Kindergarten – A Good Beginning Or The Beginning Of Assimilation?
According to my mother, I was pretty much ambidextrous as a toddler - I’d be lying if I said I could remember that, but she mentioned it at least once. Then I got to kindergarten…
I don’t remember this either, but apparently my teacher(s) didn’t know what to make of this “using both hands” thing, and being concerned that I might turn out to be like the kid from the Twilight Zone who turned his neighbour into a jack-in-the-box, told my parents that this just wouldn’t do!
In order to integrate properly into polite society and the public school system, I was going to have to be “encouraged” to pick one hand over the other. Being a strange combination of ahead of their time and yet rather conservative, my parents agreed and I was thus turned into a “righty”.
The uniqueness-thwarting efforts of The System weren’t entirely successful, though – I still play stick and ball sports like a left-hander… take that, Nazi bastards!
As normalization processes go, this was fairly harmless. I doubt my life would have turned out any different or better had I continued to be unacceptably versatile. But it makes me wonder how many kids go through these corrective measures, and what or whose purposes they’re really serving.
The teachers in question might really have thought they were doing a good thing, since preparing me for success in the school system was their job and the scissors I’d be using in class are mostly made for right handers…at least they were in the mid ’60s.
Or perhaps someone, somewhere, wrote into the curriculum that any kid who displays an ability he or she isn’t supposed to have needs to be made “normal”… before the little tykes turn into people who do or see everything differently and anarchy breaks out.
This all came back to me as I was working up a nice little article about pre-school – maybe I’ll post it tomorrow!
For the record, I liked kindergarten. We got to go on a field trip to a different place every Friday and saw all kinds of cool stuff. But I would still encourage anyone looking at registering kids in preschool/kindergarten this year to ask a lot of questions (uh-oh…) before picking one. It’s only January, you probably have time.
