Or we could just let the wolves teach them. Couldn't be that much worse.

[pktechgirlbackup]

Embedded all over previous posts is the idea that children need to be with other children of their same maturity level. Implicit in that is the idea that the children will be somewhat close in age, because a mature 9 year old is not going to benefit from a friendship with an immature 15 year old. Moreover, when we group kids, it's in roughly same age/maturity groups. On one hand, I feel very very strongly about this: kids should be with their peers, it's warping to be with kids too much older and boring to be with kids too much younger. On the other hand, there's several hundred thousand years of human history that says I'm not only wrong, but deeply, horrifically wrong.

Up till, I dunno, 150 years ago, the idea of a large group of same-age children interacting mostly with each other wasn't just weird, it was impossible. Kids were automatically exposed to lots of grown ups and older kids as a matter of course, and learned through imitation. With that lens, letting a bunch of same maturity kids learn social skills from each other sounds like as good an idea as letting them learn surgery from each other. Which doesn't mean letting modern 8 year olds learn social skills from modern 12 year olds is a good idea, but does mean we're even further from a workable system

Possible counter argument: I've broken my non-fiction fast with Unequal Childhoods.* One of the things she describes is that middle class children spend a lot of time in highly organized activities with same age peers, and working class and poor kids spend a lot of time in unorganized activities with neighbors and relatives that feature a wider age span. I have some quibbles with things the middle class does, but forced to choose, I think the overall middle class behavior system does better by kids than the poor or working class, and maybe the tight age banding is part of that.


*Impossible to know if this is a property of the specific book or something changed in me during the fast, but I'm thinking more about this book than I usually do and feeling more need to share it as I read it. So if you thought I was doing a lot of underprivileged children blogging before...

Comments

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

Obviously those things are important, but without seeing those things without the tight age banding, we can't know if it makes a difference on the margin. Basically, the fact that these things occur in a package makes me wonder about the effects of removing one element.