It’s an exciting time to be a teacher or student at Freeport High School. Within a stone’s throw of the school is a live clinic in civics, history, economics, moral choices, business regulation, politics and the law and so much more — all rolled into one.

The Sheetz convenience store on Route 356, adjacent to school property, has applied for a state liquor license to sell beer and wine.

The school district has lodged a protest with the Pennsylvania Liquor Conrol Board. Dan Lucovich, school board president, hopes the license is denied based on proximity — one building and the football stadium are well within 300 feet required by state regulation.

By contrast, the state liquor store in the Buffalo Plaza is much more distant — about 1,300 feet from the Freeport Middle School property. And we must admit that juveniles don’t walk in and out of liquor stores the way they do a convenience store.

Nonetheless, this issue might be more about archaic attitudes toward adult beverages than it is about convenience, customer service and proximity to the school.

We’re rapidly approaching the centennial of Prohibition. Amid a period of Protestant revival and post-World War I grain shortages that essentially halted beer and liquor production anyway, temperance-minded Americans ratified the 18th Amendment banning the manufacture, transportation and sale of alcoholic beverages. Industrial titans of the era were only too happy to support temperance, realizing that sober workers were more productive and less prone to accidental injury. Prohibition went into effect in 1920.

It was repealed 13 years later, but not until resistance to Prohibition gave rise to moonshiners, bootleggers, speakeasies and, ironically, the NASCAR circuit. Newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt was reported to have celebrated the repeal of the 18th Amendment with a dirty martini — vodka, olive brine and vermouth — his beverage of choice.

Pennsylvania led the temperance movement. Keystone voters bucked the FDR landslide in 1932 and voted for a third term for Herbert Hoover despite the deepening Depression. Only five other states picked Hoover — New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maine, Delaware and Vermont. Hoover got more popular and electoral votes from Pennsylvania than from the other five states combined.

Public opinion swings like a pendulum, first in one direction and then in the opposite, coming back to nearly its original position. Opinion then proceeds to sway back and forth, eventually coming to rest — if you’re patient and wait for it — midway between the extremes.

That’s what happens in most cases. But not with alcohol sales in Pennsylvania. Politicians with intentions both good and greedy have kept the pendulum in play for 100 years.

Blue laws and a breakup of the state monopoly on liquor and wine sales appears to be inevitable in Pennsylvania. It’s what the people want and what the state must do to accommodate us. The Liquor Control Board is not Herbert Hoover. It is nobody’s nanny.

We can be sure that more than a few students shop regularly at Sheetz for a variety of snacks, drinks and other items. Teachers probably get their morning coffee on their way to work — and, we would safely wager some would jump at the chance to pick up a cold six-pack or bottle of wine on their way home from work, too.

Sheetz spokesman Nick Ruffner says his company is “dedicated to being good neighbors to the communities and school districts where our 558 store locations call home.” There is no reason to doubt that — and until there is a reason to doubt it, the state should issue the liquor license.