I just rented a heart warming and amusing documentary which followed a bunch of New York City students, mostly 11 years old, as they prepared for a ballroom dancing competition.

I saw kids who started out tough, talking about drugs, living on the street or in broken homes, coming from abusive backgrounds; and by the end of the movie many of them had transformed into "ladies and gentlemen" (as the teachers referred to them). And as one would expect, the experience of the dance altered their lives outside of school.

I saw aspirations raised. I watched as they saw themselves with a chance to climb out of the third-world-like squalor in which they were being raised.

The children were learning skills, a way of relating, a way of dealing with competition, success and failure. I saw boys and girls learning to be respectful of each other, learning to look into each others' eyes, to take a partner's arm when entering and leaving the dance floor, to touch and hold each other, to move together. I saw teachers teaching by example, touching and dancing with students.

I saw kids learning to stand straight for the foxtrot, shake their hips for the merengue, be sultry for the tango. The children were mimicking intimacy and sex in the way that dance mimics intimacy and sex. And the process was helping them develop from a childish standoffishness to the maturity of relationship.

So the movie was a heart warming one of hope, of intervention and growth. But for me there was also a touch of sadness. I was struck by the fact that these children were being given the opportunity, in school, to learn the social graces that would be expected of them as civilized adults, but that these social skills had to be taught in a formulaic way. It was alright for the teacher to touch the child as a necessity to the ritual of the dance.

Touching is an act of love, affection, caring, nurturing. But those aspects of touch were not openly acknowledged even though they are formative aspects of maturity and healthy interpersonal growth. Children were taught to look into one another's eyes, not because it is a language of respect and union, but because it is a part of the dance.

Intimacy and love are not acknowledged school subjects. Sometimes they aren't taught much at home either. Children are left to their own devices to learn how to deal with the hormonal soup that forms the basis of love.

Now these few schools have found a way in which the education of love and intimacy could slip in the back door. Perhaps in a more civilized world it would be an acknowledged part of the curriculum.