School Banning "Best Friends"

[SapereAude]

Caught this the other day:

http://blog.american.com/?p=15550

Apparently the social engineers of our public school system have decided that it is wrong for a child to decide that they prefer some people to other people. It isn't "fair" and they should be friends with all people equally. In fact, if they notice best friends spending too much time together they split them up, not allowing them to sit near each other, play on the same teams or eat lunch together. The Brave New World is upon indeed.

[Zip]

As someone I'm friends with on facebook pointed out this is pure evil. You choose your friends, especially your best friend because that person reflects your values. This policy is designed to destroy the concept of personal value.

[bluecherry]

What the fuck? D:< This can do absolutely nothing but harm. Nothing. But. Harm. This will not prevent bullying or ostracism, instead, it will encourage it. Now you encourage whole groups that will join together to ostracize others and prevent some of those poor ostracized kids from forming their own smaller, but more tight knit friendships that support them and help them deal with the jerks. It makes it an awful numbers game. If you don't have X amount of friends, you aren't allowed to spend much time on forming a first friendship even, because now they think you're too exclusive and will shuffle you off onto somebody else before you can even really get established with anybody. It tends to be either single people or groups anyway that do the bullying, not just some pair of friends. Breaking people up from those who really like them won't make other people change their opinion about somebody they don't like anyway. They may even just be trying to force kids to spend more time with the bullies too since they make kids go interact with people they haven't spent much time with. Heck, and not all people are ostracized for bad reasons either. Maybe one kid is ostracized because they themselves ARE the bully and now trying to force others to be friends with them is only supplying them more with victims and having them dodge the consequences of being a jerk.

As if I didn't need more reason to be upset at the government education system. Kids have to go to these places and now there may be a trend to prevent them from forming meaningful relations and force them to instead spend time with people they don't like too? I hope this trend gets no bigger and dies off very quickly. That there are schools of kids subject to this in the first place at all is bad enough.

[D'kian]

This should teach children to think of themselves as part of a collective earlier on.

I hope some parents sue their pants off for intentional infliction of emotional distress on their children.

[John Link]

I'm heartened by the fact that almost all of the comments at The New York Times expressed dismay at the idea that friendships ought to be regulated and best friends discouraged.

[Hairnet]

School's have lost their credibility with children a long time ago. Some of my earliest thoughts were most concerned with what was wrong with schools and what sorts of bad things were they doing to me. While most kids may have not been curious enough to think about anything like that in depth, I do think most kids tune out whatever message's they try to teach us. People still have sex, people still smoke, people will still have best friends.

[Thales]

So, this is off limits:

Leftists want to remove all value from the world, so that we live in a bland, decaying cardboard world full of terrorists. Who is attracted to that?????

[softwareNerd]

Apparently the social engineers of our public school system have decided that it is wrong for a child to decide that they prefer some people to other people.

This is crazy. If anything, I were running a school, I'd ask myself how the system's design could help kids find and keep best friends.

Quite apart from today's "fairness doctrine", there is another motive that even traditional teachers have. They are wary of the groups that form among kids, because the cohesiveness/unity makes the class more difficult to control. Probably, good curriculum and good teaching would reduce that problem significantly, and may even turn it into a positive.

[Amaroq]

If/when I have children someday, I won't let them touch the public school system with a ten foot pole. Profoundly evil bullshit like this just makes that even more clear to me.

[RussK]

John Dewey wouldn't have even thought of this. If only he were alive now to see how far his ideas have progressed; I think he would be shocked--in a very happy, giddy way.