Good point, I’m probably being a bit idealistic there. It still seems likely that there’s a way to do a mixed-age community correctly, but it probably needs additional work.
Montessori classrooms do this—kids are usually in groupings of three-year spans. I haven’t read about bullying there specifically, but I never heard of it being a problem in the 6-9 year old class where my mother taught.
Anecdotal experience: My elementary school was divided in to 2-3 year spans (it varied from year to year, as it was a rather experimental school), with about an hour per day on average where we’d have the whole 6 year span together.
I have VERY clear memories that I got bullied from 1st-3rd year by older students (4th-6th year), but from 4th year on the problem went away. I don’t recall anyone else having issues with bullies in 4th grade or later, so I’d assume the younger spans tended to be targeted by anyone with such proclivities.
When I was in middle (7th − 8th year) and high school (9th − 12th year), bullying seemed largely age-irrelevant, although the oldest students in high school (12th year) seemed to enjoy occasionally “hazing” the newest students near the start of the year and would then get bored and focus on kids closer to their age.
Good point, I’m probably being a bit idealistic there. It still seems likely that there’s a way to do a mixed-age community correctly, but it probably needs additional work.
Montessori classrooms do this—kids are usually in groupings of three-year spans. I haven’t read about bullying there specifically, but I never heard of it being a problem in the 6-9 year old class where my mother taught.
Anecdotal experience: My elementary school was divided in to 2-3 year spans (it varied from year to year, as it was a rather experimental school), with about an hour per day on average where we’d have the whole 6 year span together.
I have VERY clear memories that I got bullied from 1st-3rd year by older students (4th-6th year), but from 4th year on the problem went away. I don’t recall anyone else having issues with bullies in 4th grade or later, so I’d assume the younger spans tended to be targeted by anyone with such proclivities.
When I was in middle (7th − 8th year) and high school (9th − 12th year), bullying seemed largely age-irrelevant, although the oldest students in high school (12th year) seemed to enjoy occasionally “hazing” the newest students near the start of the year and would then get bored and focus on kids closer to their age.