The problem:
If we treat kids like prisoners, herd them into prison-like buildings, and provide insufficient adult supervision, we **will** see PRISON SOCIAL PATHOLOGY!
Fundamentally, I believe that our human ancestors, all 150,000 years of them, would be both amused and horrified that we treat children as cruelly as we do. I doubt that there is any documented account of any historical culture educating children as we do now. Even in my father's day, it was more likely that children attended extremely small one-room-schools of mixed aged children and they were finished by the 8th grade. The very idea of kindergarten did not exist. ( He was born in 1913.)
I've been going to the beach since I was an infant. As they say in Philly, “Down the shore!”. One day I was watching my children and the other children playing on the beach and it occurred to me that I had never, in more than 40 years, seen bullying on the beach among the elementary or middle school aged children, or experienced it myself. Why was that I wondered. I observed the following:
** There was more than enough adult supervision. Drowning is always a danger on a beach, and because of this there are enough adult eyes watching what is going on. I suspect that the children subconsciously know this.
** The older children were eager to teach the younger children the new skills they had mastered on a year or two before. One afternoon I watched a ten year old work with a 6 year old for literally the entire day on doing cartwheels. Geeze! That trashes the idea that children have short attention spans, or that children are only interested in their narrow age group.
** Mixed ages of children commonly played together. The most common range seemed to be within 4 years.
** When children were tired or hungry, they freely left the play group and took a rest.
** When younger children threw sand or accidentally stepped on a sand project, the older children gently taught them beach manners.
** Older children organized team games, and agreed upon rules. I concluded that the “real world” team skills and cooperation are learned in **PLAY** not in any hot house, school-created, and artificially created project.
Please read my post, #67.
Spot on observation.