Prince George Is Going to a Swanky Private School Where Best Friends Are Banned
(Royal.uk)
Prince George, world’s fanciest baby, is about to leave his local Montessori school and transfer to a full-time private school. According to The Telegraph, the little prince will be attending Thomas’s London Day School, Battersea, a school that says its first rule is “be kind.” That’s a pretty good rule, especially for small children. The Duchess of Cambridge (Kate Middleton) is on the record as saying that as far as her children are concerned, she thinks kindness is just as important and valuable a quality as being good at math or sports.
”Whilst we are proud of our record of senior school entrance and scholarship successes, we place a greater emphasis on a set of core values, which include kindness, courtesy, confidence, humility and learning to be givers, not takers,” the school says on its website. Those all sound like pretty fantastic qualities for anyone to have, especially the future king of England.
One slightly more eyebrow-raising rule is that Thomas’s discourages kids from having best friends. A few years ago, parents at Thomas’s said the school told them that their children could not have “best friends,” because that could lead to ostracizing. The headmaster later told the Telegraph that it’s not an official rule that kids not have best friends, but that he did not like the idea of best friends for small children.
“There is sound judgment behind it,” he said. “You can get very possessive friendships, and it is much easier if they share friendships and have a wide range of good friends rather than obsessing too much about who their best friend is. I would certainly endorse a policy which says we should have lots of good friends, not a best friend.”
Thomas’s has about 540 children between the ages of 4 and 13, and it’s breaking royal tradition, because it’s a co-ed school. Princes William and Harry and their father, uncles, and grandfather all went to single-sex schools. It sounds like George will have an opportunity to make lots of good friends, girls and boys, and that’s pretty great.
