School Daze

It's interesting that educators make a big deal out of how it's important for kids to be with their "peers," and yet the only time in our lives when we're lumped together with our own age group is in school. Once we get out we're expected to interact with people of all age groups, older, younger, a whole range of people from which we select those who will be our friends. And most people move right through school, from grade to grade, suffering the company of the same limited bunch of faces. It's not natural. The old one-room schoolhouse was a little better, and since there was a single teacher the older kids helped pass on the lessons they'd learned to the younger kids, which is a pretty decent pedagogic model. Still, school was never designed to educate well. Indeed, I'd argue most schools don't educate at all, but rather they teach. We educate people to think for themselves, we teach them to think like we do.