Bid Them Sell My Bones

The End of the Best Friend

The tag-line of this New York Times article reads: School officials intent on discouraging any exclusivity are seeking to sever traditional best-friend bonds.

The more normal something is, the more it must be destroyed by the modern liberal managerial complex. “Educators” and other people entrusted with the day-to-day care of children (the role that used to be filled by, you know, mothers) have spied an excellent opportunity to begin artificially managing a segment of reality previously untouched by their ideology: friendship.

In recent years Timber Lake Camp, a co-ed sleep-away camp in Phoenicia, N.Y., has started employing “friendship coaches” to work with campers to help every child become friends with everyone else. If two children seem to be too focused on each other, the camp will make sure to put them on different sports teams, seat them at different ends of the dining table or, perhaps, have a counselor invite one of them to participate in an activity with another child whom they haven’t yet gotten to know.

The writer, Hilary Stout, senses that this idea will seem outrageous to readers, even readers of the New York Times. So she quotes sympathetically some people who oppose these friendship-managing programs. But note carefully the reason it’s objectionable:

Many psychologists believe that close childhood friendships not only increase a child’s self-esteem and confidence, but also help children develop the skills for healthy adult relationships — everything from empathy, the ability to listen and console, to the process of arguing and making up.

When building the optimally functioning little social cog-bot, one must take care to develop the proper “skills” and “self-esteem.” There’s no mention that friendship is good in and of itself, that it’s one of the joys that makes life worth living for children and for adults. No, goodness is a foreign concept. There is only utility for these people. Once that’s your only criteria, then it’s easy to see how there could be a debate about whether or not authorities should manage a child’s friendships.

They acknowledge that a particular managerial action may have desirable or undesirable consequences, but they never once question their right — their duty — to govern and transmute the most basic forms of human existence:

Still, school officials admit they watch close friendships carefully for adverse effects. “When two children discover a special bond between them, we honor that bond, provided that neither child overtly or covertly excludes or rejects others,” said Jan Mooney, a psychologist at the Town School, a nursery through eighth grade private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “However, the bottom line is that if we find a best friend pairing to be destructive to either child, or to others in the classroom, we will not hesitate to separate children and to work with the children and their parents to ensure healthier relationships in the future.”