Hon­est­ly, this top­ic could get me into a lot of trou­ble, but I seri­ous­ly want to explore this with you all.  So instead of focus­ing on the oppo­site, “why age seg­re­ga­tion”, we are going to focus on the positive. 

If you truly want to explore all sides, please join us for our monthly educator session on the fourth Monday of this month :  https://scioacademy.com/events/educator-session-age-integration/

Most like­ly when you hear the term “Age Inte­gra­tion” you think about an Anne of Green Gables, Wal­tons, or Lit­tle House on the Prairie episode with the one room school house.  Hon­est­ly, you would­n’t be far from the mark.  Age inte­gra­tion is sim­ply inte­grat­ing or includ­ing mul­ti­ple ages of peo­ple in the same group.  We do this at home when we have grand­par­ents liv­ing with us, or at church when we wor­ship as a com­mu­ni­ty togeth­er.  We all know that the mod­ern school house is not a large one-room age inte­grat­ed par­ty. How it came to be or why is beyond the scope of this post.  But explor­ing some themes around edu­ca­tion and age is not, so let’s see what we come up with. 

I do not know every­thing about the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion, for there are many books and experts on this sub­ject.  Peruse them at your leisure. 

What I do know is that we often learn by: 

1. receiv­ing infor­ma­tion (book, online, video, etc)
2.  prac­tic­ing skills (using the infor­ma­tion to dis­cuss, write, build, etc)

Each of these items has a one to one cor­re­la­tion.  Mean­ing, As Dr. Seuss told us, “the more you read the more you know.”   The more you prac­tice your vio­lin, the bet­ter play­er you will become.   These two ways of learn­ing do not explain a fun­da­men­tal truth that we all know:  If I take my vio­lin to a group of bet­ter vio­lin stu­dents, then they will chal­lenge me to build bet­ter vio­lin habits and become a bet­ter player. 

If I’m sur­round­ed by learn­ers on the same lev­el as myself, how do I find that help? If I nev­er play the vio­lin with bet­ter vio­lin play­ers, how do I grow as a violinist? 

As a math­e­mati­cian, I’m not sat­is­fied with a one-to-one cor­re­la­tion for learn­ing.  I want to mas­ter a skill faster.  I want to know more than the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion, but there’s only so much time and we all start from the begin­ning.  That’s where men­tor­ing comes in.  Some­one who lets us stand on their shoul­ders to see the path ahead.  They give us a leg up.  They increase our cor­re­la­tion from one-to-one to one-to-two or three or four.  When we learn from some­one who has arrived at where we want to be, then they can help us advance along the road faster. 

• Who are these people and how do we find them? 

They are the peo­ple in the next grade up, the old­er Sun­day school class­es, the peo­ple at the gro­cery store when we are all at work, the peo­ple in our com­mu­ni­ty homes and parks. 

• How do we connect with these people? 

We jump into age-inte­grat­ed community.