No Touching–a desert of affection

 

Seriously.

Have you read about this? A ban on touching (from roughhousing to holding hands, all inclusive) in an elementary school in British Columbia once again proves just how thoroughly out of touch with reality –and basic human needs—too many people working in the school system are.

In his seminal work, Touching, the Human Significance of Skin, Ashley Montague provides decades of scientific research on the benefits of touching and the strange world of what happens to human beings (and, cruelly, monkeys) in the absence of physical affection. Published in 1986, surely at least one person working in the school system, who has studied anything to do with what human offspring need to thrive, has encountered at least the foundation research?

What happens to people when they’re banned from social physical contact has been well-established . . . .

Already living without the most important people in their world, for most of their waking day, now children are not allowed to do the most human of all social activities: bond emotionally with others.

As if the behaviour problems in schools were not already bad enough, with children needing (and not getting) a strong sense of stability and security, with children needing (and not being allowed) to eat when they’re hungry or have silence when they’re overwhelmed or social contact when it’s inconvenient for the teachers, now they’re not allowed to touch a friend… at all.

What cruel world of impersonal body segregation are we working toward, here?

Hey, hang on! Isn’t school supposed to be where kids go to learn to be ‘properly socialized’?!?