No-fun zones: schools take a recess timeout - Commentary - from CityTalk, November 9, 2001 - Brief Article - Reprint

Technos: Quarterly for Education and Technology, Winter, 2001 by Matt Schudel

Every parent knows how hard it is to make an eight-year-old sit still. But at schools across the nation, that's exactly what the education establishment is trying to do. In all its forward-thinking wisdom, America's education elite has decided to put kids in their place--and keep them there all day.

As many as four out of ten schools nationwide, and 80 percent of the schools in Chicago, have decided there's no time for recess. Instead of romping in playgrounds, kids are being channeled into more classes in an effort to make their test scores rise on an ever-higher curve.

You just have to shake your head. In fact, it's hard to imagine any idea that seems more contrary to both nature and common sense. It makes you wonder if there is any group that knows less about children than the people who run our schools.

"It's really not about recess," one suburban principal told the Chicago Tribune. "It's about time management."

Well, who said the most important thing for a seven-year-old is time management? Maybe the schools should hold off until, the subjects of this educational experiment actually know how to tell time.

To be fair to the schools, they're burdened with all sorts of conflicting responsibilities. They're trying to get by with shrinking budgets, underpaid teachers, unmotivated students, apathetic parents, and a Darwinian political climate that makes their very existence depend on their ranking in standardized tests.

"Ultimately," a superintendent at Hazel Crest School, in the south suburbs, told the Tribune, "we will be judged on how well prepared these kids are to go out into the world."

Precisely. If our children spend their days with no hope of freedom, you could argue that the only adult institution we're preparing them for is prison. Moreover, if swings, ball fields, and jungle gyms are forbidden territory, we could end up raising a generation of fast-food fatsoes.

This isn't the first time that grown-ups have tried to eliminate the notion of play. The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony banned recess because, presumably, playfulness was not next to godliness. But for the most of our nation's history, recess was a simple--and valuable--fact of every child's life. It was not merely a time of idle, unguided action.

Many of the lessons we retain from childhood are learned on the playground. It's where we first join a team, where we first stand up to bullies, where boys can be boys, where girls can be girls, and where solitary souls can find a quiet corner to gaze at a cloud of their own.

Kids used to play all sorts of games because recess, and the imagination it engendered, made them possible: Annie-Annie-Over, 23-skidoo, Red Rover. I remember one blissfully unsupervised mid-winter recess when half of my school slid around on a patch of ice, trying to teach ourselves hockey.

"The only rule," said the ringleader, "is no kicking above the ears."

Maybe, in retrospect, we weren't managing our time very well. After all, we were only building up a lifetime of memories.

But over the past decade, education has begun to look more and more like a market-driven commodity. Modern social puritans see recess as a frivolous luxury, and the trend has caught on with alarming speed. In Atlanta, recess has been abandoned altogether. New schools are being built without playgrounds.

Can you think of anything more sad? Few things are more innocently joyous than the sound of children at play, playing the happy games that childhood is made of. It is simply in the nature of children to squirm, fidget, run, bounce, and shout. There is nothing more forlorn than a playground going to rust, tempting the kids on the other side of the windows but forever out of reach. Yet our schools seem determined to make education an official no-fun zone. As a result, kids are deprived of the very thing that makes them kids.

Amid all the misguided statements of the experts, one voice of reason has spoken with unmistakable clarity and sense.

"Sometimes, it's just really hard to sit so long," said a fifth grader at Wicker Park School in Chicago. "You just want to be free."

Matt Schudel is a writer for the South Florida Sun Sentinel. His specialty is music, jazz in particular.

Originally published in CityTalk 15:35 (9 November 2001), p. 3. Copyright [c]2001 by Window to the World Communications, Inc., Chicago. Reprinted with permission.