The Importance of the Classroom in Child Development
Updated: Jun 7, 2021
It’s 8 am and Tommy just walked into his 2nd grade classroom. You drive off to work ready to pick him up at 3 pm, 7 hours later. What happens in those 7 hours, 5 days a week for 25 weeks a year will shape Tommy’s life more than anything else.
The debate of whether our kids should go back to the classroom because of the novel Coronavirus is thought about all wrong. We should be asking ourselves what we can do to ensure students, especially younger ones, get back to the classroom asap. Why? The classroom is not a physical institution to learn multiplication and capitals. Homeschooling and private tutoring can replace factual learning, and more efficiently for that matter. But what can’t be replaced is the social development that takes place within the classroom setting. Think for a second what interactions our kids will have if have if we took them out of the classroom permanently? How will you replace their social interactions?
As parents and educators, we want to give our children the tools to become intelligent, independent, and ethical human beings. To accomplish such a task, we set rules in the house, spend on extracurricular activities from music to sports, and promote a lifestyle of acceptance and moral good. What do these all have in common? These are the lessons Tommy and his classmates receive every day in school.
Tommy walks into his home room. He says hi to his best friends, ignores and sticks his tongue out at the girls and goes to sit in his assigned seat. His teacher gives her morning hello and then begins teaching the first class. A few lessons later and it’s time for lunch. The kids shuffle to the cafeteria in orderly fashion, greet and thank the lunch staff, sit, gossip, and eat with their chosen friends, throw away their lunch, recycle their bottles and go out and play for recess. After recess, it’s time to go back to class and sit through a few more lessons before being picked up.
What seem to be minor details in your child’s life are incredibly important. Following rules set by members outside the family, interacting with kids of different backgrounds, and creating a sense of independence all take part within and around the classroom. During lunchtime, our kids need to learn to wait their turn. During recess, they learn to share. The more time they spend with each other and outside the constraints of a family with a singular thinking, the more independence they will gain. Independence in their physical needs, but more importantly, independence in the way they think and make decisions.
StudyBuddy is an advocate for private tutoring and we believe that having extra education can benefit our students greatly, but we also know that being present in a physical school is an irreplaceable benefit to our kids.
