So Michael Gove, Secretary of Stae for Education has appointed a school meals Czar
For crying out loud..
I had hoped that Gove was impervious to all this nonsense. When you consider the dire straits of our educational system, the lack of attainment, the absence of a proper learning culture, the total waste of literally billions of pounds for nil effect the last thing we need to concern ourselves with is school dinners.
School meals at every level of education have always been crap because it is mass produced cooking for a captive audience. Added to that the natural gravitational pull between junk food and adolescents and it is obvious that any attempt to get secondary students to pig out on poncy colour supplement trendy cuisine must be doomed to failure.
But we live in a world where self appointed messiahs are just so eager to poke their noses into our own affairs by hectoring us about our sinful behaviour and an infantile media, unable to reverse its own decline, jumps on any bandwagon to scare us into demanding something must be done – and the current panic about school meals becomes flavour of the month.
Let’s get things straight. Schools and teachers are not parent substitutes. They should not be used as freebie child minders. They cannot heal the halt, the sick or the psychologically unstable. Their job is to enable a common cultural inheritance to be passed to the next generation by providing children with the basic tools to understand and add to that inheritance.
Give them the tools and the money to do that effectively for once and just outsource school meals to MacDonalds and Domino’s Pizza – and put gaffer tape around the mouths of every celebrity chef and chattering class food critic…
