Opinion | Student Height as a Determinant of School Performance?

In this same space a few months ago, I promised to write about the pedagogical connection to turning doorknobs on physician office doors. It was a joke, of course, made only to reaffirm that education affects everything in this world. However, at that time, I did not imagine that among my articles would be the one I write now (originally titled Student Height as a Determinant of Their School Development) that could be grouped with the doorknob article. In this case, it is not a joke.

The matter begins with the following anecdote.

I was talking to a couple of elementary school friends at a school generation meeting not long ago. The three of us were over seventy-one inches tall (nearly six feet).

“Do you realize,” said one of them, Gonzalo, “that the three of us are still close friends because fifty-odd years ago, the day we entered preschool, the teacher formed our class by height, and we were always at the end of the line together?” 

I had never thought about it. Gonzalo and my other friend, Alan, were, indeed, two classmates with whom I maintained more communication during those years of primary and secondary school and among the ones that most marked my school performance. I met their families and frequented their homes, and our friendship lasted through almost everything that I experienced in those school years.

All for being tall.

The fact of being together in the lines we formed may seem random, but it has its history. Forming boys and girls in lines and by height is not just someone’s useful convenience. For example, it seems logical and even natural to us that the principal wishes to dominate her students with her eyes. We have no problem imagining our primitive ancestors resorting to this strategy when leading groups. But no. As far as I understand, the formation by rows and heights is part of a set of control tactics that began in the late eighteenth century, when the German philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived a prison model in which guards occupied a central position from which they could watch over the prisoners in their cells near them. The design concept was called panopticon and was by no means trivial. As a prison model, it was rarely practiced, but as a concept of surveillance and control, it materialized a mentality of omnipresence at the time, which extends to this day. According to the French philosopher Michel Foucault, Bentham’s concept/model is present in modern society in prisons, psychiatric hospitals, barracks, and, of course, schools, but also in all our subconscious conceptions of the world. (The current followers of Foucault do not hesitate to study the phenomenon of Google and social networks with this same approach, revealing the hypervigilance to which we are all subjected by a power that is as objective as internalized).

It sounds exaggerated (and undoubtedly is, like any philosophical position), but at least I can accept the acuity of this thought just by imagining the following: It is the beginning of the day in a government primary school like all others. The director makes an announcement to the children, not from a central high place but somewhere in the courtyard, at ground level, while the kids listen to her, not formed in rows or by heights but accommodated at will in small or large groups, standing or sitting, anywhere. All of them are attentive, listening—or at least silent—and when the director has finished speaking, they head to their classes.

End of fantasy.

In this utopian image, everything is the same as our schools today, except that in the fantasy, the principal does not have every student in her sight. This single detail is so decisive that, for me, it could only happen in a society utterly different from ours: different streets, different houses, different transport, people relating in different ways, even wearing different clothes, and of course, all this in such contact with nature that even in cities trees proliferate, emerging from windows like in that building in Mexico City.

The current school order has its fortunes, like mine, coinciding with those two friends. But we cannot deny that, for many students, the rigidity of “details” such as height affects them hard. I speak of “details,” and for the moment, I am only referring to logistical planning and leaving aside other deeper dimensions that influence children’s basic satisfaction. (If lining up by height determines so many things, I do not even want to think about the consequences of being born in a particular social stratus, attending certain schools, having access to particular foods, and dressing in determined ways…).

Without having to delve into these depths, I can expand a little and tell you another anecdote that shows how this panoptic gaze sees invisible horizons. To do so, I must comment on a feature of Bentham’s original model, which I did not mention before: it turns out that in this one, the guard post windows are made of a material that allows guards to see the prisoners without being seen by them; they cannot even know if he is actually in his post watching them or has left it to go home. In this way, the guard becomes a kind of omniscient gaze that the prisoners internalize and always feel. (Because the guard may or may not be there physically, the panopticon significantly saves staff salaries for the prison institution).

Here is my relevant second anecdote: It turns out that in my school, as in so many others, children were divided into classes identified by letters: A, B, and C. We all knew that the students in the A classes were the most applied and best behaved (I can say that in my memory, they were also the most hair-styled); at the other extreme, those in C were the most restless, the least applied and even the least academically gifted (and of course, the least concerned about staying combed); those in B were an intermediate level between both. Needless to say, when it came to academic competitions between the three groups, beating those in A and even those in B meant for those in C (or for me, at least), overcoming a kind of ever-latent humiliation.

Not long ago, I had the opportunity to talk to one of the directors from those years. To my great surprise, he told me that the classes had always been formed randomly, without any personal characteristics in the decisions: no superior intellectual capacity, no different social means, no behavioral differences – nothing! He told me that all I just wrote here was a kind of myth that passed inevitably among the students and made them self-classify, provoking behaviors like the ones I described.

Who knows how many things that “detail” might have determined in our lives! I must say that I still maintain a friends chat from that generation, and we still allude to those differences. We do it with humor, but some friends remember, for example, their passage through group A as a distressing experience of fierce competition, depression, and constant stress. On the other hand, if I give my testimony as a student from the C group, I must confess that I cannot help but associate this letter with being lazy and a little silly (which, on the other hand, always opened up tremendous opportunities for me to have fun). The omnipresent gaze of the Foucauldian panopticon somehow still follows inside me.

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How much arbitrariness like this unites and separates children? By what pre-established paths do they come to know each other or not know each other? How many prejudices operate so that they decide who they want to approach and who they do not, configuring the social universe that will accompany them for a long time and distorting the very meaning that they have and will have in their lives to make decisions?

A third personal story allows me to turn these questions around and try to answer them positively, looking for an exit from those unconscious routes that determine our relationships and behaviors. It involves a group exercise many years ago in a Mexico City school. It was part of a large project called Integration Workshop, which we had created to support coexistence between fourth and fifth-grade elementary students and explore practices of communication and inclusion. Through talks, games, and group dynamics, we aspired to provide new channels of encounter for children who remained separated for reasons of which they were unaware.

The exercise in question consisted of drawing a line in the center of the classroom, with the children gathered around it. The teachers asked, “Who likes music?” Instead of saying, “Me,” the children would stand on the line. It was a way to create ephemeral groups with those united by that characteristic. While at first the questions summoned many children to go to the line, little by little they addressed less common inclinations (Who likes to paint? Who likes to have moments of solitude?) or alluded to intimate conditions (Who has lost a loved one? Who feels anger frequently?). The children on the line now formed smaller groups, and we hoped that some could identify coincidences that united them with peers who were not their friends, or whom they rejected, or even those with whom there was a bullying relationship. I remember well that one of our primary concerns was how far we could take the questions without violating anyone’s privacy.

Years later, I was fortunate to see this exercise (which we had not invented) repeated in a social experiment in which the same thing happened, only with more people, all adults. The objective was to show the coincidences among inhabitants of different zones in a conflicted city. Initially, the participants formed six or seven groups, united by age or social means, I do not remember. Once the questions began, the groups dissolved to form others with new characteristics (those who were the only child, those who had lost a sibling, etc.). Seeing all those people passing through the great hall to form ensembles with new and unexpected diversities was moving. From that, I have two fond memories: the image of a giant motorcyclist, dressed in dark leather and with his whole body tattooed, bending down to receive the embrace of a shy and conservative-looking older woman, crying together for having coincided about I-do-not-know-what question. The other touching image was a boy who walked onto the stage alone, timidly placing himself in the center, the only participant who answered the question, “Who among you is bisexual?”

I believe this is an exercise we should all do in our communities. The education I want definitely includes it. I don’t know for sure if this interaction can open rusted-shut windows inside us and make us think and act differently. I want to believe that the old lady and the motorcyclist were never the same after that hug and that seeing one reflected in the other eliminated hurtful prejudices about their differences. I also want to think that some of our students in the Integration Workshop allowed themselves to approach some “unknown” classmate after that game. I want to believe that dynamics like this can open ways to solve problems, for example, bullying, which presumably operates when one person does not want to see himself reflected in another.

Perhaps this exercise is not enough to enlighten the participants who feel inside them the watchful eye that pursues and induces them to believe certain things. For me, it would be enough to allow them to glimpse an understanding that our attributes and experiences are more distributed than we think and let them suspect that human beings are more united with each other than with that omniscient eye of duty watching us vigilantly.

Ultimately, I would like to return to the beginning of this text and stand in front of those children in my pre-primary school to shout in a tender and firm voice: Break ranks! Some would stay with their newfound friends, but others would surely wander around, attracted by a different look, smile, or stature.

Everyone would suddenly feel free. In our hyper-surveilled world, that would be an unfathomable respite.

Translation by Daniel Wetta

Andrés García Barrios Writer and communicator. His work brings together experience in numerous disciplines, almost always with an educational focus: theater, novel, short story, essay, television series and museum exhibitions. He is a contributor to the Sciences magazines of the Faculty of Sciences of the UNAM; Casa del Tiempo, from the Autonomous Metropolitan University, and Tierra Adentro, from the Ministry of Culture. Contact: andresgarciabarrios@gmail.com

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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0