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But they can't know until they try and it's a set of worthwhile skills to have, either way... Why not teach it to them?

Why force people to partake something they don't enjoy, if it involves other kids let the kids who dislike it or hate it stay and cause some of the other kids to possibly suffer?

By that logic we should release all kids who do not like schooling, which is every kid at some point, from schooling.
And then where would we be?

What I'm saying is that your argument is only fair if it can be applied to every discipline which it can't be, not reasonably anyways... I think that seeing art as not equal to the other disciplines is an unfortunate and common practice which really does short out our youth.

As Chanku said, mandatory study of the arts isn't to be encouraged the same way mandatory study of humanities isn't. We should trust children to select their own pathways.

We don't have free meals for 5-7 year olds in tks country, yet. Most polls show a likely Labour majority in 2015 though, and introducing them is one of Miliband's more recent pledges. It's a waste of money, quite frankly, we've lived perfectly fine with parents giving their children sandwiches and frubes for decades. I ate packed lunches at school. I still do. I'm not discriminated against for it, my life isn't impaired in any way by it. The idea is shameless populism, because it's impossible for the Conservatives to argue against feeding children.

How do you know that "we've lived perfectly fine" as it is? Just because you and the people you know have done fine doesn't mean that everyone has. I got free lunch when I was in school, and although I didn't realize it at the time growing up, now that I'm a adult and know just how poor we were when I was a child, I know how fortunate we were to be spared that ~$30/month bill. That was a lot of money when I was in grade school in the 90s, by the way.

Recently in America there's been a big to do about children's lunch money bills, including a recent story I read where a child was forced to dump his lunch in the garbage because his account had a debt of $2. I understand that when lunch bills aren't paid the schools end up footing the bill, but it seems to me that this would be happening a lot more if there wasn't a free lunch program in most states. I'm hardly an expert on the issues of the British school systems, but I can't imagine it's all that different there.

Of course, with Michelle Obama's meddling with the school lunch program, I understand most students want to throw their lunches in the garbage anyways. :-X

I grew up in a very deprived area of the country, with an unemployed single mother. I think I'm better qualified than most to make that judgement.

I also grew up in a very deprived area of my country, with a single mother (after I was 13). It's when I realized just how poor we had always been all along.

Poverty sucks, but the difference between our countries is that the UK is a welfare state, the US is not. Our safety nets are already wide-reaching, and the free school meal proposal is just silly when a) kids with unemployed parents are entitled to free meals anyway, and b) we're running out of money (as a state) to throw away on these things. We should be cutting unnecessary spending, not increasing it.

Well, I remember when my parents divorced, one of the first things we had to do was sign up for food stamps. We were getting child support and my mom was working part-time and odd jobs, but it just wasn't enough...to this day I marvel at how much money just paying bills takes. So technically we were receiving free food anyways, but the free meal program was still nice...I actually enjoyed most school lunches, they were relatively good and nutritious (regardless of the naysayers now), and it was about $30 a month of extra food that we didn't have to spend ourselves. I'm not sure what exactly Britain offers, but we only received a few hundred dollars in stamps a month.

I agree that we (as in all countries in our situations) should be cutting unnecessary spending, but without doing more research on the topic I would hesitate to call something like food to children unnecessary, especially given my own history.