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buybuydandavis comments on Advice for a smart 8-year-old bored with school - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm puzzled why people think putting a bunch of unsocialized children in a pile will turn them into civilized adults.
Nobody else read Lord of the Flies?
Children learn social skills from those who have them, not by getting together and trying to reinvent civilization when they're 8 years old.
Lord of the Flies is fictional evidence.
Your general point stands, though.
It's a famous fictional archtype that should have reminded people to question that cohort institutionalization is a fabulous means of socialization.
I don't think I'm alone in seeing fiction as a means of understanding and remembering valid principles.
The impression I have of public schools (at least the good ones) is that younger children are pretty closely supervised, and that much of what elementary teachers do all day is say "No Johnny, that wasn't nice, apologize to Suzy", or "Suzy, you need to share the scissors with Tommy."
The children are practicing social skills with each other, but it's a structured environment with adult supervision, and with adults who are specifically trained and tasked to help improve the children's social skills and emotional maturity.
An elementary school classroom that feels like Lord of the Flies, socially, is a very badly run classroom.
Children learn social skills by practicing relating to their peers in a supervised setting. Adults don't relate to kids the way people are expected to learn to relate to other adults, and even for kids who're capable of putting into practice explicit instruction on how to behave in social situations, few adults if any are equipped to describe the real nuances of social interaction explicitly.
Lord of the Flies is a work of fiction, not a sociological experiment.
They have to learn the skills before they can practice them. They can learn them from their elders, not other equally ignorant children. Again, they shouldn't be in the position of having to reinvent civilization.
Further, practicing on other incompetents is a tough way to learn, because none of them are behaving appropriately in the first place. It's like learning to drive on a car that randomly swerves and brakes. That's largely why people hire dance instructors - a competent partner speeds the learning process even if they have no teaching to impart.
If an adult wanted to learn to relate to other adults, they would do poorly by attempting to learn from children. If a child wanted to learn to relate to other children, they would most likely learn things by relating to children which they would not learn by relating to adults. Children are behaving inappropriately by adult standards, but they're still learning skills about relating to their peers which will generalize to their experience relating to their peers as adults, which they are unlikely to learn without having peer relationships.