I could write a post, but it wouldn’t be in agreement with that one.
I had no interest in the opposite sex in High School. I was nerd hardcore. And was approached by multiple girls. (I noticed some even in my then-clueless state, and retrospection has made several more obvious to me; the girl who outright kissed me, for example, was hard to mistake for anything else.) I gave the “I just want to be friends” speech to a couple of them. I also, completely unintentionally, embarrassed the hell out of one girl, whose friend asked me to join her for lunch because she had a crush on me. She hid her face for sixty seconds after I came over, so I eventually patted her on the head, entirely unsure what else to do, and went back to my table.
...yeah, actually, I doubt any of the girls who pursued me in High School ever tried to take the initiative again.
Maybe there’s a stable reason girls/women don’t initiate; earlier onset of puberty in girls means that their first few attempts fail miserably on boys who don’t yet reciprocate that interest.
Since you mention this, I find it weird we still group students by their age, as if date of manufacture was the most important feature of their socialization and education.
We are forgetting how fundamentally weird it is to segregate children by age in this way from the perspective of traditional culture.
Have you read The Nurture Assumption? There’s a chapter on that; in the West someone who’s small/immature for his class level will be at the bottom of the pecking group throughout his education, whereas in a traditional society where kids self-segregate by age in a more flexible manner, kids will grow from being the smallest of their group to the largest of their group, so will have a wider diversity of experience.
It’s a pretty convincing reason to not make your kid skip a class.
I could write a post, but it wouldn’t be in agreement with that one.
I had no interest in the opposite sex in High School. I was nerd hardcore. And was approached by multiple girls. (I noticed some even in my then-clueless state, and retrospection has made several more obvious to me; the girl who outright kissed me, for example, was hard to mistake for anything else.) I gave the “I just want to be friends” speech to a couple of them. I also, completely unintentionally, embarrassed the hell out of one girl, whose friend asked me to join her for lunch because she had a crush on me. She hid her face for sixty seconds after I came over, so I eventually patted her on the head, entirely unsure what else to do, and went back to my table.
...yeah, actually, I doubt any of the girls who pursued me in High School ever tried to take the initiative again.
I know how you feel, I utterly missed such interest myself back then.
Maybe there’s a stable reason girls/women don’t initiate; earlier onset of puberty in girls means that their first few attempts fail miserably on boys who don’t yet reciprocate that interest.
Since you mention this, I find it weird we still group students by their age, as if date of manufacture was the most important feature of their socialization and education.
We are forgetting how fundamentally weird it is to segregate children by age in this way from the perspective of traditional culture.
Have you read The Nurture Assumption? There’s a chapter on that; in the West someone who’s small/immature for his class level will be at the bottom of the pecking group throughout his education, whereas in a traditional society where kids self-segregate by age in a more flexible manner, kids will grow from being the smallest of their group to the largest of their group, so will have a wider diversity of experience.
It’s a pretty convincing reason to not make your kid skip a class.
Also a good reason to consider home-schooling or even having them enrol in primary school education one year later.
As a very rough approximation:
A normal western kid will mostly get used to a relatively fixed position in the group in terms of size / maturity
A normal kid in a traditional village society will experience the whole range of size/maturity positions in the group
A homeschooled kid will not get as much experience being in a peer group
It’s not clear that homeschooling is better than the fixed position option (though it may be! But probably for other reasons).