The wired article makes it sound like the girl was a political activist trying to force a change in the school lunch program. But if you read her blog, the photos of lunches look pretty good and her "reviews" are mostly positive. It almost struck me that people with agendas are projecting onto this girl's blog, which doesn't seem to be intended to be controversial at all, rather just a chronicle of her lunches - including how many mouthfuls of food each meal contains as well as the color of the wristband needed to get your lunch that particular day! I don't know why the school shut her down, it certainly was not a negative reflection on their lunch program at all.
This did make me remember my school lunch days - basically tv dinners served in aluminum foil tins. I would have loved to have these lunches instead of the crap we had to eat!
Here's one of her typical reviews "Today's Shepherd's Pie was really nice. The mash on top was really creamy and the mince was in lovely gravy. I wonder where their meat comes from. The salad was lovely and crunchy. The cake looked really difficult to serve because the icing was so sticky. I saved my melon until last and it was a great way to end my lunch. Food-o-meter - 9/10, Mouthfuls - 32"
As part of their classwork on healthy eating the teaher should take a photo of a meal or two each day and post them on the school website. That would avoid any problem of the pupils using their own cameras in school; it would also I feel make a stand for the autonomy of the School unit and demonstrate that the school is behind pupils efforts to eat better and support this child's self-education.
Giving a 'screw you' to the council might be a happy side effect.
The council deny that and while you could say "they would" the pressure on improving school lunches over the past few years her in the UK is such that changes for the better could well have been in the works.
that is true her day #1 post has a sad cheeseburger and the lasagna looking thing. I was hoping to see an amazing transition in the food quality.
But, that was just the first day and the school didn't change their entire lunch program in one day. In fact the article says that the food didn't actually change, they just changed the policy to allow students to go back for as many fruits and veggies as they like. (well technically they claim that was the policy all along, but nobody knew, but whatever)
Initially, she did start her blog to change the program - and it worked! The school started allowing students to come back for seconds of veggies and sides. (You can read more about it in the original article, which was posted to HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4009404)
I went through her blog from the beginning posts hoping to see the meals change from terrible to awesome. I didn't really see a dramatic change - the quality seemed consistent (which is to say, pretty good quality to my eyes) Her very first post has a somewhat sad looking cheeseburger, but that was the only bad one I saw.
I wanted to know how many CCTV cameras they have. We in the UK are a heavily monitored population (here's a frustratingly thin article with a few details, hinting at a rich data set that is not made available. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8159141.stm) ) It's bizarre that her tax money (as a child she doesn't pay much, but she will pay VAT on a few items and her parents certainly pay taxes) is used to provide state surveillance and to prevent her photographic record of her dinners.
There are many reasons to prevent children taking phones and cameras to school. This reason is a really really stupid reason.
How wrong-headed it is to take active measures against a child who is showing an interest in writing; civics; nutrition; and so on.
EDIT: The father has appeared on BBC Radio 4's "Today" news programme. (about 7:20 for anyone 'listening again'.) He has said that the school has been very supportive, and that the decision was taken by the council. He sounds pretty balanced about it.
We crush the joy of learning out of children.
Ken Robinson, who makes my favorite TED talk IMHO, talks about this and how odd our education system is when looked at objectively from the outside in.
His followup, as well as the RSAnimate (you can find them by clicking "Full Bio>>" on the right), are good followups to his ideas.
One of the most powerful quotes, to me, is from the RSAnimate:
We still educate children in batches. We put them
through the system by age group. Why do we do that?
Why is there this assumption that the most important
thing kids have in common is how old they are? It's
like the most important thing about them is the date
of manufacture.
Not only do we crush learning out of children, but creativity suffers as well.
I went to an elementary school in the U.S. where you were not grouped by age. It was a pilot program, and I can't find a reference to the program being in place almost 20 years later.
The program at the school had 1 large building, which was divided into 4 classroom with some common space in between. For each class period, you went to the class taught at your level. So you could go to the 1st grade math, or you could go to the kindergarten math.
I lived there for 2 years, and basically took 1st grade as kindergarten aged, and 2nd grade as 1st grade aged.
The worst part was moving, and having to "re-integrate" with the system. I had to take the age appropriate 2nd grade. My parents wanted me to skip directly to 3rd grade, but the school rejected that.
What's funny is that you hardly have to "pilot" this model, because it used to be the norm all across America (the one-room school house). The evidence is compelling that it works great, and it costs less too.
Which of course is why it's a political non-starter. The bureaucratic imperative is bigger budgets and centralization.
We had a small private k-8 school in my home town that employed this same model (White Oaks School Monticello, IL). I considered sending both of my children. Sadly, tuition was a little out of reach for us. The school is closed now (they only lasted about 10 years).
In addition to the one-room style of education, they had older students mentor younger one, an instruction model that enabled students to learn at mixed pace (accelerated for subjects the student was "good" at, slower for those they were't), music education that included learning to play an instrument at the kindergarden level, and foreign language at the 1st grade level (language choices included: french, spanish, russian, cantonese and many others)
This is a little OT, but the position of Ken Robinson is at least debatable. I dislike the fun he has with "Shakespeare's English teacher" (whoever that was!) He thinks it's pretty funny that anyone would be so un-self-aware as to want to teach English to young Shakespeare.
Maybe Shakespeare was born with the ability to write the best plays and poetry. But isn't it more likely that his talent started small and grew big, and that the people who helped it grow should be commended and admired?
Creativity is very important, yes; but it feeds on knowledge (creativity is the product of clashing together seemingly unrelated fields of knowledge). You don't have ideas about things you know nothing about, or if you do, they're usually useless.
Yes, it also struck me how this really underlined what Ken Robinson says. School is for fabricating industrial zombies that are good on solving prefabricated problems/tests made by someone else higher up in the hiearchy. Not inventive entrepreneurs that finds and solves real problems autonomously without the need of a professor/architect dictating what and how to solve someting.
As a student, I can see the reasons to forbid phones in school (though I believe the advantages outweigh these), but what reasons are you citing in support of camera prohibition?I highly doubt that cameras could pose much of a distraction from classes, and they can't really be used for anything that might be harmful to other students or the school, except by producing hard evidence of something like these lunches, which should be encouraged.
I am not saying I agree of disagree with the use of the law in this case but the problem that is associated with children having cameras at school could be fear of things like this: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29017808/
Pardon, why does not having the camera at school help here? If they want to they can take the photos at home. In fact, I doubt many such photos would be taken at school even without a camera ban, why risk someone walking in on you?
I've had a lot of experience with schools banning a dependency of something rather than the thing itself, allegedly because they feel that gives them more time to prevent it. If they can take a camera away before students start sexting, then the student never will have started sexting. If they wait until the student starts, then it actually happened.
Of course, that means also banning all the legitimate uses of cameras, implying that the school thinks students' primary use of cameras is sexting, which I find obscenely offensive.
well god forbid that uppity cleaver kids might enjoy school it might impact our plan to game the ofstead inspection so that we get the duffers who are on course for a D up to a C
Everyone seems to assume that the local council actually have the right to forbid a child taking photographs of her own property (in this case her lunch that she has just bought).
Is that really so?
Even if the school should have some capability to issue its own strange rules and by-laws, contrary to the common law applying outside, should this not be up to the Governors Board?
We all far too readily acquiesce, at our own cost, to arbitrary orders by 'authorities', assuming that they have powers over our lives which often they don't have or should not have.
It's also private property owned by the council - I couldn't just wander into a local school that my taxes pay for and start taking photos in the way that I could do in any public space.
You may well be right. Still, I find the concept questionable. I mean forbidding the lawful use of her property (camera, lunch), just because she is inside someone else's property? She is not photographing the school.
Besides, council property does not belong to the council officials but to the residents in the area and I suspect that, if their rights and opinions were respected, this order would not have been issued.
"In general under the law of the United Kingdom one cannot prevent photography of private property from a public place, and in general the right to take photographs on private land upon which permission has been obtained is similarly unrestricted. However landowners are permitted to impose any conditions they wish upon entry to a property, such as forbidding or restricting photography."
I think the council would argue that they are enforcing the ban of photography to protect the children from people who might want photographs of the children. I know when I used to work with children we had to get written consents from parents before any child could apear in a photo and in some cases we were instructed to make sure some children were never photographed and step in the way if we saw anyone with a camera.
Don't you guys remember school at all? The school has the legal right to force you, especially at the age of nine, to obey any number of arbitrary rules and instructions.
When you think of it from an adult perspective, the idea that an arbitrarily-chosen authority figure can walk into the room, tell you to put your hands on your head for no reason, and if you don't put your hands on your head then you get punished, is pretty weird. But children have fewer rights than adults and there's no good way around that except to suck it up and wait a few years.
Even if there is a law that would give the local council the necessary power, freedom of speech (given from the british constitution or human rights or the constitution of the EU) would override that.
The UK doesn't have Free Speech in the US sense, nor a Constitution (with a capital C). I don't think there's a right to photography of private (albeit publicly owned) property, especially a school.
If you read my comment above, she is not photographing their private property (the school) but her own private property (the bought lunch). They say they can impose any rules they like as a condition of entrance on their property, even though it is not a voluntary entrance. Her parents may have a choice to send her to a non-council school but she has no choice.
As to the UK's non-existent constitution: the point is that in most countries a stronger parliamentary majority is required to change the constitution, whereas in the UK any shaky government, that just happened to muster a majority of one on a rainy day, can abolish the Magna Carta, for instance.
Maybe she could draw lunches ... then take photos of drawings and post them. There would be a short caption under each photo, saying that the actual photos are not available due to the council policy.
Win-win: keep on doing what you love and learn to draw!
That would be even more ridiculous than forbidding her to photograph things
and would probably increase the public outrage by at least two orders of
magnitude.
I understand that having pictures of the food is probably going to get the point across even more, but I don't understand why she didn't just continue to blog about the horrible lunches and put a sketch or something. Imagine if she has just kept on blogging without the pictures like nothing ever happened. That would have sent a pretty powerful message to those people that tried to shut her up.
Looking back at some of the early stuff they don't look that good to me. Maybe horrible was too strong of a word... but those were some pretty sad school lunches. We pack lunches but if my kid was getting served that at school I'd be a little concerned too. But if the council didn't have anything to hide then why did they try to hide it? ;)
true. But even a broken clock is right twice a day. And that was also a couple weeks after she started getting media attention. She generally was less pleased with other aspects of the lunches besides just taste. Even if the chicken curry was de-lish... it is freakin tiny. And that single broccoli stock... wow.
Statement on school meals from Argyll and Bute Council
Published Date: 15 Jun 2012 - 10:53
Updated: 14:19 - 15 June 2012
Statement from Cllr Roddy McCuish, Leader of Argyll and Bute Council
"There is no place for censorship in this Council and never will be whilst I am leader. I have advised senior officers that this Administration intends to clarify the Council's policy position in regard to taking photos in schools. I have therefore requested senior officials to consider immediately withdrawing the ban on pictures from the school dining hall until a report can be considered by Elected Members. This will allow the continuation of the "Neverseconds" blog written by an enterprising and imaginative pupil, Martha Payne which has also raised lots of money for charity.
But we all must also accept that there is absolutely no place for the type of inaccurate and abusive attack on our catering and dining hall staff, such as we saw in one newspaper yesterday which considerably inflamed the situation. That, of course, was not the fault of the blog, but of the paper.
We need to find a united way forward so I am going to bring together our catering staff, the pupils, councillors and council officials - to ensure that the council continues to provide healthy, nutrious and attractive school meals. That "School Meals Summit" will take place later this summer.
I will also meet Martha and her father as soon as I can, along with our lead councillor on Education, Michael Breslin to seek her continued engagement, along with lots of other pupils, in helping the council to get this issue right. By so doing Martha Payne and her friends will have had a strong and lasting influence not just on school meals, but on the whole of Argyll & Bute."
I don't know about the UK, but schools in the US make up one of the three categories of places where you relinquish some fundamental rights, the other two being prisons and military bases.
For example, my high school in Maryland officially forbids ALL ELECTRONICS. In practice this generally only refers to cell phones and iPods, I can usually pull out a laptop and the faculty doesn't care, but they can also apply that rule whenever it makes their jobs easier. For example, I started recording classes to enhance my notes, and the school told me I must cease doing so, originally because they claimed it was an invasion of the teachers' privacy (!), then later that it was an invasion of students' privacy; but when I argued that the state law against recording people without their consent only applied to private conversations, and that no conversation could be considered private in a public place such as a school, they responded by simply saying that I can't record because it involve the use of an electronic device.
In my personal experience, the combination of sensory abilities, a brain and the motor skills required to take notes with a pencil on paper works alright sometimes.
Hello from Europe! You would be surprised how many rights inmates have over here. I am pretty certain the same applies to schools, they don't have fundamentally more rights over their students in any way I could remember.
I don't know the exact laws but I know that certain property is "publicly owned," but not "public property" available to the general public. Government buildings, schools, airports, parks, etc have different rules.
Children in general are not given as many rights as adults--they lack the right to vote, to bear arms, etc. It's not just schools, and it's not necessarily wrong.
yes, it's not necessarily wrong, but it tends to end up that way unless you are careful to justify things on a case-by-case basis. it's all to easy to end up at "no, you cannot do this, because we say so and we have been given carte blanche to infringe on your rights".
I love her light-heartedness and wish I still had mine. And does anyone else think of Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist" when reading the title of her blog ("Never Seconds")? I keep hearing "Please sir, I want some more" in my head.
I'm certainly glad to have kids like this in the world ... she's made more of a difference already than most of us will in our life-times. She's just passed the 35,000 pound mark for donations to Mary's Meals, feeding 3500 children for a year. Wow!
I'm certainly glad to have kids like this, but I'm also glad to have parents like hers. I know many parents who would, as long as it started getting some attention, told their kids to "stop looking for trouble".
There's a lot of bad parenting going on in the world, and her dad looks like a pretty balanced person.
Honestly, that food looks quite a bit better than my school offered. There are some nutritionally-very-questionable combinations occasionally, but by and large they seem among the more reasonable options I tend to see.
Which, yes, is terrifying. More focus on the crap we feed our kids is fantastic.
Follow the same link above and you'll see there are updates to Wired's original article. Thank you Argyll and Bute Council ... and you've shown the kids that it's okay to admit you were wrong and to take action to rectify what you've done.
Honestly, this was the sort of response I was expecting the first time that this story was posted -- not the Cinderella story of a positive change within two weeks. I guess the bureaucracy over there took a while to boot..
There should be some law that should state that if you can be at some place you can have a camera and take photos from that place of whatever you like and no one should be able to forbid you that or require a fee.
So to you theres no difference between being fleetingly seen naked whilst changing (eg at a swimming pool) and having your nude self featured in mass media?
Would you at least concede that this wouldnt be true for everyone? Or are you trying to make some sort of impractical distinction between capture and use of an image.
FWIW I'm personally happy to embrace nudism but feel forcing the possibility of widespread exposure on others is going way to far.
> So to you theres no difference between being fleetingly seen naked whilst changing (eg at a swimming pool) and having your nude self featured in mass media?
No difference, meaning that I don't want to be in both of this situations to pretty much same degree. That's why I choose swimming pools with private changing rooms. Also currently anyone can smuggle camera to a changing room and publish photos of the people he/she can snap on mass media called internet. And we can't pretty much do anything about this. Pretending we can and from time to time trying doesn't provide us with any additional privacy.
> Would you at least concede that this wouldnt be true for everyone?
Yes. I'm aware that some people don't mind being seen naked when not too many people watch.
> Or are you trying to make some sort of impractical distinction between capture and use of an image.
Not really. If it's captured it can be published. At least anonymously.
I'm neither in favor or against nudism. I think that society could use more acceptance about how ordinary people look and what ordinary people do.
I think there is a great value in right to take and publish pictures. Of police officers on duty, of school cafeteria menu of what all interesting especially powerful people do and how the policies turn out in the field.
I think that no one with camera should ever feel frightened to take photo or record something.
I also don't really like fighting technology with law. Technology will always win eventually but it can do massive damage to progress of mankind delaying whole nations by centuries.
In 50 years projects like Google Glass will probably blend the boundary between seeing and recording so why struggle.
Well, that's an interesting perspective. But I don't think it's either desirable in itself or necessary for consistency with any higher principle, so I disagree.
Argyll and Bute Council wholly refutes the unwarranted attacks on its schools catering service which culminated in national press headlines which have led catering staff to fear for their jobs. The Council has directly avoided any criticism of anyone involved in the ‘never seconds’ blog for obvious reasons despite a strongly held view that the information presented in it misrepresented the options and choices available to pupils however this escalation means we had to act to protect staff from the distress and harm it was causing. In particular, the photographic images uploaded appear to only represent a fraction of the choices available to pupils, so a decision has been made by the council to stop photos being taken in the school canteen.
There have been discussions between senior council staff and Martha’s father however, despite an acknowledgement that the media coverage has produced these unwarranted attacks, he intimated that he would continue with the blog.
The council has had no complaints for the last two years about the quality of school meals other than one from the Payne family received on 6 June and there have been no changes to the service on offer since the introduction of the blog.
Pupils have a daily choice of two meals from a menu which is designed with pupils, parents and teachers. Our summer menu is about to be launched and includes main course choices like meat or vegetarian lasagne served with carrots and garlic bread or chicken pie with puff pastry, mashed potato and mixed vegetables.
Pupils can choose from at least two meals every day. They pay £2 for two courses and this could be a starter and a main or a main and a desert. Each meal comes with milk or water. Pupils can have as much salad and bread as they want. Salad, vegetables, fruit, yoghurt and cheese options are available every day. These are standing options and are not a result of any changes in response to the blog site.
As part of the curriculum for excellence, pupils in all our schools are regularly taught about healthy eating and at lunch breaks staff encourage pupils to make good choices from what is on offer. We use a system called ‘Nutmeg’ to make sure everything is nutritionally balanced. Our staff also get nutrition awareness training so they know how to provide a good healthy meal. There is portion sized guidance which we adhere to and it is matched to the age of the child so they get the right amount of food. Second portions would mean too many calories for pupils.
In Lochgilphead Primary School we are piloting a new pre-ordering scheme which is designed to encourage class discussion around meal choices and also improves the accuracy of meal choices. The pupils use a touch screen to select their lunch option and the data is downloaded in the kitchen so they know how many portions of each meal are required. As they place their order, the pupils are given a coloured band which relates to their meal choice that day. They wear it during the morning, and at lunchtime they hand it to the catering assistant, who will give them the corresponding meal.
The council’s focus is now on supporting the school in the education of young people in Argyll and Bute
Council leader Roddy McCuish has already changed his mind and lift the ban:
"There is no place for censorship in this Council and never will be whilst I am leader. I have advised senior officers that this Administration intends to clarify the Council's policy position in regard to taking photos in schools. I have therefore requested senior officials to consider immediately withdrawing the ban on pictures from the school dining hall until a report can be considered by Elected Members. This will allow the continuation of the "Neverseconds" blog written by an enterprising and imaginative pupil, Martha Payne which has also raised lots of money for charity.
But we all must also accept that there is absolutely no place for the type of inaccurate and abusive attack on our catering and dining hall staff, such as we saw in one newspaper yesterday which considerably inflamed the situation. That, of course, was not the fault of the blog, but of the paper.
We need to find a united way forward so I am going to bring together our catering staff, the pupils, councillors and council officials - to ensure that the council continues to provide healthy, nutrious and attractive school meals. That "School Meals Summit" will take place later this summer.
I will also meet Martha and her father as soon as I can, along with our lead councillor on Education, Michael Breslin to seek her continued engagement, along with lots of other pupils, in helping the council to get this issue right. By so doing Martha Payne and her friends will have had a strong and lasting influence not just on school meals, but on the whole of Argyll & Bute."
This statement supersedes all other council statements on the matter already issued.
Bureaucracies are probably doomed to failure in this type of situation. A better solution to all the ass-covering and denial would have to simply ask Veg to write the occasional post, with photo of course, of the healthiest meal she could purchase on given day. Then either there is evidence to support the council's claim of healthy choices being available to the pupils or something needs to be fixed.
That might well have been a reasonable compromise, but I disagree that bureaucracies are doomed to failure in situations like this. I absolutely expected them to say they're reconsidered and were prepared to let Veg keep photographing food (with perhaps some agreed guidelines). Instead they've basically said that a 9 year old was bullying them.
It wasn't intended as a compromise but as a way for the council to use the situation to their advantage. If the selection of food is as they claim then they could use the massive coverage the blog had to show that perhaps the photos were being economical with the truth. Instead by claiming that this is the deranged rantings of a 9 year old and her dad they just made the situation infinitely worse.
Thanks for the info about the Exec appearing on Radio 4, should be entertaining indeed.
"we had to act to protect staff from the distress and harm it was causing
"In particular, the photographic images uploaded appear to only represent a fraction of the choices available to pupils, so a decision has been made by the council to stop photos being taken in the school canteen."
An embarrassing own goal that could have been resolved with a simple "OK, we overreacted, Veg can carry on as before" has been turned into a quite spectacular PR catastrophe.
An Exec Director for Argyll and Bute is appearing on Radio 4 at 1pm - should be fun!
So much for that whole "you can do anything you set your mind to" bullshit they spout in most public schools (I'm assuming Scotland is the same way as in the US).
Funny how the powerholders are all talk until somebody puts their money where their mouth is (no pun intended). Here's to you, assholes in charge.
If I were in her shoes, they wouldn't have heard the last of me by a longshot. I'd start pulling out hidden cameras, and when they caught on to that I'd show my lunch around to everyone in the school during lunch...one of whom has a hidden camera and will photograph the lunch.
Once they start taking disciplinary action is when I get others to start blogs and post pictures. If for no other reason than because I'd have a damn good time doing it.
> So is her dad. In the long term, for them, a relationship with the school is important.
Definitely an aspect I didn't think about.
> All they need to do is play good citizens while the Strisand effect takes care of the rest.
Oh yes, regardless of any action on their part the council has really dug into the dung pile now.
I really like the suggestion in the comments on her blog for her to start posting pictures other kids send in. But for now it's probably best to leave the "Shut down by censorship" bulletin up, boosts the Strisand effect.
Keeping in the spirit of the parent: I guess it's story time.
When I was nine, (Pretty sure it was nine, I may have been younger.) I went to a special school. (To give you an idea of the environment, imagine a one room school with a solitary space barred by magnetic lock in the back.) And I took the bus there and back. One day while I was walking out from school to the bus, I noticed something yellow and shiny on the ground; a golden bracelet. Stepped on, worn, and mostly scrap, but a golden bracelet nonetheless. In my childhood naiveté I shouted "Hey everyone! I found a golden bracelet!".
The entire mob of fleeing kids turned around to look at me, and then just as quickly as they'd noticed, melted back into their rush to the buses. When I got home the lead instructor called to ask for the bracelet because "A couple had lost it.". This smelled like bull because as I mentioned, it was mostly scrap by this point. Probably $5 of scrap gold. So my parents ask if I'm going to give it to her:
My answer was not a chance in hell. So I went in the next day and she pulled me aside to ask for the bracelet. She asks "Where's the bracelet?". I smile and inform her that "She's not getting it.". When she asks the inevitable "why?" my enthusiasm is boiling over with excitement.
I matter-of-fact-ly tell her the truth:
"I don't give things to rip off artists."
And into the solitary room I went. (I think, my memories fuzzy after that part.)
(If you ask me about it now, theres reasons why that was really really cool, and just as many if not more why that was really really not cool.)
What I wrote above is probably the mild version of what 9 year old me would have done if he got his hands on the cameras.
EDIT: I am aware that most nine year olds are probably nothing like this. (I actually wouldn't know, I rarely got to see normal nine year olds.)
This did make me remember my school lunch days - basically tv dinners served in aluminum foil tins. I would have loved to have these lunches instead of the crap we had to eat!
Here's one of her typical reviews "Today's Shepherd's Pie was really nice. The mash on top was really creamy and the mince was in lovely gravy. I wonder where their meat comes from. The salad was lovely and crunchy. The cake looked really difficult to serve because the icing was so sticky. I saved my melon until last and it was a great way to end my lunch. Food-o-meter - 9/10, Mouthfuls - 32"