School Doesn’t “Socialize” Kids

In my previous post, I explained why I hate school, citing mainly its academic worthlessness.  Some agree that school largely fails to educate, but they maintain that we need it because it “socializes” children—or teaches them to interact with other people.  I find this argument pathetic.

Imagine a world without compulsory schooling.  School does not exist.  It never has existed.  Maybe some children are slow to socialize because they are not regularly in contact with people outside their immediate families.  How to solve this problem?

I would wager my eternal soul that no one would conclude we need buildings where all people below the age of eighteen are forced to spend the majority of their time studying academic subjects, mainly in silence and under close adult supervision, for durations exceeding a third of the waking day.

My point is that one can argue school exists as a tool primarily to educate, which helps to socialize in the meantime, but one would be senseless to argue that school is a tool primarily to socialize.  It’s designed to educate.  If it fails to educate, then it should be scrapped for something else.

This means that socialization is not sufficient reason to support school as we know it, but I’ll go further.  It isn’t a reason at all.  In fact, it’s a reason to oppose school.  School’s purported methods of socialization are actually counterproductive.

Much of what’s meant by socialization is contained in the word “restraint.”  If you haven’t developed restraint by adulthood, major realms of society will be off-limits to you.  Some behaviors just aren’t acceptable in formal environments, and practice in school is supposed to ensure you’re prepared to abstain from them.

Let me tell you a story about restraint.

Last week, I participated in a mandatory all-day field trip where the Honors Government classes at my high school went to our city municipal building, the place our local government assembles.

We were to play the roles of citizens, councilmen, city clerk, mayor, and others to conduct our own mock council meeting.  We were told to dress formally for the occasion, so at 7:00 AM, before the bus came to ferry us across town, the main lobby was overflowing with seniors in suit jackets, ties, and smart blouses.

One of my classmates, who was wearing a fancy watch, got the attention of an acquaintance.  “According to my watch…” he said, and he made a great display of reading the time, “…you’re a little bitch!”

This was said lightheartedly of course, and the target of the insult found it funny, but it was not the sort of joke that would suggest appropriate restraint in a professional environment.  And that’s to say nothing of the less-than-regal behaviors that plagued us once we began the council meeting, for which we were explicitly directed to emulate professionals.

We looked the part of refined adults that day, but there is a very different culture that pervades groups of teenagers when they are confined together for years on end and treated like little children.  It should be obvious to anyone who remembers high school that the conventional standards of polite interaction do not hold.  You’re not going to learn proper restraint in high school.  If you practice it, you might actually slide a rung or two down the social ladder, so it’s not uncommon for reasonable people to fall into bad habits of socialization.

Kids were even less professional in middle school, where it was popular for boys to harass their friends with little pokes and pinches, called “tazes” or “bee stings,” and ferret out impossibly vague sexual innuendos from ordinary speech.  I can guess that the politics among girls were at least as ridiculous.  And in elementary school, it was a constant objective of half of one’s classmates to “tell” on him, having him punished for trivial or nonexistent infractions.

When we disallow first graders the company of anyone older—except parents and teachers who act as godlike authorities instead of social models—their culture must arise from their own social ignorance.  Watching first graders develop alone with their age peers is like peering into a petri dish of organic alien chemicals, unable to look away for a morbid curiosity of what horrors will emerge from the ooze.  I know I went into first grade more mature than I left it.  All the social norms that were impressed upon me look outrageous in hindsight.  My natural disposition was far more courteous and restrained.

The kind of socialization that goes on in schools does not prepare students for adult life, and conversation is rare regardless because “I shouldn’t be hearing talking!”  Obviously, the classroom is not an ideal venue for spending time with friends.  In contrast, I’ve had my best and most intimate experiences with friends during summer breaks, when we waged Airsoft wars in our backyards and discussed video games over Skype.

After all, it is the nature of children to seek and enjoy socialization, even when we are not forced.  We find it so enjoyable that grounding—forbidding it—is an effective and dreaded punishment.  We find it so enjoyable that we are known to bemoan homework for preventing us from chatting or gathering with our friends.  School strikes again!  On the whole, most people will spend far more time engaged in healthy socialization without school and its work.

If you defend school mainly as a vehicle of socialization and these arguments can do nothing to sway you, at least consider this question: when am I well enough socialized that I no longer need forcing?

When people talk about school teaching children to interact with others, I think they tend to envision kindergartners speaking for the first time with kids their age, learning that it’s not acceptable to draw on their friends’ property.

I’m growing a beard.  I’m a private math tutor who has worked with many students, older and younger.  I’m articulate.  Few envision me when they advocate forced socialization for children, yet, come Monday, I’ll be back in school on its account. I work the equivalent of a full-time job for zero tangible compensation because I’m supposedly being imbued with valuable skills.  If those skills are already present in me, is there not calamity afoot?  Don’t I at least deserve a chance to show whether I’m already socialized before I’m made to devote the majority of my energy to becoming so?

And it’s not just seventeen-year-olds that I suspect harbor adequately socialized individuals.  I believe, for example, that many sixth graders are secretly capable of interacting very maturely.  I say “secretly” because they’re not strolling through their school hallways like 5-foot businessmen—that would be immensely stupid; as I’ve said, adult mannerisms are not praiseworthy in middle school—but when they speak one-on-one with an older person whose respect they value, it’s remarkable how much they’re able to pry themselves from their usual habits.  My sixth-grade sister reports that her peers can be strikingly juvenile, but when I have the privilege to tutor the exact targets of her vexation, I find they converse with perfect restraint.

We should do away with the notion of school as a socializer entirely, but if we can’t, we should at least offer a test to free demonstrably socialized individuals—high, middle, or elementary schoolers—from its compulsory socialization.  We children aren’t supposed to like tests, but I have a feeling most us would agree that an objective assessment is preferable to marking socialization, like education, another of those mystical progressions that lasts precisely twelve years for everyone.

An objective test of socialization might seem impossible on early consideration, but there are ways about it.  Here’s one option:

The child and a proctor have a conversation.  The same proctor has a similar conversation with an adult.  Based on the transcripts, a set of evaluators guesses which conversation was the product of two adults and which conversation involved a child.  If fewer than 75% correctly distinguish them, the child is forever deemed socialized.

There are countless details to be haggled over here, but such a system is, at its core, workable.  To those concerned with its cost, remember that its goal is to remove people prematurely and permanently from our public education system.  It’s a money-saving venture, not an expense.

In summary, our compulsory education system does not educate, and it’s a shame that an insubstantial argument like “All minors need mandatory socialization” should redeem it in the minds of so many.  I’ve lost years of life to that strained logic, and a hundred angsty blog posts could never win them back.

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Written: 12/23/2015