Smart with struggling. Rich with poor. Disabled with able-bodied. Quiet with loud. Everyone with everyone.
It's called society. School should probably prepare them for it.
Six lanes. Each child meets the kind of child the machine decided they were. It took work to arrange.
One classroom.
Same kids. Fewer walls.
Nobody disappeared. Only the sorting did.
Sorting is sold as fit. The gifted child is not held back. The struggling child is not left behind. The child in the wheelchair gets the building with the ramp. Some of that is true. All of it is also a decision, made when a person is six, about who they will sit beside for the next ten years, and therefore who they will grow up thinking of as people like us.
A child who never sat beside a poorer child learns that poverty is somewhere else. A child who never sat beside a disabled child learns that disability is a separate building. The lesson is never on the timetable. It is the timetable.
Mixed classes. Support brought into the room instead of the child taken out of it. The brilliant kid explaining fractions to the difficult kid, and finding out the difficult kid is funny. The rich kid learning that the poor kid's bus is late for reasons. Nobody moved to a different building for being the way they are.
It is harder to teach. That is the real argument against it, and it is an argument about adults.
In the 1970s Finland dismantled its two-track school system. Instead of sorting children into academic and vocational futures at eleven, it kept them in comprehensive school together until sixteen.
The fear was predictable: what happens to the brightest kids if you stop separating them?
They seem to have managed.
One of the children who grew up in that school system was Linus Torvalds. He went on to write Linux.
The operating system serving you this page.
Society starts early.
Some things sort themselves out. Children shouldn't have to.
Don't sort kids.