CHARLESTON, W.Va. - Sixth-grader Adam Eddy discovered he has a couple things in common with one classmate. Both would like to vacation in California, and both like rock 'n' roll.
"It was a girl, which was weird," Eddy said of their mutual taste in music.
Cody Messer, Evan Burton and a couple other boys talked about beef jerky, football and popular videos on You Tube as they munched on turkey, mashed potatoes, green beans and pumpkin pie.
Friends Stormy Lokey and Jazmyn Mitchell, however, missed being able to sit together at lunch.
"We encourage the kids to take the leadership role," said Leah Devine, a community service coordinator at East Bank who organized Mix It Up Day. "The main idea is they're sitting with people they wouldn't normally sit with and finding similarities."
Some of the more outgoing students who already know most classmates didn't feel like the exercise was necessary, but other children said it was a good way to meet new people and they hope to see it back next year.
"They started out real quiet, but they opened up the more they were in there," Devine said of the sixth-graders.
Students asked each other questions like: "What's your favorite food?" and "Who's your hero?" to get the discussion going.
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This is the government using a captive audience to indoctrinate the minds of impressionable children. The whole thing promotes viewing others as members of a collective rather than as individuals; government sponsorship of such an exercise negates the concept of individual freedom of choice. I seriously doubt that the school systems of Europe, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea would ever condone this nonsense. Perhaps this is why students of these other locations excel academically while American government-schooled students are unable to locate their own country on a world map.
In today's global economy, U.S. government schools concentrate more on self esteem and social engineering than on actual education. The result is ultimately a citizenry that will depend more and more upon government for its livelihood. Such a system is abusive.