Is schooling asocial?

"Aye lass we of the send them down the mines when they are ten committee agrees wiz you."

 

That's another thing....

 

In fairly recent times gone by youngsters were expected to work. My parents' generation began full time work at 14, and in those days full time meant 48 hours per week.  Their generation worked during out of school hours too, helping with seasonal agricultural tasks, shop work, in laundries and on trawlers and pleasure boats, carpenters shops and funeral directors.  You name the trade and school age kids had part time and holiday jobs in it.

Then the UK went almost directly from shoving 7 year olds up chimneys and down mines into forbidding under 16s to engage in any remunerative work whatsoever - paper rounds aside - and even paper rounds are strictly controlled. 

 

One year British workaday society was made up of the entire age range gamut and then suddenly school age youngsters were withdrawn from daily contact with their communities.  Not only that, but they were incarcerated with others of exactly the same chronological year of birth.  How would you like to be forced to spend every weekday with a peer group made up solely of people of exactly your own age plus one older person in charge of all?  I can think of fewer more unhappy and less developmental ways to spend over 10.000 hours of the most synaptically active period of life.  It's no wonder that modern youth don't know what life is really about - they're removed from it and kept in seclusion in classrooms.

 

Healthy activity is something sadly lacking in youngsters lives these days.  They're overweight, inactive, unhealthy and often bored to the extent that vandalism seems like an exciting wayto pass time.  They often have difficulty relating to people outside their age cohort, resent being asked to do something useful and seem unable to undertake the simplest tasks such as changing a plug, dibbing in plants, hanging laundry or cooking a simple meal.  Youngsters now are mere children, and for most that state lasts until they are well beyond their teens. 

 

It's time we rethought schooling and stopped trapping all young people inside stuffy classrooms full of their resentful bored and socially inept fellows.