This blog post is a very interesting topic of whether students should have the liberty to decide their own classmates. It sure would be a lot of fun but I say no and here's why...
Imagine that you are a student in 12th grade. You have had the same classmates throughout your school years and are about to graduate. Would you be ready for facing different personalities outside school life and knowing how to deal with them?
I believe that that the major downfall of this idea is that students won't be able to connect to the outer world which is the real world. They will not always have their friends by their side helping them because everyone will pursue different career paths. This is what I will be further explaining right now.
- A key life skill for a student is the ability to connect and interact with diverse people from varied cultures, choices and preferences. This makes students future-ready since as adults in professional life one has to deal with many different people
- As humans we have a tendency to get attracted to people of similar choices, preferences and behaviours, hence we make friends with people of “our types”.. example a soccer player would essentially have another football freak as a friend
- Giving a choice to select your classmates would possibly have a class full of sports freak, another full of debaters & so on.. this would defeat the purpose of learning from each other, secondly the ability to co-exist with people who have different opinions and appreciate their thoughts since each one of us is unique and have different abilities
- This year being the year of tolerance in the UAE, one of the key traits that HH Sheikh Mohammed, Ruler of Dubai, is driving is the ability to live together happily amidst people of diverse cultures since that teaches us to be tolerant each other’s view. School life should prepare us for the future and hence diversity would make us more tolerant ready to face the real world later.
Now many may say that everyone should have a free right to choose. Indeed, however, school is a journey preparing us for making the right choices, what is the guarantee that our selection would be far-sighted and definitely the best choice since everyone is learning together. Therefore entrusting the decision to an adult who has more experience would have higher chances of students be in safe hands
Marc Hermans, head of the teacher education programme at PXL University College in Hasselt, also has his doubts about the value of the system. “We should teach children how to deal with conflicts,” he told Het Belang Van Limburg. “If they don’t encounter them in class, they will come into contact with them outside the class. This system rather creates problems than solving them.”
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