Preschool Bans Use of the Term 'Best Friend'
Source – Julia Hartwell loves her dolls, arts and crafts and like most four-year-olds, she has a best friend. However, that’s not a term Julia can use at Pentucket Workshop Preschool in Georgetown.
Her mother, Christine Hartwell says, “The teacher told her she couldn’t say that there in school.”
Christine Hartwell calls it “ridiculous.”
“Children who are four years old speak from their heart,” she says. “They should be able to call kids anything loving. You’re my best friend. You’re my best pal.”
The Georgetown preschool offered an explanation to Julia’s parents. Saying the term best friend “can lead other children to feel excluded” and it “can ultimately lead to the formation of “cliques” and “outsiders.”
The preschool wrote, they “encourage children to have a broader group of friends, and foster inclusion at this particular age.”
Good call by the Pentucket Workshop Preschool. I think we can all agree that the best way to raise our children is to deny the very nature of the human experience. To train kids from the age of four that their feelings are not legitimate. That emotions are not valid. All people are exactly equal. That likes, dislikes, interpersonal relationships and chemistry between fellow beings does not exist. Best of luck tossing your little shovelfuls of sand into the tide of millions upon millions of years of human existence.
Here’s what those meddling social engineers trying to play God with the Pentucket students’ lives don’t get: Julia Hartwell is doing her fellow 4-year-olds a favor. By playing favorites. Newsflash you naive Early Childhood Ed majors don’t get: Not all children are created equal. Some are more deserving of being friends than others. Some are weird. Some suck at playing games. Some are abysmal failures on the playground. Some can’t color for shit. Some pee their pants or just flat out are cursed with cooties. It has been that way since we came down out of the trees. You can’t fight it. Nor should you.
By being rejected by the Julias of the world, maybe they’ll be inspired to clean up their acts. To work harder. To be better. The friendship of the Julia Harwells is to be earned, not given. Otherwise it is devoid of meaning. If I were a student who heard cool kids calling each other “best friends” and felt left out, instead of whining to my teachers and demanding they ban speech in order to appease me, I’d work on my own self-improvement. I’d make myself belong in their “clique.” Which is exactly what I did, by the way. It’s how the most popular people became my friends, from elementary school to Weymouth South High to Bill Belichick. By earning it, not forcing it on everyone under fear of punishment.
So when the parents of Georgetown find out down road they’ve raised a generation of permanently misfit “outsiders” incapable of being genuinely and honestly liked, they’ll have the Pentucket Workshop Preschool to thank. You keep doing you, Julia. And never let these weirdo bastards drag you down.