Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.
– Proverbs 22:6 NKJV
In 2009, first lady Michelle Obama announced, to much press fanfare, her plans to dig up portions of the South Lawn at the White House and plant a vegetable garden, complete with fifty-five different varieties. Her hope, she said, was the garden would become a conversation starter that would lead the select schoolchildren who helped farm the produce to bring home a healthy-eating message to their families and, ultimately, their communities.1
Just a few months later – and no doubt buoyed by the media success of her much-publicized garden – the first lady went a step further and introduced her signature Let’s Move campaign aimed at combating national obesity rates. The launch was a star-studded White House affair that brought out top-ranking administration politicos – from agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack to Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius – as well as congressional members and mayors from around the nation.2 The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics was on hand; members of the 2009 National Championship Pee-Wee football team showed up.3 And President Obama himself lent his executive support, signing his name to a presidential memorandum that brought into existence the nation’s first Task Force on Childhood Obesity, tasked with developing a national plan to implement the first lady’s goals for childhood nutrition and physical fitness within ninety days.4
Mrs. Obama said of Let’s Move: “The physical and emotional health of an entire generation and the economic health and security of our nation is at stake.”5
Really? That sounds ominous.
But Congress answered her call to fitness arms with the passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, freeing up billions of dollars in funding for schools to adopt healthier menus in their cafeterias and putting the US Department of Agriculture in charge of setting nutrition standards, including caloric limits on offered meals.6 The president signed it into law in December 2010.7 It wasn’t long after the mandates took effect – and around the same time Mrs. Obama was championing her 2012 book, American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America, that students across the nation started complaining.8
The lunches were too small. Students were starving. The food tasted disgusting.9 And student-athletes, in particular, were suffering, saying the menus left them hungry and weak by the time the school day ended and practice or games began. Schools, for their part, started complaining of difficulties with menu compliance, reporting the 650 to 850 lunch calorie limits – depending on grade level – were too low for students and many didn’t like the new cafeteria offerings.10 Some students tossed the food, others started bringing lunches from home, and school districts said regulations were becoming too onerous and costly to implement. In July 2013, New York’s Burnt Hills–Ballston Lake school district opted out of the federal program, reporting a loss of $100,000 from trying out the new menu.11
So what was Mrs. Obama’s and the federal government’s response to the growing criticisms about their food?
Push harder.
In September 2013, the first lady jumped to the bully pulpit to sway the private sector – both television executives and food industry officials – to stand down on marketing unhealthy food to children and to do it quickly.12 A month later, she joined with Sesame Street and announced the nonprofit that produces the television show was giving certain food companies permission and licensing to use Muppet characters free of charge to promote fruits and vegetables for the next two years.13 Mrs. Obama was positively giddy about the free marketing campaign, predicting children who saw an image of Elmo at the local grocery’s apple bin or a life-size cardboard of Big Bird by the banana display would literally beg their parents to buy the healthy snacks, in favor of chips or candy.14
Time will tell if that prediction holds true. But regardless, isn’t it time to put the kibosh on this federal overreach?
It’s not that healthy eating is a silly notion for a first lady to adopt. It’s certainly a worthy cause – our nation is a bit on the hefty side and could stand to lose a collective few pounds and adopt some healthier habits. On top of that, healthy eating seems a bit reminiscent of former first lady Nancy Reagan’s antidrug, “Just Say No” campaign. Both advocate generally accepted principles without much controversy: kids should eat healthy, and they shouldn’t do drugs.
But it’s all in the messaging.
A mild rebuke is not the same as a federal mandate. A gentle message and educational campaign is not a taxpayer-funded regulation. A cheerleader attitude and motivational speech are hardly akin to driving national policy with a presidential memorandum or to compelling Congress to pass laws. And nothing within the first lady’s Let’s Move campaign hails from the side of mild, but rather falls heavy on the side of regulation. It’s nanny-state governance aimed at the nation’s most vulnerable and, oftentimes, most gullible – the kids.
Really, Mrs. Obama’s entire campaign – from Let’s Move to lunch menu to putting the pressure on the private market – serves as an apt and long-running commentary on something that’s been stabbing at our modern culture and cutting into our once-commonly accepted norms: the notion of who knows best – parents or government. To Mrs. Obama and her healthy eating initiative supporters, government just knows better than parents how to raise and develop children.
That’s a belief that better belongs in Cuba than America.
Yet this is what we’ve become. The whole Let’s Move debacle is just one example of how our nation’s children are learning, step-by-step and day by day, that government is the answer – the provider, the sustainer, the solution to all. Government, it would seem, is the smarter caretaker.
In February 2012, a mother in the small town of Raeford, North Carolina, reported to a media outlet that she sent her daughter off to preschool with a homemade lunch of turkey and cheese on bread, a banana, potato chips, and apple juice.15 Pretty routine-sounding. But apparently, that didn’t sit well with health officials at the school who wanted the girl to eat vegetables.16 They forced the girl to take a school lunch tray of chicken nuggets, milk, fruit, and vegetables, while saying she could still eat her bagged lunch.17 The girl, age four, was intimidated by then – not to mention overwhelmed by the adult-size portion of double lunches – and ate only her chicken nuggets. The mother, who later learned of the lunchtime incident, was outraged and upset that the school wouldn’t let her daughter alone.18 Moreover, this wasn’t the first time the school pushed its own version of a healthy lunch on the girl, despite the mother’s repeated requests to let her parent and decide her own daughter’s menu. In a later meeting of the school principal, the mother, and the girl’s grandmother, the question was raised by the family: What is this, China?19
If the justification for such government oversight and intrusion is that officials just want to help – to extend a helping hand – then it seems warranted to point out that from good intentions often spring mischief and outright evil. Think zero-tolerance policy in schools around the nation.
In late 2010, a star student-athlete in her last year of high school in North Carolina was charged with a Class 1 misdemeanor and faced the possibility of six months in prison for bringing a paring knife to school in her bagged lunch.20 School officials said the knife was actually in her purse and they found it while performing random searches on other students to look for drugs.21 Either way, she said she took her father’s lunch to school by mistake and that he had included the knife to slice his apple.22 But school administrators refused to cut her a break, claiming the knife was a weapon and she violated policy by bringing it on campus. In addition to her charge, she was suspended for the remainder of the school year.23
If only such stories were few and far between. But tales like that have been making headlines around the country for years.
Head south to Fort Myers, Florida, and go back in time to 2001, and it was just the same for another high school senior – an honor student and National Merit Scholar, age eighteen, who watched her future tumble after administrators noticed a dinner knife on the floorboards in her parked car.24 She was charged with a felony, despite the fact that the knife was about as sharp as a butter spreader and never left her locked car.25 The principal in that case – as in the North Carolina case – refused to handle the matter with leniency, citing a law is a law is a law and all must follow the law.26
Now, what about the 2013 shocking story of the little Maryland boy who nibbled his Pop-Tart pastry into what school administrators deemed the shape of a gun and was subsequently suspended? In June of that year, the parents were denied an appeal to have the boy’s suspension expunged from his school records.27
His case – certainly one that tasks sane minds – is hardly in a corner all alone.
In mid-2013, Suffolk, Virginia, school officials suspended two second grade boys, both age seven, for pointing pencils at each other and making gun sounds – as no doubt 90 percent of America has done during youth.28 One boy told his father he was playing a Marine, taking out the “bad guy” his friend was playing, but school officials didn’t see it so innocently.29 A spokesperson for the school system said a pencil, when pointed in a certain manner and when accompanied by gun sounds, is truly a weapon. And the school has a policy – a zero-tolerance policy – to maintain, the spokesperson added.30
Also in mid-2013, a six-year-old Palmer, Massachusetts, boy was given a school detention for the crime of carting a G.I. Joe Lego plastic toy gun – about the size of a quarter – onto the bus.31 The kindergartner was then threatened with a suspension from riding the bus and forced to write an apology letter to the driver.32 The school, meanwhile, took it upon itself to send a letter home to each and every parent who had a child on the bus to advise of the incident and calm any fears, admitting in the process that nobody was ever in danger.33 After the mother protested the overkill and told of the trauma her son went through over the weekend, in dread of detention, the school consented to drop the punishment.34 But how can a school on one hand admit no danger exists but then on the other hand inflict a punishment on a student for committing, ostensibly, an act of danger?
Zero-tolerance policy rears its illogical head yet again.
In January 2013, a five-year-old Pennsylvania girl was given a ten-day suspension for playing with a Hello Kitty “bubble gun” that blows soap bubbles.35 She reportedly told friends at her bus stop that they could use the toy and shoot each other and play together. The principal, upon learning of the comment, said it was a terroristic threat and slapped on the harsh punishment.36
A six-year-old Washington boy who dared to talk about guns at school – just talk – was sent home in February 2013 after a classmate tattled to a teacher that he had a weapon.37 He didn’t – not even a toy one. But the boy was still sent home, leaving the parents to theorize that their son was suspended for the simple crime of discussing the Nerf guns the family bought during a recent out-of-state trip.38 When the parents contacted the school to clarify, they said the girl who had reported their son to the teacher had expressed concerns about her safety.39 And the father said school officials told them such matters are covered in the code of conduct and handbook given out to all students. The parents were puzzled, correctly realizing that talking about guns was not an act that was actually prohibited by policy, and planned to appeal.40 But before they could take action, administrators reversed the decision and said the boy’s record would be expunged of the suspension.41
Chances are, the incident wasn’t so quickly expunged from the boy’s mind – and that leads to a central issue: just what exactly are schools teaching children nowadays? Respect for authority and rule of law can’t be high on the list.
But just when it’s hard to imagine school zero-tolerance policy getting more ridiculous, there’s this, from August 2012: Nebraska parents said their deaf son’s school objected to the way he signed his name – Hunter – with the gesture of a gun and demanded he learn to spell it letter by letter instead.42
The boy, three, had been gesturing his name in accordance with Signing Exact English methods – which meant he shaped his fingers in the shape of a gun – since he was six months old.43 But school officials wanted him to spell it letter by letter instead, using American Sign Language style.44 Why? Once again, school policy prohibits any type of object on campus grounds that is a weapon, can be used as a weapon, or even looks like a weapon – zero tolerance.45
The list of ridiculous offenses seems endless.
But what’s more alarming is that while schools are busy taking out all mention of guns, violence, and weapons from the classroom, from toys to pastry images to forms of speech, teachers are simultaneously adding in lessons that skew history, push leftist political agenda, and put at risk – to those of traditional principled mind – the healthy development of youthful minds.
Why do elementary-age children need sex education classes?
Chicago Public Schools implemented sex and health education classes for kindergartners in mid-2013. The new mandate requires three hundred minutes of teaching, spread out in thirty-minute increments on a monthly basis.46 So in addition to reading, writing, and arithmetic, the city’s five-year-olds will also learn the ins and outs, as well as dos and don’ts, of human sexuality. Some parents were outraged, asking why little children needed to know about such adult topics.47 But administrators were largely unmoved, saying they would take care to teach the classes in a way that the children could understand, using age-appropriate language and graphics.48
As if that’s supposed to ease concerns. Part of the course was to talk about same-sex partnerships, a topic that some parents preferred to keep under their own wraps based on family beliefs, teachings, morals, and values.49
But those boundaries are being broken by schools on a regular basis nowadays.
Massachusetts schools were ordered by state education authorities to provide transgender students access to opposite-gender bathrooms and locker rooms.50 That policy was handed down on the heels of a November 2011 state law that prohibited all forms of discrimination based on transgender status.51 And what that means on a practical level is that schools in Massachusetts now have to honor the demands of boys who state they’re girls and vice versa, no matter what biology, genetics, and other physical evidence show.
My, how Massachusetts has changed. Home to one of the Founding Fathers’ fiercest defenders of the faith, John Adams – home to some of the fiercest freedom fighters of the Revolutionary War era, a crew of patriots who stood strong against the world’s greatest power of the time – Massachusetts is now known more as a bastion of liberalism. Even fifty years ago, though, it’s hard to imagine that school transgender policy flying.
So really – my, how our nation has changed.
New York City in late 2013, just in time for the Christmas season, mulled a change in policy that would allow schools to close for Muslim holidays – specifically, the Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha observances that often coincided with school testing schedules.52 At least one county in Maryland considered the same policy amendment for its schools, in recognition of the growing Muslim community.53 This as Christmas around the nation continues to come under attack by the same education system that seeks to be sensitive to Muslim needs.
How many schools now list Christmas break on their student calendars, as opposed to the more generic – and devoid of Christian religion – winter break? Headlines sprout every year in the lead-up to December about school Christmas pageants that are under attack for religious overtones. The nation’s now to the point that the 1965 creation A Charlie Brown Christmas, with its biblical message and mention of Jesus – the real meaning of the holiday, after all – has become a controversy.
Christianity, Founding Father roots, and traditional beliefs are slowly being drummed from our schools, and soon, our national discourse. After this generation of children grows and graduates, the path toward government and away from God will be broadened even more. The signs are all there. In September 2013, a mother in Tennessee was outraged when her daughter, ten, was told by a teacher who wanted to know all the students’ “idols” that, no, she couldn’t name Jesus – she would have to choose someone else.54 So the girl named deceased pop star Michael Jackson, and that was accepted.55
School textbooks can’t even be trusted to teach the truth of our nation’s history, or of worldwide issues of interest, anymore.
Parents in Florida in mid-2013 expressed outrage to school officials over a course book, named simply World History, that devoted thirty-six pages to Islam versus three small paragraphs to Christianity.56 One state lawmaker called the textbook decidedly biased in favor of Islam, complete with a skewed sugarcoating of how the Muslim religion really rose in the world ranks.57
Around that same time frame, in August 2013, politicians and education officials in Texas were in heated debate about a lesson plan in the state schools that many accused of teaching that the Boston Tea Party was staged by terrorists – at least in the minds of the British.58
A month later, and it was South Carolina that hit the spotlight.
A history book in at least one high school in the state was faulted for its waffling interpretation of the Second Amendment in the US Constitution. The book, furnished to Simpsonville, South Carolina, students, seemed to diminish the concept of the individual’s right to own and bear arms by combining discussion of the Second Amendment with the Third Amendment – as if gun ownership were a preclusion to keep government soldiers from taking over private citizens’ homes.59 The book also emphasized the right to bear arms but not keep them – while in the actual Second Amendment, the text specifies that those rights go hand in hand.
But one of the worst lessons thrust on our nation’s children has to be this, from Illinois: fourth-graders there in August 2013 were being taught in a lengthy worksheet, in question-and-answer form, about the true nature of government. The worksheet was titled, “What Is Government?”60 And the answer, simply: government is family.61
The worksheet posed compare-contrast questions between family and government, ultimately leading students to realize that government – like family – keeps people safe, healthy, and educated.62 The school, when asked for explanation, said it was only trying to give the children an example and analogy they could relate to and understand.63
That may be true. But fifty years ago, that same teacher would have been teaching that same lesson plan with an analogy of how government differed from family.