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We are afraid of getting kids all in the same place, usually because we can’t control what happens to them. And, ironically, the best businesses are spending their time and money trying to create ways to get people together in order to produce better workers, better ideas, and better working environments.

In a recent interview Pixar’s Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles, describes the kind of environment that he tried to build to get innovative ideas from his team of animators. Look at how he describes the building design and its purpose:

“Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. [Jobs] realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.”

It seems to me that schools may be doing a great injustice in teaching our students to separate. What if we just spent more time, energy, and money on harnessing the energy students have so that when they get together, they are producing, creating, innovating, and collaborating? What if we had a building that encouraged groups to collaborate and study, solve problems, and learn together? What if we tried to create culture rather than suppress it?