Who Is School Designed For?

Elementary, middle, and high schools are designed around the assumption that academic skills must be taught, while social skills will somehow teach themselves.

If you struggle at basic maths or basic writing, no worries: school will spend years teaching you that over and over until you get it. But if you struggle at social interactions, you’re out of luck: school will spend almost no time and effort teaching you how to get better at them, assuming instead that you will proactively teach yourself.

Some kids can. The rest are left behind.

The illusion of “getting it”

Just like some kids don’t “just get” maths or coding, many other kids don’t “just get” social interactions and must be taught them.

“But Luca, eventually, everyone learns social interactions.”

Not really. A few kids never do, and spend the rest of their lives as deep introverts, at least part of which is a coping mechanism to avoid environments they never learned how to thrive in.

Other kids do eventually, maybe in their late teens or twenties. But how much sadder do their earlier years look compared with a counterfactual in which the school system proactively taught them the social rules they were so slow to pick up, therefore getting them up to speed with their peers much earlier?

And finally, many kids do eventually learn some social rules, but only superficial and imperfect versions of them. They may, for example, learn enough social skills to get through a first date without doing anything obviously wrong, but not enough to create attraction or connection. They can then spend years bewildered and frustrated, watching others behave in ways that seem similar to their own and yet succeed where they fail. They followed every rule they knew, behaved correctly, and still cannot understand why they keep getting rejected or fail to thrive socially.

Meeting kids where they are

Most people understand that academic exercises must be suited to the child’s level. Give a child maths problems that are challenging but manageable, and they will probably improve. But give them problems far beyond their ability, and they are more likely to become confused, overwhelmed, and reluctant to try again.

The same applies to social skills. A child who is only slightly behind the people around them can experiment, notice the response, and adjust. But a child who is far behind may not understand the feedback at all. They know that everyone laughed, that the conversation suddenly stopped, or that they were not invited, but they do not know why. Repeated failure does not necessarily teach the child how to socialize. It may teach them to avoid socializing.

The solution is to teach social skills explicitly, meeting children at their current level and applying the same focus on not leaving anyone behind that we already apply, at least in principle, to academic skills.

My dream would be a school system designed to prepare all children for life, not just those whose particular mix of strengths and weaknesses happens to match what schools teach and what they expect children to “just get.”