Also, I think it's important to keep in mind that academics are the primary purpose of school.
Not in my house. Your mileage obviously varies, but the primary goal for my children in school is to learn socialization and become functional adults. Academics come effortlessly -- they can learn more academics with an hour of instruction from me every day. If all I wanted for them was academic growth they would be homeschooled. School is for the harder stuff: social awareness, cooperative learning, team building, and even, yes, learning how to do group activities they think are boring or beneath them with a good attitude.
But are they being explicitly assigned to do these things by a teacher? Are they being denied their own learning because this is the role they are expected to play, every day? Does the role suit them, or are they expected to do it even when it potentially makes them disliked and brings out negative aspects of their personality?
Yes, they are often explicitly asked to do these things by a teacher. And you could certainly argue they are wasting valuable time they could be growing in the skills they are good at (or even the skills they are not so good at) by helping other children. I'm certainly glad they and their parents don't see it that way.
I am not saying that a child who is a really wrong fit for tutoring others should be doing it (nor should they ever be doing one task to the exclusion of all others). If your daughter is having difficulties managing that skill at this point in her life, then it's not right for her. My ds7 certainly couldn't tutor others. He doesn't have the social or communication skills. I wish he did -- we work constantly toward helping him develop the necessary social and communication skills that he could perform a task as valuable as being able to teach to someone else. I would say, in fact, that
that skill is just as valuable, if not more, than how quickly he masters calculus.
EDIT: To be clear, I support differentiation and acceleration whenever possible, and the advocacy there of. But reality is what it is, and I think there are many soft skills that can be learned in the times when a child is still in a regular education setting. And intellectual capital is not the only commodity children are asked to give to each other, nor is it the only thing of value for them to learn from each other.
