EPTWatch the video first.
I want to focus on one aspect of schooling. The social hierarchy. It is my belief that this aspect of schooling is the most neglected but the most important part of your child's time at school. Why? Because when parents send their kids to school, they tend to have this in their minds;
![[image loading]](http://www.earlytraumagrief.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/School.jpg)
The asian kid couldn't be here because he was in tutoring class.....
This post isn't about bullying. There are plenty written on the issue and I don't believe I have anything valuable to add. This is about the mistaken beliefs of parents on;
1. What school is
2. What parents should do
What school is
School is first and formost a day care centre for non-adults. This day care centre also happens to have the characteristics of the jungle. As soon as your child enters, he/she is being judged by the other inhabitants of the jungle. Is he a lion, is he a deer, does he look/talk like us? They will poke and prod like what farmers do when they're buying livestock. You best hope your kid passes the tests. If you're lucky, he will rank highly. If not well.... you watched the video right?
This passage from David Foster Wallace describes what school is actually like if your kid fails these social tests.
A SNOOTlet is a little kid who’s wildly, precociously fluent in SWE—Standard Written English—(he is often, recall, the offspring of SNOOTs). Just about every class has a SNOOTlet, so I know you’ve seen them — these are the sorts of six-to-twelve-year-olds who use whom correctly and whose response to striking out in T-ball is to shout “How incalculably dreadful!” The elementary-school SNOOTlet is one of the earliest identifiable species of academic geekoid and is duly despised by his peers and praised by his teachers. These teachers usually don’t see the incredible amounts of punishment the SNOOTlet is receiving from his classmates, or if they do see it they blame the classmates and shake their heads sadly at the vicious and aribtrary cruelty of which children are capable.
Teachers who do this are dumb. The truth is that his peers’ punishment of the SNOOTlet is not arbitrary at all. There are important things at stake. Little kids in school are learning about Group-inclusion and -exclusion and about the respective rewards and penalties of same and about the use of dialect and syntax and slang as signals of affinity and inclusion. They’re learning about Discourse Communities. Little kids learn this stuff not in Language Arts or Social Studies but on the playgroun and the bus and at lunch. When his peers are ostracizing the SNOOTlet or giving him monstrous quadruple Wedgies or holding him down and taking turns spitting on him, there’s serious learning going on. Everybody here is learning except the little SNOOT—in fact, what the SNOOTlet is being punished for is precisely his failure to learn. And his Language Arts teacher — whose own Elementary Education training prizes “linguistic facility” as one of the “social skills” that ensure children’s “developmentally appropriate peer repport,” but who does not or cannot consider the possibility that linguistic facility might involve more than lapirdary SWE — is unable to see that her beloved SNOOTlet is actually deficient in Language Arts. He has only one dialect. He cannot alter his vocabulary, usage, or grammer, cannot use slang or vulgarity; and it’s these abilities that are really required for “peer rapport,” which is just a fancy academic term for being accepted by the second-most-important Group in the little kids life. If he is sufficiently clueless, it may take years and unbelievable amounts of punishment before the SNOOTlet learns that you need more than one dialect to get along in school.
…The point is a little A+ SNOOTlet is actually in the same dialectal position as the class’s “slow” kid who can’t learn to stop using ain’t or bringed. Exactly the same position. One is punished in class, the other on the playground, but both are deficient in the same linguistic skill — viz., the ability to move between carious dialects and levels of “correctness,” the ability to communication one way with peers and another way with teachers and another with family and another with T-ball coaches and so on.
Too many parents believe the most important part of their child's schooling life is leaving it with a lot of academic knowledge. This is foolish. I won't go into how and why schools are bad place to learn (thats a whole other can of worms). Suffice to say that for what they take (fees,12yrs,etc) compared to what your child gets, it is a horrible trade.
What parents should do
Realize that school isn't just a place where knowledge is downloaded into your child's brain and a ticket into university. It's a jungle where social hierarchy can seriously warp your child's self image and confidence. So what should parents do? Send them into the jungle with weapons.
Weapon 1: basic social skills
Even a simple "Hi my name is Jaedong, would you like to play?" on the first day of school is huge. Sounds simple but realize that social circles form fast in school and it is hard for children to break into it once they've become isolated. It is a lot harder to bully a group than an individual.
Weapon 2: fists
Self explanatory. Have you ever seen someone who knows how to fight but lacks confidence? I haven't.
Weapon 3: mindset
Realize that the whole school thing is just a game. You win by not losing your curiosity, self confidence and making good friends. Everything else is just byproduct.
Conclusion
This blog isn't about bashing schools or about bullies. The point is to change the mindset of parents and make them remember what school actually is and better prepare their children for it.
