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.
One might reasonably ask why parents are not more insistent about making lunch time and recess more humane. But parents also, like teachers, have little control over their local schools. In TN, again, many parents and most teachers are vehemently opposed to arming teachers: there are protests every day at our state capitol in Nashville as the legislature debates this proposed law. Parents have been dragged from the Senate gallery by state troopers (when the Lt Gov said that they had to leave). But the law will probably pass.
I think a lot of parents think, "Well, I survived elementary school and high school. My kids have to learn to deal with it also." They don't realize how much worse things are than they were even twenty years ago. Or if they do, they simply don't have anything better in mind, to which they could compare the dismal state of their child's school. If the child has to deal with bullying every day, well, then they just have to deal with it. If there are no math textbooks, well, that's probably fine too. If kids don't have time to eat lunch, oh well. Sadly, I think most parents don't really want to think too much about the actual conditions in their child's school. They need the day care.
I observed this during the pandemic, when even stay-at-home parents, who could have enjoyed the free time with their kids, were eager for kids to go back to school. When I tried to persuade them that this was an opportunity to let kids have some freedom to read and learn on their own, they were outraged and accused me of being a super-conservative home schooler, privatizer of public schools, and an ally of Betsy Devos! The idea that you might advocate for home school from a secular, progressive point of view did not occur to them. A lot of even progressive parents don't really want to spend all day with their kids, even if you told them that there was no need to "teach" the kids. They just want their "me time." (For the record, our schools here were only closed for a few months in the spring of 2020.)
I think most people just don't trust kids to be ok without a lot of authoritarian control.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I recall lunch being 45 minutes when I was in high school. In all fairness, I can't remember before that because time felt different when I was a kid (Exhibit A - The 90-minute trip to the shore felt like it took days). Your question about why teachers don't do anything about it didn't shock me. Their union is meant to protect them, not the kids. I've been struck by that conflict for a while. I imagine that the people advocating for the kids would be their parents. How many are aware of the lunch situation? And if they aren't, why aren't they? Have kids come to believe not having enough time to eat lunch is normal? Are parents too focused on other things to notice?
I remember lunch when I was in elementary school. It was a critical social time. Not only did you get to talk to your friends about what you wanted to talk about (self-directed conversation), we had also developed a bit of a micro-economy based on bartering for food you'd rather have. Go-Gurt was the thing to trade — it would get you just about anything you wanted.
If you want to see kids having a real lunch, go to an authentic Montessori school. From toddler through adolescents, lunch is a part of the daily ritual with kids setting the table, regularly helping to prepare the food and doing the clean-up which is likely to include things like composting. The elementary and younger children also have a snack table available through the morning as a place for children to have a snack and socialize. Montessori schools had to move away from the social part of lunch and snack during the pandemic but are making their way back to this cherished aspect of the day.
I recall my lunch period in the 70s being 55 minutes (Indiana). I know in Jr High it was 55 because my group would take turns skipping lunch to go directly to the gym to get one of the six basketballs that were available, first come first serve, for games after lunch. I imagine that isn't a thing today.
Today our neighborhood school (CA) has a 25 minute lunch period - and I personally know kids who skip lunch because they don't have time to eat (the school has a morning snack/recess, so they are not going hungry, but it is still crazy).
I went to school in the 70s and early 80s. I don't remember ever being rushed - even though I am a slow eater. I ate at home occasionally, too. I did go to one school with an extremely loud cafeteria. There was no way to carry on a conversation. One older woman paced back and forth yelling, ”I hear it! I hear it!” angrily. This only added to the noise.
When I taught in the ‘90s lunch was at least 45 minutes long. In the first few days of school, the cafeteria would get backed up. I had students throwing out their food because the bell rang. I told them to bring their food back with them, and I would let them eat in class. I also started providing popcorn and juice in the afternoon during that first week. Our school was mainly free lunch students, so I could not imagine letting them go hungry.
My oldest child started school in 2004. Neither of my kids had problems in elementary school, but they let me know in middle and high school that they had to rush to eat. My sons are autistic, and my oldest was bothered by noise and people threatening each other in the cafeteria. His choir teacher let them come to his room, but only after they had eaten. Of course, he rushed to eat in order to go there. The administration contacted me about his “strange behavior” of shoving a whole bag of pretzels in his mouth while standing in the hallway! My younger son decided to just bring snacks to school, and tried to eat them during passing periods!
Everything you describe in the article was happening in our local schools when I did some subbing in 2016-17. Lunch workers barked at little kids to take something and move on. A lot of milk and fruit was thrown away. I don't understand why teachers wouldn't push back - if the kids have a rushed lunch, so do you! It is indeed very sad how our children are treated.
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.
When I was in elementary school in the early 1960s, I walked home to eat lunch. Imagine that.
One might reasonably ask why parents are not more insistent about making lunch time and recess more humane. But parents also, like teachers, have little control over their local schools. In TN, again, many parents and most teachers are vehemently opposed to arming teachers: there are protests every day at our state capitol in Nashville as the legislature debates this proposed law. Parents have been dragged from the Senate gallery by state troopers (when the Lt Gov said that they had to leave). But the law will probably pass.
I think a lot of parents think, "Well, I survived elementary school and high school. My kids have to learn to deal with it also." They don't realize how much worse things are than they were even twenty years ago. Or if they do, they simply don't have anything better in mind, to which they could compare the dismal state of their child's school. If the child has to deal with bullying every day, well, then they just have to deal with it. If there are no math textbooks, well, that's probably fine too. If kids don't have time to eat lunch, oh well. Sadly, I think most parents don't really want to think too much about the actual conditions in their child's school. They need the day care.
I observed this during the pandemic, when even stay-at-home parents, who could have enjoyed the free time with their kids, were eager for kids to go back to school. When I tried to persuade them that this was an opportunity to let kids have some freedom to read and learn on their own, they were outraged and accused me of being a super-conservative home schooler, privatizer of public schools, and an ally of Betsy Devos! The idea that you might advocate for home school from a secular, progressive point of view did not occur to them. A lot of even progressive parents don't really want to spend all day with their kids, even if you told them that there was no need to "teach" the kids. They just want their "me time." (For the record, our schools here were only closed for a few months in the spring of 2020.)
I think most people just don't trust kids to be ok without a lot of authoritarian control.
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?
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I recall lunch being 45 minutes when I was in high school. In all fairness, I can't remember before that because time felt different when I was a kid (Exhibit A - The 90-minute trip to the shore felt like it took days). Your question about why teachers don't do anything about it didn't shock me. Their union is meant to protect them, not the kids. I've been struck by that conflict for a while. I imagine that the people advocating for the kids would be their parents. How many are aware of the lunch situation? And if they aren't, why aren't they? Have kids come to believe not having enough time to eat lunch is normal? Are parents too focused on other things to notice?
I remember lunch when I was in elementary school. It was a critical social time. Not only did you get to talk to your friends about what you wanted to talk about (self-directed conversation), we had also developed a bit of a micro-economy based on bartering for food you'd rather have. Go-Gurt was the thing to trade — it would get you just about anything you wanted.
This is utterly shocking.
It's inhumane.
It's abusive.
It's coercive.
It HAS TO STOP.
:( :( :(
If you want to see kids having a real lunch, go to an authentic Montessori school. From toddler through adolescents, lunch is a part of the daily ritual with kids setting the table, regularly helping to prepare the food and doing the clean-up which is likely to include things like composting. The elementary and younger children also have a snack table available through the morning as a place for children to have a snack and socialize. Montessori schools had to move away from the social part of lunch and snack during the pandemic but are making their way back to this cherished aspect of the day.
https://vimeo.com/78697376 https://vimeo.com/121311138
I recall my lunch period in the 70s being 55 minutes (Indiana). I know in Jr High it was 55 because my group would take turns skipping lunch to go directly to the gym to get one of the six basketballs that were available, first come first serve, for games after lunch. I imagine that isn't a thing today.
Today our neighborhood school (CA) has a 25 minute lunch period - and I personally know kids who skip lunch because they don't have time to eat (the school has a morning snack/recess, so they are not going hungry, but it is still crazy).
I went to school in the 70s and early 80s. I don't remember ever being rushed - even though I am a slow eater. I ate at home occasionally, too. I did go to one school with an extremely loud cafeteria. There was no way to carry on a conversation. One older woman paced back and forth yelling, ”I hear it! I hear it!” angrily. This only added to the noise.
When I taught in the ‘90s lunch was at least 45 minutes long. In the first few days of school, the cafeteria would get backed up. I had students throwing out their food because the bell rang. I told them to bring their food back with them, and I would let them eat in class. I also started providing popcorn and juice in the afternoon during that first week. Our school was mainly free lunch students, so I could not imagine letting them go hungry.
My oldest child started school in 2004. Neither of my kids had problems in elementary school, but they let me know in middle and high school that they had to rush to eat. My sons are autistic, and my oldest was bothered by noise and people threatening each other in the cafeteria. His choir teacher let them come to his room, but only after they had eaten. Of course, he rushed to eat in order to go there. The administration contacted me about his “strange behavior” of shoving a whole bag of pretzels in his mouth while standing in the hallway! My younger son decided to just bring snacks to school, and tried to eat them during passing periods!
Everything you describe in the article was happening in our local schools when I did some subbing in 2016-17. Lunch workers barked at little kids to take something and move on. A lot of milk and fruit was thrown away. I don't understand why teachers wouldn't push back - if the kids have a rushed lunch, so do you! It is indeed very sad how our children are treated.
I went to school in the 60s and 70s. We had time to play chess (I was a nerd) or listen to Maynard Ferguson LPs.