Middle School: The Heart of Darkness

As I often do, I went to stop in at a friend’s office at work today during the afternoon lull. When I approached him, I noticed he was engrossed in thought. “What’s up?” I asked. He told me that his son had been suspended from school today because he had gotten into a fight with another child.

As we discussed what happened, the subject of school structures and choices naturally came up. “Last year, my son was focused, academic, serious, on top of things. This year, as a sixth grader in middle school,” he told me, “things have just fallen apart.”

Yep. Middle school. What a tremendously bad idea.

I think that middle schools are a failed experiment. Honestly, I can’t think of an idea much worse than stuffing hundreds of kids between the ages of 11 and 14 into a single school.
Before you go off hooting and hollering about how there are some really good middle schools and kids need to learn independence and larger schools can offer more options and services than smaller schools, let me just stop you and explain why you are crazy to try to defend them.

First, do two things. One, go to a middle school for a whole day, and just observe the kids and their interactions with each other and with adults. Observe them in the hallways, the cafeteria, the locker rooms, the classrooms, the school lounge, the steps out front, the bus stop, and the bus itself. Two, invite 20 middle school kids to your home and have them hang out for a few hours with just you and another adult there to supervise. Or better yet, do it by yourself, and see what happens. Find out how quickly chaos ensues. If, after those two experiences you think jamming a bunch of tweens and young teens into a single school is a good idea, we can talk.

Second, admit a few really important things. That middle school kids are not mini-adults or young high-schoolers. That middle school aged children are going through intense physical, emotional, and cognitive changes. That you would likely never go back to middle school or your early teen years even if someone paid you. That the pressure kids are under today to grow up fast and experiment is as intense as it has ever been. That children today have more opportunity, thanks to the internet and social media and texting, to discover and communicate good and bad, inappropriate and appropriate, than at any time in history. Things are different now for them than it was for us. And it wasn’t a cakewalk for us, either.

Third, do a bit of research. I ran across the article from Time Magazine that explains how many cities and school districts are deciding to move away from middle schools and back to K-8 schools. Why? Because kids do better in smaller schools than in middle schools. Because middle schools have the potential to become violent places, more like high school than grade school. Because K-8 environments offer middle school aged kids the chance to be mentors, leaders, and responsible in a way that grouping them together only with kids of their own age does not. Because a RAND institute study questioned the idea that puberty is a good reason to start a new school phase.

Read about bullying. Read about poor academic achievement. Read about stressed and overworked teachers.

I can’t express more strongly my dislike and disapproval of middle schoo. I am not saying that they don’t feel peer pressure or don’t get teased or don’t feel the pressures of a changing body and intellect. But they are not under the same intense pressure that their fellow middle school students are. And we know the parents and teachers in the school – the whole school – on a level that would be impossible at a middle school.

Pre and early teen years are not the time to set our kids loose and have them figure out how to fend for themselves. We are not in ancient Sparta. These are the years where they most need us to help them grow in thrive within a school and family construct which allows them the balance of support and freedom and responsibility they need.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%E2%80%938_school

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1088694,00.html

image https://www.privateschoolreview.com/new-jersey/union-county

https://nobullying.com/school-issues/