SUFFER THE little children, with their shoulders slumping, their backs bowing - under the burdens of all that they're cramming into their ubiquitous school backpacks. So now comes a New Jersey lawmaker with a proposed state law that would limit the weights of school texts.

And we thought the problem with school texts is that they aren't weighty enough.

Of course, there's a problem here. Studies find many children's backpacks exceed 15 percent of their own weight, resulting in spinal injuries. About 5,000 kids a year end up in emergency rooms with backpack injuries.

But as anyone who's ever cleaned out a child's backpack knows, there's more here to legislate than just text weight limits - including last week's half-eaten lunch, wads of crumpled test papers, the school fund-raising kit due days ago, and all manner of electronic devices, grooming tools, comics, trading cards and, on occasion, some interesting small dead things.