Dr. Harry Harlow at the University of Wisconsin performed a series of studies in the 1950s involving monkeys and physical contact. He removed baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers and set up a chickenwire "mother" with a milk dispenser and a plush cloth "mother" with a milk dispenser, and then several variations thereof. He observed the psychological states of these little monkeys, in an attempt to gain scientific insight into the nature of love and development.Perhaps you have heard about Joyce Kilmer Middle School in Fairfax County, Virginia. They don't permit touching there. Any sort of physical contact between students is against the rules. No high fives. No piggy-back rides. No hugs. The principal at Kilmer Middle defends her policy by noting that her school is overcrowded to the tune of 250 kids, and that when mixed with the youngsters' immaturity, that can lead to a terrifying maelstrom of aggressive and/or sexual contact. The kids play violent games, get in fights, hug people who don't want to be hugged, and generally test the boundaries of social acceptability at the behest of their newly discovered hormonal id. The school's argument is that absolute prohibition of physical interaction is the only way to enforce enough order to educate.
Even when the wire mother was the one giving milk and the plush mother was dry, Harlow's monkeys would go get their food and then scurry back to the plush mother to cuddle. They would play and explore under the benevolent gaze of the smiling face painted on the felt. Those with only a wire mother in their enclosures would curl up and shriek when confronted with anything unfamiliar. They would wrap themselves tightly in their own arms in a desperate attempt to simulate the contact and comfort they innately knew they needed, but it was inadequate. They grew to resemble sanitarium inmates or severely autistic children. If Harlow's monkeys had no mother for the first 90 days, they were irreparable. The window had closed. No amount of love and attention could undo the ravages of the wire mother. The lonely little monkeys went crazy and could never function in a normal environment. When presented with a potential mate, they would often start furiously humping the wrong parts, sometimes grabbing ahold of the other monkey's head instead of hips, sometimes not reacting at all. Those females that managed to reproduce were either indifferent or abusive to their offspring, neglecting them or biting and scratching them to death.
Kids don't live their whole lives in school. They hang out together afterwards, they have families, they have friends, they play sports. Kilmer Middle isn't necessarily breeding wire monkeys by keeping these kids physically isolated for at least 40 hours a week. But they aren't fulfilling their mission as a school, either. They are creating an artificial and unrealistic environment for their own convenience, and eventually those kids are going to leave Kilmer and go to high school or into the workforce and they are going to find themselves in crowds that are not of their choosing. They will be surrounded by strangers in environments of varying structure and protocol. Not having had a structured environment in which to explore those protocols, they will be unprepared, courtesy of their middle school's desire for more rigid order.
Schoolchildren are not receptacles into which knowledge can be poured, provided that they can be held still for long enough. Their development at that young age cannot be segregated into academic and social and physical and psychological categories and dealt with separately, each one in turn. It's everything all the time with the little hellions, and yes, that's a very difficult job to do. Middle-school kids are learning how to calculate the effect of their actions and recognize appropriate behavior even as they learn to calculate the volume of a cylinder or recognize literary foreshadowing. Any educator who would deny that in the name of making his or her job a little easier would do well to go find an easier job and leave teaching to those who have the uncommon fortitude to handle thirty-odd tweens for eight to ten hours a day and still care about their well-being after they leave.
