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.

Pre-Kindergarten through Eighth Grade, I attended a Catholic Elementary school.  I feel like that has been beaten to death through my posts, papers, and reflections.  However, I have mostly talked about how important I believe it is for children to learn from other children to develop socially, and how that is the main purpose of school at an early age.

However, an education like this could be dangerous.

I do not take back any of my convictions.  Kids learn from other kids.  Thats what school does.  One would think that a Catholic school or a private school would be the ideal place to learn.  However, I could argue for public school, because often a private school is lacking in one thing– diversity.

Pre-Kindergarten through Eighth Grade, I had a graduating class of under forty.  One kid was homosexual. Three kids were hispanic-American.  Three kids were overweight.  The other thirty-one were white, straight, athletic, and therefore “normal”.  The other kids took their lumps.

Now, it is grade school.  Everyone takes their lumps.  I wore my uniform pants as long as I possibly could, and get my lumps for having tight pants when the style was baggy.  Other kids were teased for being too short or too tall.  My best friend from grade school was nicknamed “Spanish” after the movie old school.  I still call him by the name Spanish to this day, it is not something that bothered him.  I do not want to give the impression that my school was the birthplace for the new Klu Klux Klan, but there was not a lot of diversity.  We were never exposed to diversity until we went to high school.  The only black kids I knew going into high school were the few that I played basketball with at the neighborhood courts.

This is a major problem.  I did not grow up in a heavy white neighborhood.  It was actually becoming increasingly a mix of hispanic, asian, and african descent.  I would have never known this at my grade school.  Now if one goes back there, the population of the school more accurately reflects the community.

Too bad I did not get this exposure in grade school, because it would have helped in high school.

During my first few months at private Catholic high school, I sat with kids I went to grammar school with.  Mostly white kids surrounded me.  We adopted a few kids from Floral Park, also stemming from a majority white school (and in their case, area too).  We were white trash, they were wealthy whites, and together we made the all-white table.  There was a Greeks only table, a blacks only table, a Haitians only table, a Howard Beach table, a fake “guido” table for all the future wannabe John Gotti’s, there were the smoker’s at one table and the nerds at their own table.  Kind of cliquey for an all boys school, huh?

Where else was I expected to sit?  I was never exposed to that many black kids, nor did they want a white kid at their table.  Our table were pegged as racists, some of them embracing the all-white theme and enforcing it.  I admit at some points in that first year I participated in this bigotry, and am very ashamed of it.  There may be a few kids who still remember and probably would testify that I was a racist, something that eats at me every day.  I was a product of my environment, and at 14 years old, I was not strong enough to fight out of it.

Thank God I played football.

Anyone who reads my posts must think I am some kind of fanatic.  It must seem like every good thing in my life a credit to football.  Well, I was tagged as a racist, on a football team with fifty kids, more than half of whom were black or hispanic.  By year two, not many of those kids would have had my back.  I do have to say I was really saved by a few kids on the team.  At a time where I had “friends” and “black friends”, the latter group were some of the true friends.  One teammate in particular always knew the truth.  He knew I was just a product of the environment, knew I was just sitting at that table because thats where I sat down day one.  He vouched for me to a lot of people, who gave me the chance to prove their idea of me wrong.  And I am proud to say I did with more than 99% of the cases.

I have not been called a racist in probably 3 years, and I have not had any problems with it at all.  I have been called many names, but intolerant is not one of them.  There are a handful of kids at that table who are still ranting about how minorities and gays and women are the root of all problems.  The ignorance is unbelievable.  One of the best decisions I made in high school was to blow them off and find a new table to sit at.

So yes, I learned as a young one not to hit my fellow classmates.  I never learned to accept them.  And it almost buried me.  I hate that part of my past, and it is difficult for me to share it.  Honestly, if it was a larger class I would not have been able to.

I often fell under the label of “jock” for my lifetime.  You guys are are techies, science fiction people.  By labels, you are not my people.  If I was put in this class right out of elementary school, I would have a hard time talking to you and sharing with you, even over the internet.

Good thing thats not the case, because apparently I feel comfortable enough to talk about this now, when I never really spoke about it publicly before.  I was blessed with a second chance, a chance to add the virtue acceptance that I did not get a chance to add due to a lack of diversity at a young age.

I feel that being pegged as something I was not made me adverse to pegging other people.  I like to believe while I may not always be described as the friendliest person, the people who know me are never afraid that I would judge them (unless they are from Staten Island, that is a different story altogether).