Schools Ban Best Friends – Why?

British school teachers are banning children from having best friends while encouraging them to “play in large groups” instead. That’s right kids, no BFF for you!

Schools ban children making best friends

Pals … but kids told to form groups (The Sun: 19th March 2012)

TEACHERS are banning schoolkids from having best pals — so they don’t get upset by fall-outs.

Educational psychologist Gaynor Sbuttoni said the policy has been used at schools in Kingston, South West London, and Surrey.

She added: “I have noticed that teachers tell children they shouldn’t have a best friend and that everyone should play together.

“They are doing it because they want to save the child the pain of splitting up from their best friend. But it is natural for some children to want a best friend. If they break up, they have to feel the pain because they’re learning to deal with it.”

The Sun‘s Deidre Sanders added her 2 cents regarding this stupid policy at the end of the article, blaming it on insecure teachers.

THIS policy doesn’t just fly in the face of common sense, it’s chilling.

Our childhood friendships are how we begin to learn about love and commitment. Of course they often break up, and that is how we learn resilience so we can cope with rejection later.

Such a ruling has stemmed from teachers lacking confidence and skills to deal with the fall-out from classmates’ rows.

The idea that best friends should be banned is indeed chilling. But that’s London, it’ll never happen here in “the land of the free,” right?

Um, uh, wait a minute here … Take a look at this from a year ago.

Best Friend Ban? What a Lousy, Orwellian Way to Rear Children

Hey there, helicopter parents and minions in schools, camps and extra-circular activities: “Nineteen Eighty-Four” called. It wants its fascism back.

[Administrators] claim the best friend paradigm smacks of exclusivity and cliques, which could lead to bullying.

In recent years Timber Lake Camp, a co-ed sleep-away camp in Phoenicia, N.Y., has started employing “friendship coaches” to work with campers to help every child become friends with everyone else… “I don’t think it’s particularly healthy for a child to rely on one friend,” said Jay Jacobs, the camp’s director. “If something goes awry, it can be devastating.”

I guess these parents and educators should tell kids to forget about college or a career, because if something goes awry, it can be devastating. Best to stick to minimum-wage jobs. By the same token, these parents should discourage marriage and encourage communes, like the ones that sprang up in the 1960s. After all, a marriage focuses on just one person. How unfair.

If we’re going to outlaw best friends, what’s next? Chocolate? Might as well outlaw life. It always ends badly, you know.

By this fail-safe standard, one should not attempt any feat. Baking pastries, for instance, can end in disaster.

The New York Times article referenced above offers some valuable insight into what these BFF bans are all about.

A Best Friend? You Must Be Kidding

Most children naturally seek close friends. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Americans ages 8 to 24 conducted last year by Harris Interactive, 94 percent said they had at least one close friend. But the classic best-friend bond — the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who gravitate to each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school — signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying.

Conformity.

Individuals are a problem because they’re too difficult to control.

“I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”

“Parents sometimes say Johnny needs that one special friend,” she continued. “We say he doesn’t need a best friend.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Kids want a best friend. Parents want their children to have a best friend. But “teachers and counselors” think otherwise, so they’re actively working against the wishes of both the children and their parents.

In other words, schools “are usurping the parental role of teaching personal values to children. They are not acting as educators but as guardians, in loco parentis (in the place of a parent).”

The People’s Romance with the Savior State

You may wonder how they get away with this. Why have parents surrendered so much control?

That attitude is a blunt manifestation of a mind-set that has led adults to become ever more involved in children’s social lives in recent years. The days when children roamed the neighborhood and played with whomever they wanted to until the streetlights came on disappeared long ago, replaced by the scheduled play date. While in the past a social slight in backyard games rarely came to teachers’ attention the next day, today an upsetting text message from one middle school student to another is often forwarded to school administrators, who frequently feel compelled to intervene in the relationship.

Americans today, both on the political left and right, imagine the state to be the people’s guardian and guarantor of well-being and morality. Convinced they need to be on constant guard against Ghosts & Goblins (thanks in no small part to government fear-mongering), it’s only natural then, that they turn to their guardian of well-being and morality- the Savior State .

Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Daniel B. Klein, describes this as “The People’s Romance.” According to Klein, the reason so many of us seek political “solutions” is because we believe it is government which provides us a “common frame of reference, a set of cultural focal points, a sense of togetherness and common experience … ” Furthermore, political action indulges the romantic notion that “we’re all working together.”

Klein also reminds us of Adam Smith’s recurrent theme that “man yearns for coordinated sentiment like he yearns for food in his belly.” Indeed, man is a social animal. The problem, however, is that our yearning for “coordinated sentiment” manifests itself via the coercive power of the state.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. — H. L. Mencken

Hobgoblins

Smitten with power, politicians and bureaucrats naturally seek to expand their authority. To do so, they cultivate and exploit one of our most vital human instincts – fear. Hunger, poverty, illiteracy … predators, poisons, disease … invaders, terrorists, nuclear attack … government can, should, and will provide the necessary “coordinated sentiment” to ward off everything the people fear (whether you like it or not).

Governments always find new hobgoblins from which to protect us. The entire history of the 20th century is the story of governments beating the drums of fear in order to secure their dominance and expand control. Blinded by romance, we cheered for our “good guy” rulers to get the “bad guys” … and slowly our “government of the people” grew to become the sovereign state – ruler and creator of civil society itself.

Helicopter parents are simply the logical outcome of perpetual fear-mongering mixed with “The People’s Romance.” Politicians manipulate our fears for political purposes. The media manipulates our fears for ratings and also for political purposes. And the people demand “something must be done.”

Our kids are in danger, dontcha know? In fact we’re all in danger. We gotta do something! “You need to be there in case something happens,” but you can’t always be there, can you? So somebody … “the government needs to do something about … [drop in anything here]!”

Politicians in the upper echelons “never let a good crisis go to waste,” others may simply fear being blamed for bad outcomes (which are really out of their control), so new regulations and laws are passed. Government power increases. Liberty retracts. Of course one overreaction leads to another … and The People’s Romance with the Savior State has brought America’s once “rugged individuals” to their knees.

Schools

It’s no secret that public schools provide the state a powerful indoctrination tool. Israeli military historian and theorist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Martin van Creveld, points out in The Rise and Decline of the State, that American public schooling originated with socialists intent on imposing collectivist ideals which required increasing secularization, taking education away from family and church, and the “discipline” of independent minds. Former New York State Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto, writes in The Underground History of American Education, that

Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.

Francis Bellamy, an early proponent of public education, declared that “the training of citizens in the common knowledge and the common duties of citizenship belongs irrevocably to the State.” John Dewey, widely recognized as the father of modern education, warned that “The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone would be interdependent.”

From Murray Rothbard’s Education: Free and Compulsory:

As early as 1785, the Rev. Jeremy Belknap, preaching before the New Hampshire General Court, advocated equal and compulsory education for all, emphasizing that the children belong to the State and not to their parents … [Archibald D. Murphey] planned a system of state schools as follows:

all children will be taught in them … in these schools the precepts of morality and religion should be inculcated, and habits of subordination and obedience be formed…. The state, in the warmth of her solicitude for their welfare, must take charge of those children, and place them in school where their minds can be enlightened and their hearts can be trained to virtue.

Into this atmosphere was injected the closest that the country had seen to Plato’s idea, of full State communistic control over the children. This was the plan of two of the first socialists in America — Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen … outlined their scheme as follows:

It is national, rational, republican education; free for all at the expense of all; conducted under the guardianship of the State, and for the honor, the happiness, the virtue, the salvation of the state.

The major aim of the plan was that equality be implanted in the minds, the habits, the manners, and the feelings, so that eventually fortunes and conditions would be equalized … From the age of two every child would be under the care and guidance of the State.

The Savior State

Most of us today have been raised in the state’s public education system. We were taught that government is good, politicians are servants, and that they’ve saved us time and again from oppression, disease, economic depression, foreign enemies, and a whole endless array of hobgoblins instead of the truth … The state is an instrument of power; that politics is nothing more than the struggle for power; that common decency simply does not exist when it comes to politics; and that the sole aim of the politician is to accumulate power and keep it (see James Burnham’s The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom).

The dominant worldview of the public school system is one of a sovereign all-powerful state to which the populace must conform and sustain – Hobbes’ “great Leviathan … that Mortal god.” We are taught that civil society could not exist without the state, for man is a brutish, nasty, unsocial animal. The state does not exist to serve civil society, but creates it. Because the “natural condition” of the individual is a “war of all against all,” chaos would reign without the state to provide order. There can be no harmony without the glorious state.

The myth of democracy that “we’re all working together,” The People’s Romance, is drilled into our heads for 12 straight formidable years of our lives. Natural moral law will not suffice, so we’ve been told, we need the state to save us. This myth, however, cannot succeed unless the people are unconditionally bound to the state. So the natural pillars of civil society to which we give our obedience – family and religion – must be destroyed. Thus America has become “a nation where not only have all Christian prayers, pageants, holidays and holy days been purged from all government schools and public institutions, but secularism has taken over” as the state has assumed parens patriae powers – “parent of the nation.”

Until we shake our faith in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s collectivist “civic religion … that confers sacred status on democratic institutions and symbols,” we’ll continue to panic whenever the government warns of hobgoblins, happily turning to it for safety, while educators continue pushing collectivist ideas like banning best friends down our children’s throats.

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