Parenting & Family Quote by Jeanne Kohl-Welles

There is a politician's neat little magic trick at work here: take a sprawling public-health crisis and pin it to a single, emotionally charged setting where adults feel both protective and accusatory. "Our children" is the softest possible shield, making disagreement sound like callousness. "Going to school" narrows the blame to an institution everyone funds and trusts. Then the real provocation lands: "learn how to become obese", a phrase that recasts weight gain as curriculum, as if obesity is a skill being taught between algebra and recess. That framing is rhetorically effective because it turns passive environments into active wrongdoing.

The intent is policy pressure: justify tighter nutrition standards, limit sugary drinks, rework cafeteria menus, increase PE, or regulate vending contracts. It's also a signal to parents that the state is willing to fight on their behalf against an ecosystem of cheap calories. The subtext, though, flirts with moralizing. By suggesting children "learn" obesity, it implies adult negligence and institutional complicity, while skating past harder drivers like poverty, time scarcity, food deserts, marketing, and stress.

Context matters because schools are one of the few universal points of contact government can actually control. You can't legislate every dinner table, but you can legislate lunch. The line works because it channels frustration into a target that feels actionable, even as it risks stigmatizing kids by making their bodies sound like evidence of someone else's failure.