What if...

[kengr]

... the schools didn't *assume*that everyone knew social rules, basic facts about the world and society, etc.

Yeah, it'd make it harder teaching the kids. But it'd also mean that any who got out of (say) high school with weird ideas or blindspots about stuff wopuld be that way because either they'd rejected the attempts to teach them or were unable to learn them (autistics and body language, for example).

And we might even manage to show the kids that a lot of this stuff is the way it is simply because "that's the way we do it". Arbitrary, but "necessary" in that we need (some* sort of rules for a lot of things for society to function.

Of course, showing any sort of alternatives to "normal" will have many parents up in arms. :-(

Comments

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[kengr]

Well, any rules that stop working if people know about them are going to get abused by the people who *do* figure them out. As well as causing a lot of unnecessary pain for the folks who don't learn them by example.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[kengr]

Well, given that many politicians *are* con-men I;ll gfgo along with that.

Though I've run into many a "bully" who understood the rules well enough to use them against the "underclass" types evfen if he (or she) couldn't have articulated them.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[griffen.livejournal.com]

The problem is, whose way are you going to show them? Their own ethnic or religious community? The majority community of their nation, state, or city? The school's community?

Do that, and every child who has to deal with a diverse city as an adult will lack the tools he needs to understand how his behavior needs to change depending on the area of the city he's in. Societal rules change depending on whom you're with and what you're doing, and there's no codebook big enough to hold them all. As Ace said, it has to be learned by observation, not cognitively, to really work right - the reason being that it's so fluid and changes so quickly. The real thing that children need to learn is adaptation and adjustment, and most children do that automatically anyway. Teaching social rules and etc. explicitly is only necessary for about 5% of the population. That 5% should probably be targeted, yes, but even so, see objection #1.

(The difficulties you're talking about are the same ones that autistics face all the time. Social rules have to be explained and justified to us for us to accept them. "That's the way we do it" is not a good enough reason.)