Segregation is Not Good Enough...

When I lived in Saudi Arabia 3 years ago someone sent around some rumor that the International School was going to segregate because of pressure from the Saudi Government. I got the e-mail from about six people who were panicking and asking me “What do you think of this?” I was a bit tired of all the rumors that people spread every week to create new panic in the community so this was my response…

Segregation is Not Good Enough
By Kristie Burns
www.thedreamangels.com


I received a letter today that said our schools might have to become segregated. I was overjoyed! Finally, I thought, they have found a way to keep annoying people in a group all their own. I assumed they would segregate the school into annoying and non-annoying people. But then I found out they were talking about dividing the boys and the girls. Wow! What a concept. I mean, if you are going to segregate there are much better ways to do it than that. How about separating the people who like to wake up early from the people who like to wake up late and have different sessions for these groups? Student productivity would skyrocket and education would advance.

Or how about segregating people who are allergic to peanut butter and people who are not allergic to peanut butter? Then, having these two groups in different classrooms would solve the problem of having to send home notes and be cautious about birthday snacks being sent to class.

Or even better – how about dividing the school into people who take the bus to school and people who have other transportation? That would completely eliminate the need for a new and complicated bus/car drop-off system at the school.

Or how about segregating the school into tall kids and short kids? That way no one could ever be teased again about his or her height because everyone would be the same height.

But then, perhaps there are worse problems to be tackled…how about we divide the kids into “kids who bring healthy snacks” and “kids who bring junk food” so I don’t have to wonder every day what my kid is eating from someone else’s snack bag?
But perhaps other people have bigger things they are worried about. To please everyone we could perhaps do a more complicated dividing process. We could have each child fill out a form akin to a “date matching” form and then we could match children as closely as possible by color of eyes, book preference and favorite TV show. That way all the kids going to each session would like each other more and we could eliminate peer pressure.