what social skills you are supposed to learn from going to school? How come you need to go to nursery to learn how to go to school? Doesn’t any of this strike any member of the public as just a touch on the ridiculous side? Try the answers to this grauniad question if you feel like reading and weeping.
Today, after I’d got ludicrously cold and wet in a field in Halifax (unfortunately, I don’t believe anyone took a picture of me sitting in a wheelbarrow while some guy poured a bucket of cold dirty water over my head – even my knickers were wet! ) I went back to a colleague’s house to get warm and dry. After we’d eaten (she cooked for me) and talked about work (sad, I know) we got on to life in general, and she asked about the rules and regulations around home education.
There aren’t really any, I said, and explained the current legal position. And then she asked about socialisation. Please tell me, I replied, in what other situation in your life you are required to spend your entire day with approx 30 other ppl selected purely on the face their age is within 6 months or thereabouts of yours? She agreed, and recalled that when she met my children they were extremely capable of holding (slightly odd) conversations with all and sundry, not doing the common small child thing of just staring at the strange adult.
(On the offchance that S finds her way to this blog, this is not a rant aimed at you at all, it’s been bubbling up for a while!).
So school socialisation is not really an applicable social skill for day to day life is it? In fact, I think it goes a long way to explaining the disaffection of today’s teenagers – they are lumped in together, herded from place to place, dismissed as unimportant and unintelligent, non contributory and then suddenly, that’s all their fault. What, are they supposed to be grateful for this treatment? Returning to the conversation with my parent’s friends yesterday, they were recounting the work experience saga they are undertaking. Apparently all year 10/11 children now undertake 2 weeks work experience. This is not, though, supposed to allow them to necessarily experience the work that they are interested in, as they mentioned the boy who wanted to go into the army, who ended up spending two weeks in a hairdresser! It’s supposed to introduce them to the idea of working. Which is fundamentally different to school how in this situation? You go somewhere you don’t want to be and get told to do something you aren’t interested in doing. :/ Point proved I think.
I would just like to know how socialisation and school have come to be synonymous, in the same way they’d like us to believe that school and education are synonymous, rather than the reality for many children that they are actually polar opposites.
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