We all had at least one of "those" teachers in school -- and the unlucky among us had two or three: the type who assumed she could reform troublemakers by denying everybody recess even if only a few people had misbehaved. (Are we imagining it, or did substitute teachers seem especially prone to this tactic?)
At any rate, the idea was that innocent students would lean on wrongdoers to get them to straighten up and fly right. The jury is still out on whether that remarkably unjust strategy worked, particularly considering the fact that bullying miscreants into doing the right thing isn't generally in the nature of well-behaved students to begin with.
Now, fast forward to 2012 and the state of Massachusetts, which has embarked on its own official form of collective punishment in schools. The state has banned bake sales in public schools from 30 minutes before classes start to 30 minutes after the end of the school day.
You know, the childhood obesity crisis and all. Can't have school bands raising money for the new trombones through the sale of brownies and cupcakes -- even if there is not the slightest evidence that celery stick vending will make up the difference, nor any certainty that the ban will result in significant weight loss among the reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic set.
What it will do is send a message to students that the inability of other pupils to handle some simple freedoms means those freedoms should be denied to everyone.
Yesterday's universally forbidden playground time becomes today's all-encompassing cookie ban.
And that is part of a far broader, if not always quite so draconian, public push on the childhood obesity front.
The Institute of Medicine, which advises the federal government, recently issued a report declaring schools more or less ground zero for the battle to slim down youngsters. It also urged a special tax on sugared-up soft drinks and said restaurants should expand their healthful meal options for children without charging more for those meals.
Its proposals were rapidly endorsed by the self-styled Center for Science in the Public Interest. (The "public interest" evidently not including things such as individual responsibility, free choice and an understanding of the fact that prices reflect costs and can't be wished away.)
Of course, Washington already has begun requiring more nutritious meals in schools -- without adequately funding that mandate. Governors from across the United States sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture last year noting that the short-term cash coming from Washington to help underwrite the costlier meals was far too little to cover the expense and would put the states in a financial bind.
No matter. Congress and the president are convinced that their way is best, despite the notorious failure of big federal interventions to produce the desired results. (Think: the War on Poverty -- aka, the War to Make Poverty Permanent.)
Look, the point isn't that obesity -- childhood or otherwise -- is OK. It's not. It creates massive health care costs and deprives millions of people of happier lives. Neither should schools simply dish out junk food and leave it at that.
But the evidence that government can solve obesity among schoolchildren or any other group is marginal at best.
That's because school breakfasts and lunches -- and bake sales -- aren't primarily where children learn habits that lead to obesity. Broken, undisciplined homes are the root of the problem. Even in their earliest years in school, many children already have deeply ingrained eating patterns that the finest school lunch programs and the most lavish federal, state or local government spending generally won't be able to reverse.
U.S. Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., put the broader challenge in the starkest possible terms: "[Y]ou would not be able to print enough money in a thousand years to pay for the government you would need if the traditional family collapses," he said.
If he was wrong about anything, it was that "if" part. As commentator Mark Steyn has observed, "Pence's doomsday scenario is already here: ... Seventy percent of black children are born out of wedlock, as are 70 percent of the offspring of poor white women, as are a majority of Hispanic babies. Forty percent of American children are born outside marriage; among women under 30, a majority of children are."
That makes so much of the government's battle against childhood obesity an exercise in Band-Aid allocation.
Government can't fix obesity. It can, however, wreck state and federal budgets and make us a less free people in the attempt.