Yesterday in Part Three, we briefly considered the importance of ‘play’ in the development of a healthy child, and I quoted some comments posted by Dr. Stuart Brown, who spent part of his career working with violent criminals, and came to the conclusion that many of them had been deprived of normal opportunities to play, as children.
What we mean by ‘normal opportunities to play’ has changed over the past century.
Here’s more from Dr. Brown:
Joe Frost, the leading American scholar of play, contends that the diminution, modification and/or disappearance of play during the past 50 years is causing a public health crisis and a threat to societal welfare that may last generations…
My own research, conducted since 1968, has involved around 6,000 individually conducted play histories. It correlates play deprivation during early child development with the predilection of felons for violent, antisocial criminal activities. We found the play experience of homicidal individuals to be vastly different from that of other human beings. Their childhoods were typically characterized by isolation, abuse or bullying…
As a clinician reviewing incarcerated young male murderers, I noted that none of them, in their self-reporting or in family recollections, remembered ‘normal’ playground rough-and-tumble play. They were unable to remember the names of playground friends. Bullying and inappropriately acted out aggression were their ‘play’ patterns…
This topic concerns me, because I currently serve on the board of directors for Pagosa Peak Open School, and we are planning to open a pre-school classroom at some point in the next 18 months, supported by Colorado’s new Universal Pre-Kindergarten (UPK) program.
People involved in early childhood centers in Colorado are quite aware that some of the impetus and philosophy behind the UPK funding is to ‘prepare young children academically, to succeed in school’. This idea is based on the belief that the stagnating academic achievement in our schools and colleges is the result of ‘not starting young enough’ with academic training.
I would argue that focusing heavily on academics with 4 and 5 year olds is a problem rather than a solution.
Disclosure: I currently serve on the Pagosa Peak Open School Board of Directors as the board secretary. This editorial reflects only my own opinions, and not necessarily the opinions of the Pagosa Peak Open School board as a whole.
From a March 2023 article by Gisele Galoustian, titled “All Work and No Independent Play Cause of Youth Declining Mental Health”, published by Florida Atlantic University.
[A study] published in the Journal of Pediatrics , suggests that the rise in mental health disorders is attributed to a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam and engage in activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults. Although well intended, adults’ drive to guide and protect children and teens has deprived them of the independence they need for mental health, contributing to record levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide among young people…
…“Unlike other crises, such as the COVID epidemic, this decline in independent activity, and hence, mental wellbeing in children has crept up on us gradually, over decades, so many have barely noticed it,” said David Bjorklund [co-author of the study]. “Moreover, unlike other health crises, this one is not the result of a highly contagious virus, but rather the result of good intentions carried too far – intentions to protect children and provide what many believed to be better (interpreted as more) schooling, both in and out of actual schools…”
The other day at the Ruby Sisson Library, I found one of my favorite books on the “Free Books” shelf by the front door.
I’d first come across this book back in the early 1990s.
Dumbing Us Down, by John Taylor Gatto.
I don’t know what happened to my old copy, but I haven’t seen it around for a number of years. So I naturally grabbed the free copy and brought it home, to find some fresh inspiration.
The full title is Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.
Thirty years of teaching in public school systems led Mr. Gatto to the sad conclusion that government-directed schooling aims to accomplish certain goals, but actually ends up, unintentionally, teaching a very different set of lessons, and in doing so, drives out the natural curiosity and problem-solving skills children are born with, replacing them with rule-following, clock-watching, and general disillusionment.
The first chapter is “The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher”. Here are a few random comments from that chapter.
The first lesson I teach is confusion. Everything I teach is out of context… I teach disconnections. I teach too much: the orbiting of planets, the law of large numbers, slavery, adjectives, architectural drawing, dance… fire drills, computer languages… pull-out programs, guidance with strangers… standardized tests, age-segregation unlike anything seen in the outside world… Even in the best of schools, a close examination of curriculum turns up a lack of coherence…
The second lesson I teach is class position. I teach that students must stay in the class where they belong. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class…
The third lesson I teach is indifference. I teach children not to care too much about anything, even though they want to make it appear that they do… I do this by demanding that they become totally involved in my lessons… But when the bell rings, I insist that they drop whatever they’ve been doing and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like a light switch…
The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good students wait for the teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of them all: we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives…
When I think back on my own childhood, one of the most joyous things I recall was climbing trees.
It was, I think, a meaningful childhood. I learned to seek out joyful experiences and explorations. Like, for example, writing editorials about my favorite community…