this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Any parent can tell you that a hungry child isn't capable of doing any complex activity. Attempting to educate a kid who hasn't eaten in god knows how long, for whatever reason, isn't going to work.
Beyond that, universal school breakfast and lunch help people who can afford it by removing yet another thing for parents to worry about. And it eliminates the stigma of only the poor kids getting free lunches.
Republicans have been disdainful of public education since before I was born, so they're trying to make it fail by continuing to spend money trying to teach hungry kids.
The stigma is the point.
Conservatives believe receiving charity should be shameful.
Because conservatives (and neoliberals) think poverty is a personal moral failure - if you're poor, it's not because society and capitalism and racism and structural inequality screwed you over, it's because you, personally, were lazy or wasted your money or broke the law or didn't work hard enough.
So if a child can't afford a school lunch, it's because their parents are bad people. And shaming that child with an obvious "free lunch" (I remember having a bright red card that I had to show in the cafeteria, and the lunch lady would sneer at me and loudly proclaim "here is your FREE LUNCH" and hand me a cheese sandwich and an apple when the other kids were getting pizza just to make sure everybody knew my parents were poor) teaches the child to be ashamed of their parents and be ashamed of their poverty so they'll work harder to avoid poverty as adults.
And if schools give every child free lunch, not only do they lose that "teaching opportunity", they teach children that food is a right and that everybody, no matter their economic status, should have enough to eat, which is a direct attack on the fundamental principles of capitalism and American society.
Go into a conservative space and tell them people have a right to food and shelter and medical care and watch them froth in rage.
Wow I never put it together before but you are right, the free lunch was a lesson to work hard and not be poor, and I have to say it worked on me. We had our free lunches provided in a very distinct white paper bag and you had to walk to the office to get it, then walk back down to the cafeteria after everyone was already sitting down. So everyone got to see the white bag lunch as you walked in, and everyone knew what it meant. Would it have killed the school to use the standard brown paper bag, or give it to us on a lunch tray with the hot lunch kids? No but if the reason was to embarrass me into not being poor it worked. I promised myself that my kids would never have to deal with that embarrassment, and so far I've kept that promise.
It's crazy how different things can be in different places. When I was in school, it didn't matter whether you paid or not, everyone got the same thing the same way. Actually, we had no way of knowing what other students paid for their lunch, as we would have an account with the school that you would put money on, and when you went through the line, you would give the person at the end the last 4 digits of your ssn and it would charge you the correct amount and take it out of your account.
Now if you didn't have enough money in your account to cover whatever you owed, then there would be an issue, but I don't remember ever seeing that.
But if you specifically say that they have a right to those things, they'll wholeheartedly agree.
Basic, and higher education should be on that list. I'd aslo argue for utilities, and AFAIC utilities should be public, and include telecommunications companies, not just water, electric, and mass transit.
Oh man, that is so fucked up. The UK has its own problems around attitudes towards the poor, but I never saw anything like this in school. My school had cards that you had to load credit onto, and people with free school meals had a standard amount automatically added on each day.
Neither is a hungry adult. Free access to food should be a constitutional right.
If we can force all the kids into a school, the goddamn LEAST we can do is toss them some snacks
Keep them hungry, keep them dumb. Make it so only the already rich have access to education. Keep the power in the hand of the wealthy few.
Ohhh, they're opposing universal free meals while wanting to keep the free meals for students from poor families. That makes way more sense than opposing both. Not cartoonishly evil. It's possible that it's for purely utilitarian reasons.
Typical politics taking things out of context and extrapolating.
(No, I am not endorsing the republican party or saying that universal free meals for students should be blocked.)
It isn't quite as insane as the headline makes it sound.
But anyway, maybe Republicans are worried that if anyone sees a "socialist" type of program at work they might think it is kind of a good idea in certain circumstances. O noes 😨