I went to elementary school in the ninetees and yes, they still do it. First through fifth grade every spring we’d get out of valuable time for learning and held hands with girls and walked around in circles. No, not squares, mind you, we just sort of walked around in circles together blushing. I’m not sure why we did that.
I learned how to square dance in music class in elementary school. I didn’t like it, or hate it at all, I was opinionless on it. I never knew why, but the teacher was pretty intent on having us learn how to do it.
St. Petersburg, FL here.
In 1st grade (84-85), certain of us were selected to perform a terribly embarrassing rendition of “Turkey in the Straw” that involved some square dancing, as well as clogging by some students who clogged outside of school. We didn’t really get into it until 5th grade (89-90 at a different school).
At that school, we had a large unit on dancing that covered 5 weeks and 5 dance styles. I can’t remember all of them, but we square danced to “Turkey in the Straw” and we learned the Texas Two-Step (?) and a traditional Israeli folk dance and song called “Mayim Mayim”. I can still do this last one.
I don’t know why they would teach a bunch of 11-year-old Floridians a traditional Israeli folk dance, but I’m sure they had their reasons.
It was still going on in the early 90s in Sydney. Mixed genders for dancing even though most other P.E. was separated.
Some earlier responses are hinting at the fact that is might be a form of socialising with others of the same age and opposite gender in some cases. I’m still waiting for an answer with a reason WHY. The fact that it is prevalent around the world makes me think there has to be a reason behind it.
Why? Because it’s horribly embarassing and P.E. teachers are sadistic! Isn’t that enough?!
Yeah!!! I thought we were the only ones too (Connecticut, early 80s). Must have been the thing to do.
I think I remember doing some square dancing in gym class in grade school, and I know we learned some folk dances in probably junior high. There was a Greek dance that I thought was kind of pretty and the one you do to Hava Nagila (the Hora?)
But we also had a unit of dance in gym class in high school every year, one of the few times the class was coed. We did some square dancing, the polka, and the jitterbug. My polka partner when I was a freshman was a big guy (a junior) on the football team who apparently wasn’t listening when the guys were told to adjust their steps to their partner’s. About every third step I was off the ground, just swinging around in a big circle to catch up. Kind of fun, actually.
AvariceAngel, you mentioned the Chicken Fat record? I think I still have a copy. Wonder what it would be worth as a collectible? 
“Well, you all join hands and you circle the ring. Stop where you are, give your partner a swing. …” I’ll have it in my head for the next week, I don’t see why the rest of you shouldn’t. Sometimes it just comes up out of nowhere, and all of a sudden I’m singing “Oh, Johnny, oh, Johnny, oh”. Someday I’m really going to embarrass myself.
I suppose one of their motives might have been to encourage socialization between the girls and the icky old boys. Kind of funny when you think about it. Our elementary school teachers spent 7 years trying to convince us to touch each other, and then our high school teachers spent the next 4 trying to make us keep our hands to ourselves. I dunno, though. You’d think after (apparently) 50 some-odd years they could come up with a better way to make kids interact.
I love square dancing.
Then again, I’ve also danced in front of loads of drunks whilst polkaing and wearing a drindle, so you could pretty much say nothing embarrasses me.
NYC in the '70’s and early '80’s. No square dancing because we had no gym, actually, the school dated from 1922 and they had run out of money for one–there was a space with pillars wrapped in gym mats right in the middle of it that we had the cafeteria in, and sometimes we’d play dodgeball and Duck Duck Goose or anything else that required almost no equipment (fiscal crisis time!) I know nothing of real gyms, teams, football, showers, or parachutes that you rich kids who doubtless were chauffered to school in Rolls Royces had 
In HS, we had sex-segregated gym too and real gyms although again, no equipment and no teams except Frisbee and basketball. But no dancing at all. It’s a shame, we had some very good dancers off-campus.
Yup, grew up in Ontario and had to “learn” it around 4th or 5th grade. Can’t say I ever really enjoyed it. Of course, I never enjoyed PE, so there ya go.
However, I loved the parachute games! So yeah, we did that too. Why the hell were they making us square dance when we could’ve been playing with the parachute?? 
We did the square dance thing in 8th grade back in 77. I went to a Catholic grade school and the unstated purpose of the nuns was boy-girl socialization. I was one of the awkward unpopular kids and after a few do-si-dos and a few laughs from my classmates I was banished along with the two unpopular girls to clean the classroom while the normal students continued the dance lesson.
Well, having grown up in the alleged “Cowboy Capital of the World” (Dodge City, KS), I never thought to ask why. Cowboys, Boot Hill, square dancing - it all seemed to fit.
This is something I have forgotten but I learned square dancing when I was in elementary school, grades 4 and grade 5, (this was the early eighties), and our principal taught us. It was an extra curricular activity, but I dont know why we had to take it. I vaguely remember a song going something like “around the old grove tree” and thats where you hooked arms I think. In junior middle school we had to take dance and learn stuff like “hookball change” where you kicked your feet out.
Square/line dancing was not the weird part. (I actually liked it; had a crush on one of the girls…)
What I MUST have an explanation for is why–when we were sitting out and watching another crew dance, we had to sit on each other’s laps. I am not making this up. Half the time out, I would be sitting on a girl’s lap. The other half of the time, a girl would be sitting on mine. We only did this when we were doing the dancing; never in any other PE activity, or on any other occasion. It had some connection with the dancing, but I cannot find any reference to a dance custom that involved boys/girls sitting on laps when sitting out.
Of course if the girl thought I was gross, she would sit clear out at the kneecaps, and with as little of her weight on my legs as possible. (Don’t say it!) And being shy, I did the same because I didn’t want to creep the girls out.
What the heck was going on?? (No, the teachers were not perverts; they were quite normal in every other regard. And they were highly regarded.)
This happened around 1974, fourth grade. The teachers were about 35 years of age at that time, so they would have gone through college around 1960.
OK, now you can ask: No, nobody got pregnant. (Probably because we sat out on the kneecaps…
This seems appropriate:
I did in jr high in PA in the mid-1970s. Dance was, I think, the only non-competitive thing we did in gym class as well as the only co-ed activity. It was not popular with either the boys or girls. Along with square dancing, we did some kind of stupid dance that centered around jumping in and out between two pieces of bamboo held at ankle height by other kids. There was also a brief and abortive attempt to teach us The Hustle. I think gym pedagogy was still struggling with the concepts non-competitive and co-ed and this was the best idea they had at the time. Like a lot of bad ideas, it lingered. (See bloodletting, slavery, methamphetamine, and bagpipe music for other examples.)
The main thing I remember about square dancing in 6th grade was that you had to hold hands (gasp!) with a member of the opposite sex. There was much talk amongst the girls about which boys had hands that were sweaty, dry, or otherwise covered in cooties. And sometimes you might even hold hands with your crush, which was cause for dying on the spot.
It was for us, too. Why a bunch of 13-year-olds from NH were being taught that a thousand or more miles from the nearest hoedown, I couldn’t tell you. It was one unit everyone hated, and it was for about a month, geez.
Why square dance in schools? Maybe to learn an adult activity that is a lot more entertaining than calisthentics? Yes, grown people used to square dance for entertainment - really! - and some still do. Easy to see why it isn’t wide spread now, with the reactions above. Yet I’m sure the teachers thought they were doing kids a favor. Whenever something from the outside world is put into a classroom and made into a study it loses its fun. I used to take the literature text and read way ahead, for enjoyment, because I knew it wouldn’t be pleasurable when we did it in class. {Shakespeare’s plays made money as entertainment, which will come as a surprise to many students today!