Garth George: Schools' hugging ban is out of touch

I couldn't believe my eyes when I read last weekend that a couple of Tauranga intermediate schools had banned their pupils from hugging one another in school grounds.

What possible reason could there be for any school to make such a rule, I wondered.

And, sure enough, there in the story was the reason, enunciated by the principal of one of the schools. Young, adolescent girls, said Otumoetai Intermediate principal Henk Popping, used group hugs to announce that these were their friends, and they were doing it in front of others who felt excluded.

Said he: "We keep a good, close eye on that and make sure that everyone feels included." What a load of old codswallop. I suppose the next thing this principal - and no doubt some of his colleagues - will do is to ban children from bringing their lunch to school in case some kids' lunches are of superior quality to those of their schoolmates. This drive for inclusion, which has bedevilled our education system now for decades, is part of that dreadful, twisted philosophy called political correctness. And all it can ever lead to is sameness and mediocrity.

For far too long educationists have been trying - fortunately without much success - to cram schoolchildren into a one-size-fits-all mould.

And what his does is seriously dampen initiative, imagination, innovation and that innate desire to succeed and please, which is as natural to children as breathing - or should be.

This is the philosophy that tells kids that they don't have to be winners and that even if they are they're no better than anyone else; that it is okay to be a loser as long as you've participated.

In far too many schools these days the competitive spirit that inhabits every child is being suppressed. And the unfortunate thing about that is that it can have a seriously deleterious effect on the rest of their lives.

So I go right along with the mother of a Tauranga Intermediate student who has laid a complaint with the Human Rights Commission over the hugging ban. What makes me sad is that she has to go to that length to get any redress.

"This is a blatant attack on [children's] rights ..." she said. "It stops children learning the most important fundamental thing on Earth, and that is to feel compassion and to feel real love, whether from a friend or from family."

How right she is. After all, touch is the first thing a new baby experiences, having been blasted into the world from a warm and comfortable womb.

It is its feel of a mother's (and, perhaps, father's) touch in the first moments of life that tells a newborn baby that he or she is not alone in this new world but is part of the human race.

Touch is one of the most powerful means of communication known to all living things, from the positives of a calming cuddle of a baby, to a gentle caress between a man and a woman, to a comforting clasp in distress, to patting a dog or stroking a cat, to the negatives of pushing, shoving, slapping or punching.

To deprive children of the right to communicate positively by touch is, indeed, criminal, and if the boards of those schools don't do something about it pronto then they don't deserve to hold their positions.

As Nicola Power, senior lecturer in the faculty of health and environmental studies at AUT, said: "Often people don't understand the importance of human touch and therefore to take that away from children at a time in their life when they often seek reassurance and comfort is a decision difficult to understand."

No, not difficult. It's downright impossible.

garth.george@hotmail.com