Fernando Dominguez cut the figure of a young revolutionary leader during a recent lunch period at his elementary school.

“Who thinks the lunch is not good enough?” the seventh-grader shouted to his lunch mates in Spanish and English.

Dozens of hands flew in the air and fellow students shouted along: “We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch!”

Fernando waved his hand over the crowd and asked a visiting reporter: “Do you see the situation?”

At his public school, Little Village Academy on Chicago’s West Side, students are not allowed to pack lunches from home. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria.

Principal Elsa Carmona said her intention is to protect students from their own unhealthful food choices.

“Nutrition wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school,” Carmona said. “It’s about the nutrition and the excellent quality food that they are able to serve (in the lunchroom). It’s milk versus a Coke. But with allergies and any medical issue, of course, we would make an exception.”

Carmona said she created the policy six years ago after watching students bring “bottles of soda and flaming hot chips” on field trips for their lunch. Although she would not name any other schools that employ such practices, she said it was fairly common.

But the real outrage is buried:

At Claremont Academy Elementary School on the South Side, officials allow packed lunches but confiscate any snacks loaded with sugar or salt. (They often are returned after school.) Principal Rebecca Stinson said that though students may not like it, she has yet to hear a parent complain.

It always comes back to parents.  Do homemade cookies count as a snack loaded with sugar?  If parents aren’t willing to stand up to this Soviet-style waste—the students refuse to eat the food they’re required to buy—then the authoritarian schools and the servile parents deserve each other.  The lessons the children are learning at school?  Waste is ok, common sense is bad, and doing whatever the bureaucracy mandates is acceptable.  There are ways to raise a free citizenry; this ain’t it.

The obvious problem is how does one measure diversity. Well the California bar suggests three ways, one of which is “Surveying diversity professionals at law schools on diversity reputation.”

Yes, they believe that each law school’s racial discrimination policies should be judged by racial discrimination professionals at other schools, and that the opinion of these professional race discriminaters should influence the decision of where prospective law students spend three years of their life and six digits of their dollars.

I say that any prospective student who actually considers that information when selecting a law school should be immediately made a lawyer – perhaps even as a judge - because plainly there is nothing law school could do to increase that person’s analytical ability.

Now Joseph Epstein takes on Professor Bailey in an oblique look at a new scandal involving the man:

Northwestern University, the school at which I taught for 30 years, has been visited by a delicious little scandal. A tenured professor, teaching a heavily attended undergraduate course on human sexuality, decided to bring in a woman, who, with the aid of what was euphemistically called “a sex toy” (uneuphemistically, it appears to have been an electric dildo), attempted to achieve a climax in the presence of the students. The professor alerted his students about this extraordinary show-and-tell session, and made clear that attendance was voluntary. The standard account has it that 120 or so of the 622 students enrolled in the course showed up. Questions about what they had witnessed, the professor punctiliously noted, would not be on the exam.

The professor, J. Michael Bailey, is a man with a reputation for specializing in the outré. (Northwestern ought perhaps to consider itself fortunate that he didn’t teach a course in Aztec history, or he might have offered a demonstration of human sacrifice.) The word got out about the demonstration he had arranged, journalists quickly got on the case, and Northwestern found itself hugely embarrassed, its officials concerned lest parents think it was offering, at roughly $45,000 a year, the educational equivalent of a stag party.

There’s more—much more—in this piece.  Read to the end to get Epstein’s unvarnished view of the state of American Education.

In 1969, spurred by antiwar student riots, the university cancelled its Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program, which had its roots in the Columbia Midshipmen’s School that trained over 23,000 naval officers in World War II. By the 1990s, after the fervor around the Vietnam War had subsided, university officials justified keeping ROTC off campus because of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

With Congress having repealed that edict last year, Columbia faculty have raised new arguments against ROTC. Some faculty members have recently circulated a petition that the military should remain banned because it continues to be a “discriminatory institution” on the basis of “many reasons from physical disability to age.” The basketball team discriminates too.

The author of this tart piece?  Jacques Barzun, who turned 103 last year.

Andrew Ferguson and Nick Gillespie should make more videos.

I sat down the other day and added up the total cost (in time and money) of my education. Had I apprenticed myself to a plumber straight out of high school, I would be immeasurably better off financially; I’d be a skilled worker with an opportunity to start my own business, and I could go as far as my skill and ambition would take me. Perhaps I’d be less interesting, but probably not. Do you know how many worthwhile hobbies one can have with an extra decade of financial stability and not taking out tens of thousands of dollars in loans?

The future of higher education simply must be different than what it is now. Currently, it’s an inefficient system to transfer money from the young and poor to the old and financially stable. Couple it with the Social Security and Medicare taxes I’m paying on my income right now (egad), and it is simply jawdropping to think about the portion of my life taken from me to support old people who have already had the opportunity to provide for their own well-being. The well-to-do elderly get my money while I have to delay trivial matters like home ownership and children. What a system!

Bring on the education reform, send the overpaid geezer professors into retirement, and give America’s youth their lives back rather than forcing them into education until they’re 30 and loan repayment (if they’re lucky) until they’re 40. A society doesn’t become great or maintain greatness by destroying the productive years of its citizens’ lives.

(See also Instapundit)

If elected (or appointed-by-others-who-are-elected) local school boards run school systems into the ground through a combination of incompetence and giving the teachers’ unions the run of the place, whose fault is that? The voters’, that’s whose. “I voted for a bunch of nitwits” is not a statement of “a civil rights issue” and it does not make you oppressed. Quite the opposite, actually.

The Provincetown school system will revisit its controversial policy of making condoms available to all students, with no age restriction, after Governor Deval Patrick expressed concern yesterday that very young children would have access to them.

A day after the new policy caused a media firestorm, School Committee chairman Peter Grosso said that Provincetown would probably limit condoms to fifth-graders and older. His stance stemmed from a conversation he had with Superintendent Beth Singer, author of the rule set to take effect this fall.

“She said the School Committee is going to have to revisit the policy and definitely reword it so it’s self-explaining, and possibly wording it so that maybe there would be an exclusion of the real young grades,’’ Grosso said.

Provincetown is, of course, somewhat what Massachusetts is to the rest of the country.  But still…