LEAVING THEM NO CHOICE SO THEY CAN LEARN TO MAKE CHOICES. CAN WE SAFELY SAY NEWTHINK?

High schools are supposed to be institutions that help develop the human potential in the new adult generation of citizens to face the challenges in life. To have a chance at obtaining meaningful results that will assist adolescents to become responsible adults and citizens, they must be taught the skills of critical thinking, autonomy, decision making, emotional stability and harmonious interactions with the rest of society.

We learn from the article linked at the bottom, that not content to have removed the food choice from high schools, the UK is now thinking of forbidding the students from leaving the school premises during lunch time so that they are not tempted to eat junk food outside the school! In MP’s Ed Ball’s , Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, own words: "Temptation can be hard to resist but we owe it to future generations to help young people make the right choices about how they want to live their lives." How exactly do we ‘’help young people make the right choices’’ when we make them for them by imprisoning them in school so that they are left with no choice but to eat whatever the school cafeteria serves? How can we expect to instill personal responsibility in our future adults when we subtract them from their own free will and impose our ways onto them? Have we lost all faith in our teaching methods that we don't believe that educating them towards healthy habits will help them make good choices in life sooner or later? Is this the type of adults we wish to breed for our future societies?

Let’s be very clear. Of course we know that many adolescents given the choice will be tempted to eat the forbidden fruit and many of them will. However, it is certainly not by holding them prisoners for their own good that they will learn how to use critical thinking and make the right choices by themselves for themselves. In fact anyone that understands a minimum of adolescent psychology knows that they will most certainly be twice as tempted to stuff themselves with everything but healthy food once they’re set free from their sterilized school cage.

We become truly troubled when we see how so many people and especially politicians can be so far wrapped up in their monolithic ideology, they can no longer (or refuse to) see the forest from the tree! Troubled times we live in, very troubled!

Link to the Telegraph article:

Schools 'should keep pupils on premises at lunchtime to fight obesity'