Schools play a huge role in helping us relate to other people, especially in today’s society. These days, when you are not in school, social interactions are limited, especially for small children, who have little access to people outside their families. So school (playgroup through college) affords people the opportunity to learn/relate to others outside of the home.

Students, especially as they get older, are probably more likely to listen to their teachers than their parents. And to be totally honest, students may spend more time with their teachers than their parents – in high school, I was in school from 8:30-5:10 without extracurricular activities.  I would only have a few hours every night with my parents, and then I was doing my homework! Weekends were for sleeping or socializing.

If anything, I think we under-value the impact of teachers on their impact on our ability to relate to others.

Ok, let’s start with the basics: playing nicely and not hitting. These values are pretty universal, at least in western society. (I can see the argument for a society that encourages children to become aggressive as a defense mechanism, but it is certainly not out society.) These are overarching values that can inform how people act in their day to day lives forever, if we instill them deeply enough and reinforce them as students grow up.  Many of society’s ills can be traced back to the inability of some people to play nicely. Like the recent problems on wall street.

Playing nice is a childhood spin-off of the Golden Rule: “Do unto other as you would have them do unto you.” Or as I like to say, “treat others like you want to be treated.”  There are a few flaws in that – people’s tastes are different. But it really means that individuals should try to treat others as respectfully as possible. And don’t we wish that that was how society was actually run? Maybe if we instill it deep enough, children might grow up to actually emulate the ideas.

Because we stop emphasizing some of these lessons enough after kindergarten. Older kids learn to value grades more than morals. And older students might value money over either of those two values put together.

So, at the most basic level, schools can attempt to teach us how to treat people in general. Which is very important. But many schools in America, even in very urban environments, are incredibly homogeneous. I attended Jewish schools my entire life, and they were mostly full of white, Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern European descent. Most of us lived in a few neighborhoods, all of us spoke English fluently, most as their first language. Many of us were frustrated at time by the total lack of diversity. But  my school taught us about all sorts of cultures, about shared American history and values, about different systems of living and learning.

We didn’t just develop into well-rounded people, we became more empathetic people. We are able to relate to each other, we are able to converse using a common lexicon of understanding with people with very different backgrounds. And a lot of that is school. A lot of that is the standardization of school as well, because I could hold a conversation with anyone in this class about the struggles of the bio regents, or Shakespeare.

How has my school given me an appreciation and understanding of difference? Well, we learned about it. We learned about different cultures and civilizations in history and social studies and English and even in science and math, sometimes. We learned that different doesn’t have to equal bad, and we learned about each other and we learned about ourselves.  I think it’s incredibly important to learn about other cultures in enough detail to truly understand them, and school is the only place that we can hope for that kind of depth of knowledge. If you are only taught your own culture without at least gaining some sort of positive or neutral exposure to another, you may never really attempt to reach out to people you cannot instantly understand.

In my media studies class, we discussed how the first puritans who landed in America couldn’t understand the Native Americans they met. The culture was so alien, so incomprehensible, that they eventually declared it evil, and started the animosity between the new settlers and the original inhabitants that would last for generations. In today’s modern society, that should not be allowed to happen. And our first line of defense is education.