Group and Sort

Every once and again a certain part of our culture becomes odd to me.  Kind of like when you look at a word too many times and eventually it starts to look like you've never seen that word.  It is so familiar that at once it becomes strangely unfamiliar.  Or it could be likened to when you stare at a bright light too long and then look away, it becomes the contrasted foreground to your vision.  So here's my latest:

The manner in which we've chosen to age segregate our children, particularly in school.  I realized that for me, this sort of grouping has permeated a larger part of my social construct than I previously thought.  In kindergarten, the 2nd graders were big mean giants, and in 6th grade (for me jr. high was 7th -8th) you were on the top of the elementary world, ready to squash any of your minions that got out of line.  Freshman are crap, in both high school and college, and so on. 

Not a big deal right?  Just part of our culture.  Now try thinking about a few people you've kept in touch with that were older than you in high school or college, maybe even by just one year.  Now try to remember somebody one year younger.  Have these slight variants in age created larger variants in perception?

This all hit me watching Layla (5) interact with some neighborhood kids.  She's way ahead of her age in intelligence, but perhaps on par with her peers in emotional maturity.  This creates a shift  in how she interacts with others, and how others perceive her.  She naturally gravitates toward the older crowd, because she talks like them, and they talk like her.  But then she's constantly below the others in terms of this unspoken American caste system, this segregation by grade.  "Oh you're in kindergarten?!?"  *eyes roll*  

Some of this plays into the (very difficult for me) decision to home school her.  We're finding that our little humans do not fit very well into the boxes that have been set out for them.   

People already have a natural tendency to compartmentalize, group and sort.  And we do this with the people around us so that we have a world view that is mentally manageable.  However, I wonder if in setting up our educational system with so many horizontal rungs to climb, we're encouraging and unknowingly teaching a disproportionate amount of exclusion and segregation.  I wonder if a more organic approach to learning could be achieved, something much more inclusive along subject matter and aptitude, instead of age and graduation.