Fresh Meat
How nursery school initiation is like prison and what this may reveal about our “true being.”
Disclaimer: Maya has been attending her school for 10 months now and genuinely enjoys it. I am not literally comparing school to prison, nor is this post a knock against her school in particular (nor nursery schools/daycare broadly speaking), but rather a contrarian and somewhat humorous observation of toddlers at their naive, innocent best.
When we signed Maya up for nursery school, we were warned she would have a two week adjustment period where she would cry every day. We were also advised that in the first few days, the crying would be epic in both magnitude and in duration, but that she would eventually adjust and begin enjoying school.
While this was all proven true, I found the other kids’ reaction to a new student joining very interesting. And by reaction, I actually mean their lack of reaction. Prior to this, if you had asked me to predict how other kids would react to a new student bawling their head off uncontrollably for two hours, I would have said either of the following:
- They would become agitated themselves and either start crying or lash out at the new child somehow, or
- Demonstrate some form of compassion having been through the experience themselves recently (granted, a stretch given we are talking about 2 year olds).
The actual answer was 3: Not give a damn. It reminded me of a new prisoner initiation. If you replace the prisoners from Shawshank Redemption with toddlers (and replace the overt taunting with blatant indifference), it’s a pretty accurate analogy:
Because Shawshank Redemption is awesome and one of the Top 5 movies of all time, here’s the lead in scene with Morgan Freemen’s inimitable narration to extend the analogy further:
Usually, the kids are dropped off around breakfast time, which sets the scene up even more. Imagine you’re having a nice Sunday brunch with a group of friends in an intimate setting when a stranger walks in and begins crying at the top of his lungs. Would you be able to continue enjoying your mimosas with that incessant shriek in your ear? Probably not. At school, however, the veterans don’t even flinch. Casting a disdainful eye at the newbie, they casually eat their waffle squares while gingerly lifting Dixie cups with their pudgy fingers to take refreshing sips of milk.
Having gone through this trauma themselves not so long ago, you’d think each of the veteran children might be capable of demonstrating some empathy. Nope. Now that Maya is a veteran, I’ve had the opportunity to observe this dynamic from the other side (note: it’s a lot easier when it’s not your child) and like every other veteran, I see the same unflinching expression on her face.
I have observed enough of these initiations to confidently assert that this reaction is the modus operandi among children under 3 years old in the school/daycare setting. Since young children are essentially “uncorrupted,” they serve as a fascinating vehicle through which we can glean insight into mankind’s “true being.”
Many argue that we are essentially good, and that positive traits like “altruism” and “compassion” are hard-wired into us.
As a stringent believer in evolutionary theory, I like to validate these claims against the ultimate goal of Darwinism — to propagate our genes. To bridge this potential contradiction, behavioral psychologists have come up with a few theories. These theories are often grounded on the premise that for most of human history, we lived in small tribes with very little interaction between different tribes. As such, we a) were related to most of the people in our tribe (ie, “shared the same genes”), and b) saw the same people day-in and day-out.
In this context, “reciprocal altruism,” which asserts that our willingness to help is rooted in the belief that these favors will eventually get repaid, makes sense. In intimate tribes, the frequency of interaction with the same people was high and therefore, the probability of reciprocation was high as well. Extrapolating altruism a bit more broadly — if the people we interacted with on a regular basis were related to us, then helping others (even at our own peril) would still accomplish the ultimate goal of propagating our genes. The vehicle would be different and there would be some dilution but the overarching objective would still be met.
If you believe most of our “hard-wiring” was solidified in nomadic/hunter-gatherer/early tribal settings, it helps explain a lot of the friction that exists between our natural “instincts” and the realities of modern society. Said differently, society (driven by technology, but that’s a different story) has evolved faster than our brains, and we are still playing catch up. We now live in a highly intermingled world where we interact with new and different people everyday, which wreaks havoc on our minds and emotions (Sidebar: this also explains why it’s hard to curb road rage even though it’s extremely pointless).
In school, the new students that join are strangers (i.e., “different genes”), so perhaps our natural inclination is to “care less” about them than if they were our kin. By contrast, when one sibling starts crying at home, it’s very common for the other sibling to start crying for no real reason except that his sister is crying and it’s somehow affecting him.
In reality, I am probably just over analyzing and it’s quite likely that having a kid cry like a maniac is super awkward for all the other children in the room. They know something isn’t right, but they don’t have the experience/developmental maturity to know how to react. Hence, they default to inertia and just continue going about their business.
Either way, I’m going to still think about Shawshank Redemption every time I see a new student initiation. It’s a lot funnier that way.
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