
Adults in the workplace are usually free to finish up their lunch later at their desks if a call or coworker interrupted their meal, something children aren't allowed to do in class. I think in many cases we do expect MORE of children than we do of adults in the work-world. Very few workplaces restrict when someone may toilet, for example, but a child must get permission from a teacher to leave her desk to do so, and may be told "no."
Peter calls it the right to quit, and children don’t have it! On behalf of children, I resent any comparison between the rights and privileges enjoyed by adults and the total lack of them in the lives of everyone under age 18.
Thanks for this comment, Megan. If adults at work were treated the way kids are at school, with no right to quit, we would call it slavery. We have made it illegal to enslave adults. That's why I also get angry when teachers say they are no more free than the kids at the school. That is simply not true. They can quit, and if they threatened to quit en mass, they could change things.
Julie, you are so right. Adults are expected to work through everything: lunch, grief, life. Breaks and rest are often not a choice. This cultural focus on work carries over to schools where breaks, rest, and play are undervalued.
Agree with the comments below too. Kids have much less agency over eating and bathroom breaks at school than adults at work, in most cases. (Some workplaces heavily monitor food and bathroom time too.)
Agreed, I'm constantly on zoom calls with folks who are eating offscreen because "it's the only time I have to eat". People feel guilty about unplugging from work and taking time to eat - this is the American corporate work culture.
Where do you suppose we start with change? My children (all 3) are “talkers.” The oldest only in 1st grade. I have often been told they didn’t have time to finish lunch and I’m dumbfounded by this. They need food to fuel their brain. Some kids in their school don’t even have hot food at home (I’m in an impoverished city; kids are at a charter school). I’d love to see change, but where do I start?
Does your school have a PTA, or any place to meet with other parents. I bet if you could find a way to get a large number of parents to protest, in an organized way, it would have an effect.
I graduated high school in 1997 and remember that year getting enough time to go “off campus” to eat, a privilege reserved for seniors. It was at least 50 minutes, if not an hour. I believe I had 50-60 minutes in all schooling up to that point. I have a vague sense that kids in junior high, and maybe even grade school, had time to ride their bike home over lunch to eat or get something they forgot.
Practically speaking, the only time anyone was driven to school (vs bus or bike) was when they had to arrive late after a doctor appointment.
Can you tell me where this school was? From this and other responses I'm beginning to develop the theory that the real change --the taking away of children's free time in school--occurred around the beginning of the 21st century, which was also when Common Core began to kick in in US schools.
Peter, are you familiar with Frank Smith's book "Insult to Intelligence: The Bureaucratic Invasion of Our Classrooms"? Sadly it's out of print but can be found by various means. I'd be curious to know your opinion of it. To me it's been very illuminating.
Memories from different stages - in about 1964, dancing on a bench in the school playground with three other four year olds pretending to be the Beatles in lunch hour, the main image that tells me I was "there" in sixties swinging London; watching in amazement the jam turn rice pudding pink around the same age, lunch as time to experiment - both together forming key moments of my introduction to being 'English', since my parents had come from South Africa though I was born over here, I'd say I learnt to be a Londoner in infant school lunch hour, very much in line with Daniel Dor's work on how kids soon learn to talk like their peers not like their parents. Later in early seventies secondary school - learning to have a conversation in a corner of the playground, talking about the wider world for the first time, as a Jewish north London post-South African boy learning how the world looked to Moroccan and Iranian friends - as Peter says, I leant more in those hours, and they were fully 60 minute hours, than in the forty minute chunks of so-called education in the classrooms. it's the main thing I missed from school as soon as I got out of the gate for the last time in the mid-seventies.
I don’t remember when I first groked it, but by university I thoroughly understood that decisions about administrative or operational or even academic matters in our educational system were almost always made for the convenience of administrators and almost never for students.
Yes, a pretty universal rule is that institutions are run for the good of the people who run them. Until kids are free to quit and have viable options, public school systems will continue to be a monopoly and can ignore the wellbeing of the people they are supposed to serve.
What struck me when I stepped into our local elementary school lunchroom to vote was the noise. I couldn’t hear myself think. I literally couldn’t wait to get back outside. It dawned on me that this was probably the only time the kids were allowed to freely talk and so they were all taking advantage of that at once. To try and squeeze all that energy into the time given for lunch felt exhausting. And I wondered how well their digestion worked amidst all the cacophony. It was quite a contrast to our easy, comfortable, calm lunches at home since we homeschooled.
It was so loud that a normal level conversation with my kids, who were with me, was impossible. I can’t imagine how difficult that would be every day for sensitive kids.
I was a kid with ASD. It wasn't the noise of the conversation that got me - I'd zone out and tolerate it. It was the attempts to reduce the noise that got me. One lunch monitor would blow an outdoor whistle, the kind meant to be heard from a mile away, into a microphone connected to an amplified sound system.
At least it seems to teach empathy. I was a little shit who never got along with and got picked on often by my classmates as a kid. But even the ones who teased me the most had the heart to warn me to cover my ears, after the first couple times I was caught off guard and freaked out. The adults never seemed to care about the physical pain they were inflicting.
My daughter is autistic, and for all three years when she was in high school, her art teacher let her eat lunch in the art room. The teacher kept the art room open every day at lunch, and there were always a few kids there at lunch time who were either putting in extra time on art projects, who wanted to read or study, or who were sensitive to noise. They formed quite a lovely little community. Bless that teacher.
I heard that in my local schools, there are teachers whose job it is to keep kids from talking even during lunch. One parent told me that a teacher slammed her son's head into a table because he was talking, which broke his tooth.
Shannon, I have heard similar stories from others. Not the head slamming, but the rule against talking at lunch and the disciplining of children for doing so. We are in many ways treating children in school worse than how we treat prisoners.
Foucault would say that prisons and schools are similar "carceral institutions." I used to think he was exaggerating until I visited a prison in Texas. I was photographing it for an architect. The architect observed that it seemed like a strict boys' school, with men walking in lines, wearing uniforms, going to and from lunch, etc. The difference was, there were armed women at the four corners of the central courtyard, snipers in raised parapets, who could shoot if there was a disturbance. Oh wait: every TN school can now have at least one armed SRO, if they can find somebody willing to take on that job.
Another difference was that the prisoners were allowed to talk to each other. Also, they played cards a lot. I don't know about the quality of the food at lunch. There is "recess" in prison, but no swings or slides. Prisoners don't have to worry that a person from outside the prison will come in and start shooting them. Of course there is violence within the prison sometimes, but it comes from other prisoners, usually armed with knives. They don't have worry that somebody with a semi-automatic rifle will come in the prison and kill, say, 30 to 50 of them in ten minutes. Also, studying is optional. If you want to, you can just read in your cell. You don't have to take a test over the reading later. In some ways, prison may be safer than some schools; it's just that you don't get to leave at 3:30 pm.
In the past I have said out loud that schools are day prisons for kids. This usually makes people really mad.
I run a small after-school care program and it's been very hard to get enough families to commit to a free range program. It just occurred to me the other day that the problem may be that if parents acknowledge their kids' need for unstructured time and independence after school it may cause them to start feeling uncomfortable with the school day itself, and they don't want to go there. They're "good liberals," and as such they don't question public schooling. They turn their brains completely off on that subject, even at the expense of their children's mental health. It's appalling.
Yes, the noise at lunch can be so stressful! My son often said he couldn’t socialize because he couldn’t hear anyone, even those sitting next to him.
And the staff at lunch are often admin or assistants, not always trained to handle differences. Their reaction (in our last school) was to crack down on the kids and ask them not to talk at all.
Generally true and an issue I come across in my work with schools on improving play. I work for Play Scotland as an OPAL (Outdoor Play and Learning) mentor. We want children to have enough time to become immersed in their play but find the same as you in terms of time as a barrier. Children are so excited by the new play offer we work to deliver that perfectly good food is binned as they are desperate to get out to play.
This is one of the big reasons I never enrolled my son in school. I wanted to create healthy eating habits b/c they do last a lifetime and determine so much of your health. So as a young child - he took as long as he needed to eat, sitting down, real whole foods and not the packaged crap at school. He was a slow eater - taking up to an hour to eat and talk with me from his highchair. lol. As a result, he is not always "snacking" on packaged goods like many of his schooled peers, or craving sugar sugar sugar. Meal time is a designated time at the table and not done while playing, running around, etc like I see many of his peers do. They literally snack while playing...they'll leave a single serving bag of chips half full b/c they get distracted midway and start playing again! Basically, I looked at all the habits children learn by being in traditional school, and thought to myself - "That is the worst thing to learn!" Also, I remember always being starving by the time I got home from school when I was in elementary and middle school. My lunch was maybe 25 min in the 80's/ 90's. If I was starving, I was not concentrating in class -that's for sure.
Also some schools are completely nut free, including those that bring their own food - so why would I restrict my child's palate and food choices b/c of an arbitrary school policy?
I began school in 1980 at an American school overseas, and always remembered having enough time to eat my lunch, usually sitting on a concrete ledge outdoors, and to do some playing. By 1990, when I returned to the US for the second half of high school, my lunch period was just 1 "mod" i.e. 22 minutes, and included no outdoor time.
I was loathe to take hot lunch because it left little time to actually eat; I usually (age 15 by that point) packed a lunch for myself. Fortunately, I had a mom who stocked our fridge with appropriate food for self-directed lunch making! Not all kids/teens are so lucky.
This data makes me doubly glad that we decided to unschool our daughter. Schools so tightly control when children eat, when they use the bathroom - and then we are astonished that we have an adult population unable to regulate food intake to hunger/satiety. We have taught children to ignore their bodies' needs, and we have made them try to learn, concentrate, and perform while (often) hungry during times of intense growth and development - no wonder many children binge on garbage calories after school.
I went to school in Spain in the 80s. We had two hours from 1 to 3 to eat lunch and play. Some kids ate at home and some at the school cafeteria. I always wanted to eat at the cafeteria, because then I had more time to play. I think it was standard. I don't know if it has changed much.
I moved to Norway a few years ago. Most schools here don't have a cafeteria, kids bring their lunch from home. Smaller kids have 15 minutes to eat and 30 minutes to play afterwards. What I find appalling is that instead of encouraging kids to talk to each other while they eat, teachers put a film on the smart blackboard and tell kids to eat in silence while they watch it.
A couple months ago during the "Should public schools teach Algebra" mini-controversy going on about California public schools, someone made a comment which stuck with me. It had wittier phrasing, but roughly:
"If only there were a way for parents to choose the type of education they want for their children, rather than having a room of bureaucrats decide everything... some kind of system where they could select from various options. Oh wait, that's called the free market."
As someone who very much supports your model of a productive education, it is frustrating to see it out of favor with the establishment and know that it will be difficult to find any options that follow those principles for my own kids.
In 1994, my family moved us to Paris, France. I was just a teenager and I remember how silly I thought it was that everyone shut down for 2 hours for lunch (except restaurants). After 5 years in France we moved back to the United States and I got my first job at a retail store in my local mall. I was given 15 mins to eat during my 5 hour shift. I scarfed down my meal which was easily portable and didn't require refrigeration (ie super processed food) and it didn't take long for me to realize that the French tradition that I had found so silly was actually promoted a much healthier lifestyle.
I agree with most of what you say. But I think you over-estimate the power that teachers have, and it's not fair to expect them to fix everything that is wrong with schools, including the fact that in some schools, kids don't have time to eat.
We over-burden teachers with too many roles. Not only are they expected to know their subject matter and teach it, but in the US at least, they are expected to comply with arbitrary testing schedules over material that they may not yet have had time to teach. (This is especially true for math teachers.) We expect them to monitor whether kids are being abused at home. And now, in TN, we are on the verge of requiring some teachers to carry guns to go after active shooters, as if they were trained members of a SWAT team. (The purpose of all of this is to "save money," so that taxpayers won't have to pay for real social workers and real cops in schools.)
Teachers are already using their own money to buy school supplies for kids. What's next? Are we going to expect them to bring food to school for their students too? I wouldn't be surprised if they already do that. Even at the college level, we teachers were supposed to bring clothes for our students, for a kind of "free store" where they could get appropriate clothes for a job interview.
The truth is that in the US, middle class and wealthy people don't want to pay more in taxes, so we put all the burden of "solving" poverty and violence and abuse on underpaid teachers. Teachers are stressed to the breaking point. They leave the profession early as a result.
About school lunch itself: in the 1970s I worked in a public school in East Cleveland, OH. The teachers went to their own room for lunch, and the kids were herded into a huge lunchroom and given thawed out, previously frozen meals that had been briefly heated. There was no real kitchen. I sat with the kids in their lunch room eating the lunch I had brought from home, but I saw how bad the lunches were. Some kids just sat staring sadly at their wilted fries and hot dogs. Often they could not bring themselves to eat such terrible food. But one of them said, "I feel more like eating when you are here with us." So I kept eating in their lunch room, which made some of the teachers mad, but so what.
In the early aughties, I worked at a small private school in Houston, TX. The kids ate outside under a kind of roof where pet turtles were also kept in a wading pool. There were so many flies around the turtles that they sometimes settled on the kids' food. Again, I was with the kids: the other teachers were in an air-conditioned room inside. I told the director about the flies around the turtle/lunch area; she did not seem concerned. I was also responsible for cleaning up the trash when dogs got into the trash and scattered it around the lunch area.
“We expect them (teachers) to monitor whether kids are being abused at home…” There wasn’t a hint of this concern at the schools I attended, many years ago, and I’d bet a pile of money there isn’t a hint of it in middle-class schools to this day. Teachers may be overextended but this is not on their plate in countless communities.
I'm not saying that they always follow up appropriately. A girl told me that she reported to a school counselor that her mother was beating her. The school called her mother. The mother showed up. They made the girl take all her clothes off. Since there were no visible bruises, no charges were made. The mother later told me that it was important to hit kids in such a way that it doesn't leave marks!
In TN, every adult is a mandated reporter. That is, if you suspect child abuse, you are supposed to report it. Failure to report is a misdemeanor for which you can be imprisoned for up to three months.
Tell the mandated reporter requirement to the staff of affluent schools and doctors who cater to rich abusers. Get real. It's not the case that they don't always "follow up appropriately." I'm telling you there is NOT A HINT OF CONCERN about child abuse at affluent schools, with rare exceptions: no social workers and no one willing to go up against wealthy parents, mandated reporter requirements be damned. If social workers are only ever willing to take children away from poor parents, how gutsy do you think anyone else is going to be? Evidently you've never met a doctor eager to make money off a kid's illness. Lucky you.
I don't know any wealthy parents or affluent schools. I live in a rural county in TN. Some parents have told me that they got "child abuse" citations for simply being a few minutes late to pick up a child at school. It seems that here in rural TN, teachers and school staff are kind of hypervigilant these days. The case I mentioned earlier where a girl tried to report her mother for child abuse happened about 15 years ago. It's possible that there are a lot of regional variations in child abuse reporting and monitoring.
About 30 years ago, a child told me that his mother was beating him with sticks. He was about 10 years old. (This was a child who was poor by any standards.) I did report this to the child protective services, but they said they were overwhelmed with more serious allegations and did not have the staff to deal with mere beatings. So this child had no recourse at all.
At the risk of being a scold, I'm sure there are abuses of the designation of child abuse, but this doesn't mean these accusations are being followed through on. I can believe CPS would tell someone they're stretched too thin to attend to a case like the one you cite in your second paragraph, but again, statistics prove that it (CPS) concerns itself overwhelmingly with low-income parents, to the point that many removals are based not on abuse but on the conditions of being low-income: heat turned off, inadequate food supply, lack of supervision due to parents working, etc. Those are resources almost never turned on white middle and upper-class abusers. This shouldn't' surprise anyone. Taxing authorities also disproportionately focus on people hard-pressed to fight back, and there are countless other examples as well. The deference is to wealthy adults--no surprise--at the expense of their children.
I remember that my sister's baby fell off a bed in 1998 and had a ping pong fracture in his head. This was in a very wealthy suburb of DC. The doctors who treated him were required to investigate the case to make sure there was no child abuse involved! So at least with doctors, it does seem as if they do monitor wealthy people as well as poor people.
You know of one case yet believe it's universally descriptive. It's not. I guarantee that, just as black people in the ER are given fewer painkillers than white people, so is the Demographic Test firmly in place with those same doctors. Our entire child "welfare" system is geared toward taking children away from low-income parents. If you were correct that doctors generally monitor wealthy people for abuse we would no doubt see investigations and at least a few removals from affluent homes. It doesn't happen.
You say adults would not stand to be treated this way but I disagree. I think that so often these days, workers are disturbed by emails, phone calls etc during lunch breaks. Often they are cramming in dental appointments etc because they can’t take them in work time. I think what is happening to children’s lunch breaks is a reflection of the adult world just showing up in a slightly different way.
Adults in the workplace are usually free to finish up their lunch later at their desks if a call or coworker interrupted their meal, something children aren't allowed to do in class. I think in many cases we do expect MORE of children than we do of adults in the work-world. Very few workplaces restrict when someone may toilet, for example, but a child must get permission from a teacher to leave her desk to do so, and may be told "no."
Also, adults at least have agency around their work choices, whereas kids typically have little to no agency in and around school choice.
Peter calls it the right to quit, and children don’t have it! On behalf of children, I resent any comparison between the rights and privileges enjoyed by adults and the total lack of them in the lives of everyone under age 18.
Thanks for this comment, Megan. If adults at work were treated the way kids are at school, with no right to quit, we would call it slavery. We have made it illegal to enslave adults. That's why I also get angry when teachers say they are no more free than the kids at the school. That is simply not true. They can quit, and if they threatened to quit en mass, they could change things.
Julie, you are so right. Adults are expected to work through everything: lunch, grief, life. Breaks and rest are often not a choice. This cultural focus on work carries over to schools where breaks, rest, and play are undervalued.
Agree with the comments below too. Kids have much less agency over eating and bathroom breaks at school than adults at work, in most cases. (Some workplaces heavily monitor food and bathroom time too.)
Agreed, I'm constantly on zoom calls with folks who are eating offscreen because "it's the only time I have to eat". People feel guilty about unplugging from work and taking time to eat - this is the American corporate work culture.
Where do you suppose we start with change? My children (all 3) are “talkers.” The oldest only in 1st grade. I have often been told they didn’t have time to finish lunch and I’m dumbfounded by this. They need food to fuel their brain. Some kids in their school don’t even have hot food at home (I’m in an impoverished city; kids are at a charter school). I’d love to see change, but where do I start?
Does your school have a PTA, or any place to meet with other parents. I bet if you could find a way to get a large number of parents to protest, in an organized way, it would have an effect.
I graduated high school in 1997 and remember that year getting enough time to go “off campus” to eat, a privilege reserved for seniors. It was at least 50 minutes, if not an hour. I believe I had 50-60 minutes in all schooling up to that point. I have a vague sense that kids in junior high, and maybe even grade school, had time to ride their bike home over lunch to eat or get something they forgot.
Practically speaking, the only time anyone was driven to school (vs bus or bike) was when they had to arrive late after a doctor appointment.
Can you tell me where this school was? From this and other responses I'm beginning to develop the theory that the real change --the taking away of children's free time in school--occurred around the beginning of the 21st century, which was also when Common Core began to kick in in US schools.
Yes, this was at a Catholic High School in Mundelein, IL (a suburb of Chicago).
Peter, are you familiar with Frank Smith's book "Insult to Intelligence: The Bureaucratic Invasion of Our Classrooms"? Sadly it's out of print but can be found by various means. I'd be curious to know your opinion of it. To me it's been very illuminating.
When I was in elementary school in the early 1960s, I walked home to eat lunch. Imagine that.
This is utterly shocking.
It's inhumane.
It's abusive.
It's coercive.
It HAS TO STOP.
:( :( :(
Memories from different stages - in about 1964, dancing on a bench in the school playground with three other four year olds pretending to be the Beatles in lunch hour, the main image that tells me I was "there" in sixties swinging London; watching in amazement the jam turn rice pudding pink around the same age, lunch as time to experiment - both together forming key moments of my introduction to being 'English', since my parents had come from South Africa though I was born over here, I'd say I learnt to be a Londoner in infant school lunch hour, very much in line with Daniel Dor's work on how kids soon learn to talk like their peers not like their parents. Later in early seventies secondary school - learning to have a conversation in a corner of the playground, talking about the wider world for the first time, as a Jewish north London post-South African boy learning how the world looked to Moroccan and Iranian friends - as Peter says, I leant more in those hours, and they were fully 60 minute hours, than in the forty minute chunks of so-called education in the classrooms. it's the main thing I missed from school as soon as I got out of the gate for the last time in the mid-seventies.
I don’t remember when I first groked it, but by university I thoroughly understood that decisions about administrative or operational or even academic matters in our educational system were almost always made for the convenience of administrators and almost never for students.
Yes, a pretty universal rule is that institutions are run for the good of the people who run them. Until kids are free to quit and have viable options, public school systems will continue to be a monopoly and can ignore the wellbeing of the people they are supposed to serve.
What struck me when I stepped into our local elementary school lunchroom to vote was the noise. I couldn’t hear myself think. I literally couldn’t wait to get back outside. It dawned on me that this was probably the only time the kids were allowed to freely talk and so they were all taking advantage of that at once. To try and squeeze all that energy into the time given for lunch felt exhausting. And I wondered how well their digestion worked amidst all the cacophony. It was quite a contrast to our easy, comfortable, calm lunches at home since we homeschooled.
It's brutal for sensitive kids, for kids with autism-spectrum challenges, for many other non-neuro-typical kids.
It was so loud that a normal level conversation with my kids, who were with me, was impossible. I can’t imagine how difficult that would be every day for sensitive kids.
I was a kid with ASD. It wasn't the noise of the conversation that got me - I'd zone out and tolerate it. It was the attempts to reduce the noise that got me. One lunch monitor would blow an outdoor whistle, the kind meant to be heard from a mile away, into a microphone connected to an amplified sound system.
At least it seems to teach empathy. I was a little shit who never got along with and got picked on often by my classmates as a kid. But even the ones who teased me the most had the heart to warn me to cover my ears, after the first couple times I was caught off guard and freaked out. The adults never seemed to care about the physical pain they were inflicting.
A lot of sadism goes down in the lunchroom.
My daughter is autistic, and for all three years when she was in high school, her art teacher let her eat lunch in the art room. The teacher kept the art room open every day at lunch, and there were always a few kids there at lunch time who were either putting in extra time on art projects, who wanted to read or study, or who were sensitive to noise. They formed quite a lovely little community. Bless that teacher.
Are there kids who aren't sensitive?
I heard that in my local schools, there are teachers whose job it is to keep kids from talking even during lunch. One parent told me that a teacher slammed her son's head into a table because he was talking, which broke his tooth.
If that’s true, that’s horrible.
Shannon, I have heard similar stories from others. Not the head slamming, but the rule against talking at lunch and the disciplining of children for doing so. We are in many ways treating children in school worse than how we treat prisoners.
Foucault would say that prisons and schools are similar "carceral institutions." I used to think he was exaggerating until I visited a prison in Texas. I was photographing it for an architect. The architect observed that it seemed like a strict boys' school, with men walking in lines, wearing uniforms, going to and from lunch, etc. The difference was, there were armed women at the four corners of the central courtyard, snipers in raised parapets, who could shoot if there was a disturbance. Oh wait: every TN school can now have at least one armed SRO, if they can find somebody willing to take on that job.
Another difference was that the prisoners were allowed to talk to each other. Also, they played cards a lot. I don't know about the quality of the food at lunch. There is "recess" in prison, but no swings or slides. Prisoners don't have to worry that a person from outside the prison will come in and start shooting them. Of course there is violence within the prison sometimes, but it comes from other prisoners, usually armed with knives. They don't have worry that somebody with a semi-automatic rifle will come in the prison and kill, say, 30 to 50 of them in ten minutes. Also, studying is optional. If you want to, you can just read in your cell. You don't have to take a test over the reading later. In some ways, prison may be safer than some schools; it's just that you don't get to leave at 3:30 pm.
In the past I have said out loud that schools are day prisons for kids. This usually makes people really mad.
I wanted to like this comment but am apparently blocked from doing so. What is this, YouTube?
I run a small after-school care program and it's been very hard to get enough families to commit to a free range program. It just occurred to me the other day that the problem may be that if parents acknowledge their kids' need for unstructured time and independence after school it may cause them to start feeling uncomfortable with the school day itself, and they don't want to go there. They're "good liberals," and as such they don't question public schooling. They turn their brains completely off on that subject, even at the expense of their children's mental health. It's appalling.
Yes, the noise at lunch can be so stressful! My son often said he couldn’t socialize because he couldn’t hear anyone, even those sitting next to him.
And the staff at lunch are often admin or assistants, not always trained to handle differences. Their reaction (in our last school) was to crack down on the kids and ask them not to talk at all.
Unions have never been about the work. They were only initially about the workers. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
Generally true and an issue I come across in my work with schools on improving play. I work for Play Scotland as an OPAL (Outdoor Play and Learning) mentor. We want children to have enough time to become immersed in their play but find the same as you in terms of time as a barrier. Children are so excited by the new play offer we work to deliver that perfectly good food is binned as they are desperate to get out to play.
This is one of the big reasons I never enrolled my son in school. I wanted to create healthy eating habits b/c they do last a lifetime and determine so much of your health. So as a young child - he took as long as he needed to eat, sitting down, real whole foods and not the packaged crap at school. He was a slow eater - taking up to an hour to eat and talk with me from his highchair. lol. As a result, he is not always "snacking" on packaged goods like many of his schooled peers, or craving sugar sugar sugar. Meal time is a designated time at the table and not done while playing, running around, etc like I see many of his peers do. They literally snack while playing...they'll leave a single serving bag of chips half full b/c they get distracted midway and start playing again! Basically, I looked at all the habits children learn by being in traditional school, and thought to myself - "That is the worst thing to learn!" Also, I remember always being starving by the time I got home from school when I was in elementary and middle school. My lunch was maybe 25 min in the 80's/ 90's. If I was starving, I was not concentrating in class -that's for sure.
Also some schools are completely nut free, including those that bring their own food - so why would I restrict my child's palate and food choices b/c of an arbitrary school policy?
I began school in 1980 at an American school overseas, and always remembered having enough time to eat my lunch, usually sitting on a concrete ledge outdoors, and to do some playing. By 1990, when I returned to the US for the second half of high school, my lunch period was just 1 "mod" i.e. 22 minutes, and included no outdoor time.
I was loathe to take hot lunch because it left little time to actually eat; I usually (age 15 by that point) packed a lunch for myself. Fortunately, I had a mom who stocked our fridge with appropriate food for self-directed lunch making! Not all kids/teens are so lucky.
This data makes me doubly glad that we decided to unschool our daughter. Schools so tightly control when children eat, when they use the bathroom - and then we are astonished that we have an adult population unable to regulate food intake to hunger/satiety. We have taught children to ignore their bodies' needs, and we have made them try to learn, concentrate, and perform while (often) hungry during times of intense growth and development - no wonder many children binge on garbage calories after school.
I went to school in Spain in the 80s. We had two hours from 1 to 3 to eat lunch and play. Some kids ate at home and some at the school cafeteria. I always wanted to eat at the cafeteria, because then I had more time to play. I think it was standard. I don't know if it has changed much.
I moved to Norway a few years ago. Most schools here don't have a cafeteria, kids bring their lunch from home. Smaller kids have 15 minutes to eat and 30 minutes to play afterwards. What I find appalling is that instead of encouraging kids to talk to each other while they eat, teachers put a film on the smart blackboard and tell kids to eat in silence while they watch it.
A couple months ago during the "Should public schools teach Algebra" mini-controversy going on about California public schools, someone made a comment which stuck with me. It had wittier phrasing, but roughly:
"If only there were a way for parents to choose the type of education they want for their children, rather than having a room of bureaucrats decide everything... some kind of system where they could select from various options. Oh wait, that's called the free market."
As someone who very much supports your model of a productive education, it is frustrating to see it out of favor with the establishment and know that it will be difficult to find any options that follow those principles for my own kids.
Thanks for fighting the good fight!
In 1994, my family moved us to Paris, France. I was just a teenager and I remember how silly I thought it was that everyone shut down for 2 hours for lunch (except restaurants). After 5 years in France we moved back to the United States and I got my first job at a retail store in my local mall. I was given 15 mins to eat during my 5 hour shift. I scarfed down my meal which was easily portable and didn't require refrigeration (ie super processed food) and it didn't take long for me to realize that the French tradition that I had found so silly was actually promoted a much healthier lifestyle.
I agree with most of what you say. But I think you over-estimate the power that teachers have, and it's not fair to expect them to fix everything that is wrong with schools, including the fact that in some schools, kids don't have time to eat.
We over-burden teachers with too many roles. Not only are they expected to know their subject matter and teach it, but in the US at least, they are expected to comply with arbitrary testing schedules over material that they may not yet have had time to teach. (This is especially true for math teachers.) We expect them to monitor whether kids are being abused at home. And now, in TN, we are on the verge of requiring some teachers to carry guns to go after active shooters, as if they were trained members of a SWAT team. (The purpose of all of this is to "save money," so that taxpayers won't have to pay for real social workers and real cops in schools.)
Teachers are already using their own money to buy school supplies for kids. What's next? Are we going to expect them to bring food to school for their students too? I wouldn't be surprised if they already do that. Even at the college level, we teachers were supposed to bring clothes for our students, for a kind of "free store" where they could get appropriate clothes for a job interview.
The truth is that in the US, middle class and wealthy people don't want to pay more in taxes, so we put all the burden of "solving" poverty and violence and abuse on underpaid teachers. Teachers are stressed to the breaking point. They leave the profession early as a result.
About school lunch itself: in the 1970s I worked in a public school in East Cleveland, OH. The teachers went to their own room for lunch, and the kids were herded into a huge lunchroom and given thawed out, previously frozen meals that had been briefly heated. There was no real kitchen. I sat with the kids in their lunch room eating the lunch I had brought from home, but I saw how bad the lunches were. Some kids just sat staring sadly at their wilted fries and hot dogs. Often they could not bring themselves to eat such terrible food. But one of them said, "I feel more like eating when you are here with us." So I kept eating in their lunch room, which made some of the teachers mad, but so what.
In the early aughties, I worked at a small private school in Houston, TX. The kids ate outside under a kind of roof where pet turtles were also kept in a wading pool. There were so many flies around the turtles that they sometimes settled on the kids' food. Again, I was with the kids: the other teachers were in an air-conditioned room inside. I told the director about the flies around the turtle/lunch area; she did not seem concerned. I was also responsible for cleaning up the trash when dogs got into the trash and scattered it around the lunch area.
“We expect them (teachers) to monitor whether kids are being abused at home…” There wasn’t a hint of this concern at the schools I attended, many years ago, and I’d bet a pile of money there isn’t a hint of it in middle-class schools to this day. Teachers may be overextended but this is not on their plate in countless communities.
I'm not saying that they always follow up appropriately. A girl told me that she reported to a school counselor that her mother was beating her. The school called her mother. The mother showed up. They made the girl take all her clothes off. Since there were no visible bruises, no charges were made. The mother later told me that it was important to hit kids in such a way that it doesn't leave marks!
In TN, every adult is a mandated reporter. That is, if you suspect child abuse, you are supposed to report it. Failure to report is a misdemeanor for which you can be imprisoned for up to three months.
Tell the mandated reporter requirement to the staff of affluent schools and doctors who cater to rich abusers. Get real. It's not the case that they don't always "follow up appropriately." I'm telling you there is NOT A HINT OF CONCERN about child abuse at affluent schools, with rare exceptions: no social workers and no one willing to go up against wealthy parents, mandated reporter requirements be damned. If social workers are only ever willing to take children away from poor parents, how gutsy do you think anyone else is going to be? Evidently you've never met a doctor eager to make money off a kid's illness. Lucky you.
I don't know any wealthy parents or affluent schools. I live in a rural county in TN. Some parents have told me that they got "child abuse" citations for simply being a few minutes late to pick up a child at school. It seems that here in rural TN, teachers and school staff are kind of hypervigilant these days. The case I mentioned earlier where a girl tried to report her mother for child abuse happened about 15 years ago. It's possible that there are a lot of regional variations in child abuse reporting and monitoring.
About 30 years ago, a child told me that his mother was beating him with sticks. He was about 10 years old. (This was a child who was poor by any standards.) I did report this to the child protective services, but they said they were overwhelmed with more serious allegations and did not have the staff to deal with mere beatings. So this child had no recourse at all.
At the risk of being a scold, I'm sure there are abuses of the designation of child abuse, but this doesn't mean these accusations are being followed through on. I can believe CPS would tell someone they're stretched too thin to attend to a case like the one you cite in your second paragraph, but again, statistics prove that it (CPS) concerns itself overwhelmingly with low-income parents, to the point that many removals are based not on abuse but on the conditions of being low-income: heat turned off, inadequate food supply, lack of supervision due to parents working, etc. Those are resources almost never turned on white middle and upper-class abusers. This shouldn't' surprise anyone. Taxing authorities also disproportionately focus on people hard-pressed to fight back, and there are countless other examples as well. The deference is to wealthy adults--no surprise--at the expense of their children.
I remember that my sister's baby fell off a bed in 1998 and had a ping pong fracture in his head. This was in a very wealthy suburb of DC. The doctors who treated him were required to investigate the case to make sure there was no child abuse involved! So at least with doctors, it does seem as if they do monitor wealthy people as well as poor people.
You know of one case yet believe it's universally descriptive. It's not. I guarantee that, just as black people in the ER are given fewer painkillers than white people, so is the Demographic Test firmly in place with those same doctors. Our entire child "welfare" system is geared toward taking children away from low-income parents. If you were correct that doctors generally monitor wealthy people for abuse we would no doubt see investigations and at least a few removals from affluent homes. It doesn't happen.