“crackpot” is the mot juste.
But when you’ve discarded almost all traditional rules and values governing social interaction, family structure, discipline, basic morality, etc etc what is left except the BFF?
The problem is that too many of these ‘educators’ are completely blinded by Moral Therapeutic Educationism (to coin a phrase).

Having watched daughters whose BFF turned on them (and likely vice versa), I understand the larger concern here. When kids have only “one best friend” or a limited friendship pool, the end of that relationship and/or maturing can be devastating. It also, both with boys and girls, end up in bullying.
While I’m not sure the article provides “the answer,” I’m not sure they are crackpots either.

This is why educators should educate, rather than play psychologist.

Actually, le mot juste is crackpot parents who think growing up must be pain-free.
Parenting is never easy. We have three children, and we made plenty of mistakes. The trick is in making any mistake only once. However, the worst mistake and most difficult to avoid repeating is preventing emotional harm from finding our children.
I don’t understand that. Pain is the best motivator and teacher. The best tool we can teach our children to use is handling pain and learning from it.
And those readers who think I am advocating corporal punishment or some such, please go pound sand. I refuse to get into a nitpicking fight when I believe it’s clear from my writing that I believe children are our most precious members of society. Raising them to be weaklings and to avoid pain at all costs would be the crime.

I agree. If only so-called educators spent as much time and effort actually trying to educate children as they do trying to micromanage their emotional/nutritional/social lives.
What happens if, as a result of this, the kids grow up not knowing how to develop a really close, emotionally-intimate friendship with someone? Will we as a society really be better off? I doubt it.
Childhood friendships are where we learn how to interact with people, how to trust and be trusted, how to deal your own and someone else’s shifting emotions, and how to deal with the fact that sometimes your trust in someone can be rewarded and sometimes it can be betrayed, that people aren’t always what they seem to be, and that sometimes another person just isn’t going to feel about you the same way you feel about him or her.
Just as childhood sports and games are where we learn that life isn’t always fair, that sometimes even if you try your hardest, the other team wins, that it’s important to be magnanimous in victory and gracious in defeat. Oh, wait …
Ha! Captcha: cupboard political

While I do agree that education “leaders” are a bane, educators on the front lines do know a thing or three.
1) A child with a healthy meal at the start of the day is more alert, less fidgity, and tends to be in a more relaxed mood.
2) Knowing even the barest minimum details about the child’s home life, including that they are under the care of a health professional of any sort, let’s a teacher be more forgiving of certain behaviors and better prepared to deal with them constructively.
And folks, a teacher that deals effectively with children as people rather than names in seats sets a generic role-model example for all the children in his or her classes. No one is a mind reader. Parents tend to hide things from teachers, and that is a fact of life in schools that everyone should be aware of as they embark on the latest bash-the-educators binge.

It’s not the teachers, most of whom are doing the best they can in the trenches, it’s the theorists, the counselors, etc. That’s one of the biggest problems with education in this country: all the way back to Dewey, the educational establishment (not necessarily the same thing as the teachers) has been in love with whatever the latest fad idea to come down the pike happens to be (see the earlier technology thread, in that regard). They’re always convinced that somewhere, somehow, there is a “royal road to education”. This example is egregiously stupid; but stuff that gets the imprimatur of government policy, such as NCLB is often as bad, just with better PR.

“Crackpot” and “Social Evil” — overreaction, much? This is just a NYT Style section trend piece (read: water-cooler fluff), noting that some educators and parents believe there’s some benefit to encouraging multiple friendships, as opposed to BFF pairings. There’s something to be said for not standing in the way of strong one-on-one friendships; there’s also something to be said for encouraging children to get along with all of their peers. There are differences in how this plays out at different ages and for girls vs. boys.
Calm down.

“Parenting is never easy. We have three children, and we made plenty of mistakes. The trick is in making any mistake only once.”
Only once? That’s one heck of a high standard! If my wife held me to that standard… Of course, not all mistakes are the same.

David White, @ 4:29 PM, writes:
“What happens if, as a result of this, the kids grow up not knowing how to develop a really close, emotionally-intimate friendship with someone? Will we as a society really be better off? I doubt it.”
That may be the entire point of the exercise. An inability to form strong emotional bonds with others may be seen as a positive; the better to be able to move from one group to another without messy social frictions.
And as to the matters of parents “hiding” things from school personnel; has it ever occurred to anyone that the schools DO NOT stand “in loco parentis” when the kids aren’t in classes ? As far as I am concerned, my wife and I are the ones responsible for raising our children, and anyone who thinks differently is cordially invited to bend over and commence the osculation of my rear end.
The “educationist” fools who came up with this one can go straight to He!l where they belong. I wonder which of the Circles has a space reserved for total idiots ?
Your servant,
Lord Karth

Hmmm.
If this is crackpot, we need to rethink the status of all those Christian writers who warned of the dangers of “particular friendships.”

If these clowns really wanted to prevent bullying, they’d punish *actual* bullies and stop trying to reason with them and tell the parties involved, most importantly the victim, that they were both at fault. Either that, or allow the victims, who are usually the children who still respect authority, to stand up for themselves. It’s really that simple. Oh–and perhaps having teachers out at recess and lunch break actually interacting with the kids so that unfair play and things such as bullying can be prevented?

Rod, is this your day to post Stupidity News? First the Barton apology to BP now this?
I have by the way heard of some religious extremist schools also discouraging close friendships, at least among boys, for fear they will result in the kids turning gay.

The Christian writers who wrote on the dangers of “particular friendships” were talking about the dangers of favoritism in a monastic community between the superior and an individual monk or nun. A best friend is a friendship between equals.

As a former little girl, I can tell you that having your BFF turn on you isn’t particularly fun. In fact, it hurts a lot. But here’s a news flash. Life is painful, but also instructive. Such experiences teach you that you can live through most anything with enough perseverance and moxie, and that hard times can turn into good times quicker than you might think. I know how hard it is for parents to see their children hurt. But do you really want to shelter them from everything, especially things that will make them stronger? What parents really need to do is sympathize and commiserate with their kids, offer them ways to solve their problems, and, with hugs, help them realize that life isn’t always easy. Who ARE these educators to presume to tell people who they can and can’t be friends with and how close those bonds can be? If you learn friendship (and loss) as a kid, you will reap many rewards as an adult.

Gee, Dan, which part of “the trick is” did you miss? ;-D
My wife and I hold the highest standards, knowing we aren’t going to reach them… but, oh, was it ever interesting* — and sometimes just plain fun — to try.
* Our version of the Chinese curse is “May you have children with strong egos.”

This post, along with the post about gifted kids, show the no-win situation educators are placed in.
On one hand, we hear stories of people being traumatized by their schooling experiences. We talk about how gifted students are delicate flowers who need special help and classes and attention to protect them from the cruel realities of being with “normal” students. Rarely a month goes by that Rod doesn’t recount his boarding school bullying and harassment, which appears to still scar him.
Yet, the moment educators look for new options to avoid the hostile realities of childhood and teen lfe–which everyone laments as scarring and horrible–they are crackpots. They offer imperfect solutions and are accused of protecting kids from the pains of life.
It’s a no-win situation.

This is ridiculous.
Regular idiocy is forgivable. But the idiocy that is spawned from education majors and “theorists of pedagogy” is just malicious.

This has nothing to do with some left-wing PC desire by militant egalitarians for a level society. This is simply school administrators’ ongoing desire to control kids with greater and greater authority. Why try to polarize this stupidity by attributing to it “egalitarianism” when it’s clearly about schools trying to control kids so as to make their jobs easier. When I went to school it was very clear that school administrators didn’t give a rats ass about kids, and that hasn’t changed a bit, and it probably never will. They’ve never encouraged kids to think for themselves or form the kinds of bonds which might undermine obediance to authority. This is something new, and a “leftist” pursuit of egalitarianism. Please. If anything, this is the usual conservative desire to control children and keep them obeying authority without any regard for how that interferes with their personal health and welfare.

What I don’t get is the connection to bullying. In my school experience, bulling usually involved a group of children — often with one dominant leader — picking on a lone child who was seldom the friend of any of the group members. (Occasionally the victim was a former friend of a group member, but this was not the norm. Former friend bullying was most prevalent in middle school; much less so in elementary and high school.) If anything, having a single close friend was a life-saving haven for a victim of bullying. The bullies themselves didn’t seem to have single best friends; rather, they had their ring of friends whom they controlled to various extents. I think the bullies were probably as lonely and in need of a true friend as their victims. I think discouraging cliques (which are distinguished from healthier groups of friends by their exclusivity, and the implicit or explicit threat of being exiled) is a good idea, but how that relates to close one-on-one friendships, I simply don’t understand.

I agree with naturalmom. I was a victim of bullying for many years in elementary school (until we moved) and it was at the hands of a group with a ringleader, not one individual. Mercifully, I had a close friend during this time. If I hadn’t…
Has anyone actually thought about how adults are really going to prevent children from forming close friendships anyway? This isn’t Romeo and Juliet folks.

“What happens if, as a result of this, the kids grow up not knowing how to develop a really close, emotionally-intimate friendship with someone? Will we as a society really be better off?”
I think Aldous Huxley has already dreamt up that society.
Have a gram instead of a damn!
Captcha: woofers sensitive

Susan Davis,
Assuming your comment was in reponse to mine, I was not talking about medieval rules for monks (which make a lot of sense as monks are supposed to focus their whole soul on God not each other). I was talking about (some) modern-day Cheristian schools where boys at least are discouraged from close friendships out of fear they result in homosexuality.

Peter, you know from reading my posts on this thread and any thread about education that I have a firm bias in favor of teachers. I’m married to one, after all.
But her 35+ years of experience, my own K-12 in public schools and three children in them since 1989 (youngest graduating next year) is quite a span of time — 1961 to present — to find evidence, and the professional scuttlebutt is clear on this one: This idea is ridiculous, and flies in the face of actual, in the classroom and on the playground evidence.
They’ve taken valid and even adequate theories and submitted a strategy that cannot be supported. They fail to address the core, structural flaws, like the assembly-line model of public education, the endemic problems in too many schools for which teachers and administrators have little to no authority to address, and the biggest one of all that I lambast in my posts above: Parents.
If a child does not come to school on the first day with a firm socialization for the authority of adults, no amount of theory or new programs is going to establish it. If a child grows up in a home of arbitrary authority, or lax authority, and is told daily in words and by example that adult authority is the enemy, or worse that parental authority is the only one they must abide, then no teacher is going to be able to contradict that, let alone change it for the better.
The bullying part is key. It is not the whole thing, but it is the strongest symptom of the endemic problems. I suggest, not as an excuse, and certainly not as a blanket description, that the message “Deal with it!” comes first from parents. That some schools and their staffs echo this is understandable, and blaming them for the failure of some children to deal with it is egregiously stupid.
Teachers and admins belong to the same society we do, and for many schools to the same local culture. Many of them have children. Don’t you think it has occurred to them that society and culture are at least at the top of the list of things to blame? How many of them do you demand sacrifice their livelihoods on the altar of such contradictions, by “standing up” to rules imposed on them by the very parents (via politicians, usually) who created those rules and want them suspended for their perfect little Johnnies and Janes?
Sorry for such a long post, and for making my primary point at the end. Here it is:
Education professionals are responsible for preparing the next generation for successful life in our society. This is a huge responsibility. Just as we must partner with them and help them avoid making mistakes, so too must we delegate to them the authority commensurate with their responsibility. We can’t put that on bungee cord, toss them over the bridge and then cut it when we don’t like their style of falling.
A broadly generalizing statement, that. It glosses over the facts like there truly are bad teachers and bad programs. But it points to the frustration the competent and sincere professionals feel when they are lumped in with those rare, bad apples and told to pay for their mistakes as well as their own. How many children do you want to see raised that way, blamed for the transgressions of their peers along with their own?

What kids do outside of school is not the school’s business, unless some parent decides to take an issue to the school counselor or principal and make them referee. I can see the school’s point if two kids always want to sit together or work together and leave other kids out in class. That could be disruptive and children ought to be encouraged to get along with classmates or work with kids they don’t get along with. But I’d tell any principal who dared suggest that a child shouldn’t have a best friend to go pound sand. It’s not her business, not her responsibility to tell parents how to raise their children unless it is negatively impacting school time.

Anyone who thinks having a BFF is an unhealthy thing should read the book The Feast of Friendship by Orthodox priest Paul D. O’Callaghan. (Here’s a post I wrote about the book: http://tinyurl.com/24uwg6q)
He very much makes a case for deep friendship.
Kierkegaard spoke out against friendship, said it was unchristian and belonged to “paganism” and thought agape love was more appropriate for Christians than philia love.
St. Basil spoke out against having close friends in a monastic setting but St. Basil himself had close friends, such as Gregory.
A number of the church fathers had close friendships that were particular and preferential. St. John Chrysostom said, “The pleasure of friendship excels all others, even if you compared it with the sweetness of honey, for that satiates, but a friend never does.” Gregory the Theologian said, “If anyone were to ask me, “What is the best thing in life?,’ I would answer, ‘Friends.’”

Anita Ashland,
Quite true. Of course, Jesus Christ had a best friend too (John) so I think we could not do much better then to follow his example.

When are the people spinning all these theories going to admit that human life is simply too complex, with too many variables, for any theory or program or policy to adequately account for it all? I would guess there are some kids who might actually benefit from this advice, more who would be harmed by it, and a good number who will let it go in one ear and out the other. Identifying which individuals are which is nearly impossible. Its like ritalin — there are moving testimonies from some individuals who actually benefited from taking ritalin. That does not mean that every child who fidgets in class will receive the same benefits from taking the same drug. Individuals, we are dealing with individuals, unique, complex, and always changing. Stop pretending there is a science to all this.
away epitome
Now that was written just for me.

So who are these levellers and militant egalitarians?
Your excerpt identifies one school:
Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School
Exactly 30 seconds googling told me that this is in fact an independent preparatory day school founded in 1859.
Unlike British private schools they seem rather coy about their fees (funny how the stereotypes always seem to be reversed) but we are clearly talking about a school for the monied elite of St Louis.
And in this context it all makes perfect sense – most members of social elites succeed because they have a wide network of shallow relationships they can effortlessly exploit over their entire lives.
It is the lower orders who tend to invest their emotional capital in a much smaller circle of intense and often eventually dysfunctional relationships.
So what you seem to perceive as some sort of subversive crackpot Marxist plot against the natural order of things in fact turns out to be the exact opposite – elitist educators reminding parents that if they want their children to prosper in the world we have created for them they must learn that relationships are not things of depth and passion but situational constructs serving the twin principles of pleasure and profit that rule our lives now.
Yet another example of post-modernism serving Mammon far better than it ever served Marx – and of how even the most intelligent of us are trapped by knee-jerk culture war politics.

Roger is right – Country Day/Mary I is *not* a “liberal,” “egalitarian,” “crackpot” school. It’s *the* place to send your kids if you are part of the stratospheric reaches of the St. Louis WASP upper-crust. Tuition is about $30K/year (could be more; that’s what I’d heard a few years ago.)
Given the social milieu, I can see that there are probably serious concerns about bullying, especially among the girls. Don’t worry; normal St. Louisians (and others) still firmly hold to the “best friend” ethos for kids.

Rereading these posts, it occurs to me that we can paraphrase what Mencken once said about puritanism:
Moral Therapeutic Educationism (to borrow Richard’s felicitous phrase) is the desperate fear that someone somewhere might be better at something than someone else.
Captcha: the palling
(How does it do that?!)