@Foxfyre,
Quote:But we don't live in a perfect world, and most of us are not willing to be that hard nosed. So we should do the next best thing which is to apply social pressure to encourage parents to parent their kids responsibly and stigmatize those parents who do not. Social pressure is a powerful thing. A good place to start would be to make it customary again that parents give their kids a good breakfast before they send them to school and the kid goes to school with a sack lunch or money in his pocket to buy lunch.
God . . . you live in fantasy land, don't you? I'm sure you would readily subscribe to the Victorian notion of "the deserving poor." How do you intend to "make it customary again" that parents give their kids a good breakfast and a lunch or lunch money? What makes you think it was customary in the past?
We had kids who came to school with no lunch and no money, and in the days before there was a cafeteria in the school--so they went hungry. Everybody knew who they were, and someone always managed to come up with two cents so they could have the half pint of milk at mid-morning, which they often seemed to inhale, probably because they had had no breakfast, and wouldn't get anything else to eat until they got home that night.
There was one girl, Alma, who was filthy dirty--not just mostly unbathed, but with smears of dirt on her face and hands which were there from one day to the next, and often were still there on the Monday when we went back to school. She was dirty like a dirty child in Hollywood movie make-up that you ordinarily wouldn't believe. Alma wore the same dress for literally weeks on end, when it would be replaced by her older brother's shirt and trousers--and she'd turn up in her one dress again the next day. She got a new dress every few years when she had so far outgrown the last one that it was no longer even remotely decent.
She brought no sack lunch, and when the cafeteria opened in the new school, they just fed her. No one bothered about the weekly lunch money, or even about the pennies for the milk any longer. They knew they'd never get it, and they knew that Alma probably wouldn't even have understood what you were saying if you had attempted to explain it to her. Once when she was given a note to take home to announce a field trip, she began to tremble and burst into tears, because to her mind, a note from school was trouble, and meant disaster for her. Trying to get her to tell her parents she had to come up with lunch money would have been far worse from her point of view.
By the time we were in the eighth grade, most of us had caught up to Alma, and plenty had passed her--she was 16 years old then. (After the first year, most teachers just promoted her to get rid of her--i doubt she ever genuinely passed any grade.) One day in the playground at lunch time, she cut her finger and came in with tears streaming dirty streaks down her dirty face, horrified and almost hysterical at her injury. The vicious bitch with the BS in Ed who was our eighth grade teacher starting talking to me about Alma and how pathetic she was and that her hysteria arose from a lifetime of neglect in a home which didn't deserve the name. (I was "detained" after having been caught playing solitaire in the back of the classroom with a miniature deck of cards.) I was squirming, but really there was no way for me to escape. At one point, the nasty old bitch looked directly at me and said: "You know, i think she might actually know we are talking about her." I had enough at that point--i said: "Not we . . . i wasn't talking about her, that's just purely hateful" and i ran out of the room. I was sure i was in big trouble, but nothing happened, and then it finally dawned on me that the vicious bitch probably didn't want to have to explain herself and her remarks to the principal, and surely didn't want to take the chance of being confronted by the drunken, violent son-of-a-bitch coal miner who was alleged to be Alma's father.
The world is full of Almas, and i suspect always will be. Pathetic, dull-witted and smug bromides like ones you're peddling here, Fox, do absolutely nothing to help the Alma's of this world, and never will.