Can't Even Google "Age Segregation"

Not much written on that subject, huh?

My own undeveloped theory is that *age segregation* may in fact be the worst aspect of government factory schooling. Yeah, worse than the 30-1 student/teacher ratio; and worse than curricula learning. But I'm not really sure.

One guy thinks that age-graded socialization contributes to a *youth culture*, thereby increasing the crime rate.

Another asserts that age segregation *divides the family*. (For $12 I just had to order his book.)

Getting back to that first link for a second....it had two hilarious quotes on the *school's* ability to reform society. First, from the infamous grandfather of modern schooling - Horace Mann:

....The Common School is the institution which can receive and train up children in the elements of all good knowledge, and of virtue, before they are subjected to the alienating competitions of life. This institution is the greatest discovery ever made by man;--we repeat it, the common school is the greatest discovery ever made by man. In two grand, characteristic attributes, it is supereminent over all others: --first, in its universality;--for it is capacious enough to receive and cherish in its parental bosom every child that comes into the world; and second, in the timeliness of the aid it proffers; --its early, seasonable supplies of counsel and guidance making security antedate danger. Other social organizations are curative and remedial; this is a preventive and an antidote; they come to heal diseases and wounds; this to make the physical and moral frame invulnerable to them. Let the Common School be expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged; men would walk more safely by day; every pillow would be more inviolate by night; property, life, and character held by a stronger tenure; all rational hopes respecting the future brightened.

90% of the penal code obsolete?

Hah!

Shouldn't anyone who was that wrong ON ANYTHING be officially certified as a complete quack?

Instead we have statues and buildings erected in honor of Horace Mann.

And here's the NEA some 78 years ago on the curative and remedial powers of government schools. Try to not urinate in your slacks:

People have long been speculating on what relationship school might have to crime. A fairly typical example of the mainstream American view is found in the January 10, 1931 Literary Digest, in a brief article entitled "What We Shall Be Like in 1950" (pages 43-44). The predictions in that article are described as "definite prophecies made by the National Education Association" and adapted from a publication called Tomorrow's Business (New York) published by the Shaw-Walker company. The NEA prediction of most interest here, not attributed to any particular individual, is "Crime will be virtually abolished by transferring to the preventive processes of the school and education the problems of conduct which police, courts, and prisons now remedy when it is too late." I wasn't born in 1950, so I don't know if this was an accurate prediction of that year, but today I still hear predictions that schools will prevent crime.

No more crime, heh?

Too bad we can't exhume these long-since-dead Morons and force them to watch Season Four of the The Wire....or the local nightly news!



See also:

"Not Because We Care About Children" - NEA

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