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Education Science

Kindergarteners Today Get Little Time To Play, and It's Stunting Their Development (qz.com) 228

Posted by msmash from the brutal-truth dept.
Christopher Brown Associate professor, University of Texas at Austin, writes:Researchers have demonstrated that five-year-olds are spending more time engaged in teacher-led academic learning activities than play-based learning opportunities that facilitate child-initiated investigations and foster social development among peers.During his research and investigation, Brown found that a typical kindergarten classroom sees kids and one teacher with them almost the entire school day. During this period, they engage in about 15 different academic activities, which include "decoding word drills, practicing sight words, reading to themselves and then to a buddy, counting up to 100 by ones, fives and tens, practicing simple addition, counting money, completing science activities about living things, and writing in journals on multiple occasions." Recess did not occur until the last hour of the day, and only lasted for about 15 minutes. He adds:For children between the ages of five and six, this is a tremendous amount of work. Teachers too are under pressure to cover the material. When I asked the teacher, who I interviewed for the short film, why she covered so much material in a few hours, she stated, "There's pressure on me and the kids to perform at a higher level academically." So even though the teacher admitted that the workload on kindergartners was an awful lot, she also said she was unable to do anything about changing it.
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Kindergarteners Today Get Little Time To Play, and It's Stunting Their Development More

Kindergarteners Today Get Little Time To Play, and It's Stunting Their Development

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  • Kindergarten ? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Archangel Michael ( 180766 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @01:10PM (#52925369) Journal

    It isn't just Kindergarten, is is throughout all of school, K-12.

    They also neglect soft education like Music and Art (often replacing with Social Conformity Drills).

    The problem is, we have people in far away cities, who don't have any real interest in the education of any student, making all sorts of Rules and Regulations (see Common Core) about not only how, but what kids ought to learn by when. All, often without any clue how long it takes to teach a room full of kids who just want to play.

    We don't live in an industrial world, we shouldn't be treating our education system like a factory.

    • It isn't just Kindergarten, is is throughout all of school, K-12.

      They also neglect soft education like Music and Art (often replacing with Social Conformity Drills).

      The problem is, we have people in far away cities, who don't have any real interest in the education of any student, making all sorts of Rules and Regulations (see Common Core) about not only how, but what kids ought to learn by when. All, often without any clue how long it takes to teach a room full of kids who just want to play.

      We don't live in an industrial world, we shouldn't be treating our education system like a factory.

      Unfortunately when the politicians and education bureaucrats realize this, they will mandate an equally stifling "soft education" regiment.

    • Neglect for music and art has more to do with funding than any desire to cram more stuff in. There are schools where they can't even afford basic supplies like paper. How are they going to have instruments that students can use (as most can't afford a personal instrument) or art supplies such as canvas and paint if they can't afford even more basic supplies?

      The educational system is fucked for a variety of reasons (far-off bureaucrats as you've alluded to) and it seems like no one is really interested in

    • we have people in far away cities, who don't have any real interest in the education of any student, making all sorts of Rules and Regulations

      I don't buy that at all. I think the people taking and the people tasked with coming up with those regulations largely do want whats best for students. But due to a variety of factors (almost all political) too many compromises must be made along the way so every "education overhaul" falls back on whats easiest to quantify which is regurgitating facts on tests. Thus classrooms in the US look almost the same today as they did 100 years ago. Give those people in far away cities enough time, data, and infinite

      • Give those people in far away cities enough time, data, and infinite "political capital" and they'll probably come up with a general system that works much better for most all students.

        They have had the Dept of Education, since Jimmy Carter, to do exactly that. And they have failed. They have failed, not in collecting data, but generalizing "students" in such a way that no student fits their "average" student in their models. There is no such thing as "average student" except in a statistical mean.

        Sorry, but the ONLY people who can educate a student (singular individualized) is in the classroom, and they are hamstrung by the "System" these people in far away cities have come up with (See

    • We don't live in an industrial world, we shouldn't be treating our education system like a factory

      If you like public education you'll love what Congress will do with socialized medicine. Remember, Pelosi's goal was to put insurance companies out of business:

      “Well of course I wanted single-payer, and I wanted a public option. But that not being in the mix, uh, you have to prioritize what it is you want to get over the finish line.” - Nancy Pelosi

  • Father of an 8 year old (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @01:11PM (#52925379)

    I have an 8 year old son and have been appalled by the expectations placed on kids, especially boys that are naturally energetic. I took my son out of one private pre-school that was an arts and crafts factory. At the time he was 3 or 4. First I noticed the drawings were too dark for him. Then I observed how they assembly lined the kids while the teacher would fill out the art after the kids 30 seconds was done. The teacher said my son wouldn't stay on a task and I witnessed my son very focused on painting and then the teacher took the painting so the next kid could get their 30 seconds of painting.

    I know I'm going off on the teachers, it's really the school system. I have teachers in my family that taught many years ago that retired or got out of the business. They too are appalled at what they saw in the final years of practicing their profession.

  • We had only half-day kindergarten. We went outside at least twice a day. During the day, we sang songs, did water coloring, played with clay, construction paper and scissors, the sandbox, sock puppets. There was lots of arts and crafts. There was always story time, where our teacher would read aloud to us. The only academic work I can ever recall was studying the alphabet, learning how to count to ten, how to count money, and learning how to write our name.

    I still work in a school, in Minnesota, and now kindergarten is full day. Kids are expected to learn how to read. They do lots of worksheets, spelling tests, spend time learning how to use computers, and learn basic adding and subtracting. There's also lots of social behavior practice (how to stand in lines, how to be quiet and raise your hand, how to take turns, not interrupt others, etc.) And writing...lots and lots of writing. Long story short, what I covered in 1st grade 30 years ago is now what is expected in Kindergarten. Play is a thing of the past.

    At this rate, expect them to be bringing home Algebra textbooks by the turn of the century.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      And the really sad thing is that all this does not benefit them one bit. Instead, it harms them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PRMan ( 959735 )
      The irony is that kids that were 1st Grade age are now being held back to Kindergarten...
    • My kindergarten year was 1969-1970, and my experience was pretty close to what you describe. I remember the teachers making a big deal of the fact that I could already read in kindergarten, and they didn't start with the Dick and Jane books until 1st grade. While I'm not one to grumpily castigate "kids these days", if they're pushing kids that much harder nowadays, I'm not seeing any particularly positive results from it.
      • I was in kindergarten in the mid '70s and i remember it was a big deal that i could read. It was just me and a couple other kids in this reading group. A couple times a week, we had to skip recess and do our advanced reading class instead. I don't think it affected me in any way, but i was bummed out about it.

        When i entered first grade, the teacher gave us reading tests to separate us into different skill levels. I saw this as my chance to start over, threw the test, and told the teacher i couldn't read

    • What, they aren't expected to learn how to program the computer? They are going to fall behind if they don't get computer science! Why won't someone think of the children?!?!

  • No time to play we have the test to learn or we lose our funding and college prep to do.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @01:23PM (#52925509)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Piaget

      You know that Piaget has been largely discredited, right?

      But, yes, education policy is dominated by know-nothings whose only strategy is "fire the bad teachers". Where the good replacement teachers come from with the pitiful salaries that most teachers earn is never discussed. Also not discussed: how to identify the "bad teachers".

      • Piaget

        You know that Piaget has been largely discredited, right?

        At some point we hopefully get to the point where we realize this entire field is discredited and stop trying to use it to set policy. Keep studying it all you want, much like economics, it has the feel of science without any of the icky details of repeatability and determinism.

        Until you have something that absolutely, definitely works, let's just teach kids with teachers who are masters of their subject. Those kids who aren't learning fast enou

        • Re:US education policy... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by apoc.famine ( 621563 ) <apoc DOT famine AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @02:59PM (#52926345) Journal

          Until you have something that absolutely, definitely works, let's just teach kids with teachers who are masters of their subject.

          That sounds good, but in practice it's not good. Why? To be a master of your subject, you have to live and breathe your subject. To be a good teacher you need to be a bit of a generalist. You can't be so hyper-focused on one thing that everything else in life gets excluded.
           
          I've got an education degree and some teaching experience, and I've also spent a fair bit of time working in and around grad-school STEM programs. The experts in those programs are the shittest teachers, for the most part. Why? They never learned about how kids learn, because they were busy becoming experts. They never learned the basics of assessing learning because they were becoming experts. They never learned motivational strategies because they were hyper-motivated on an exclusive topic, and it never occurred to them that some students need some motivation the way they would for any other topic.
           
          What we need are not masters of their subjects, but communicators and collaborators who can give kids access to people who are masters of their subjects. I once filled that role, connecting NASA scientists to middle school science classrooms. The NASA scientists weren't teachers and didn't know the first thing about it, and the middle school science teachers weren't scientists and engineers. But when we set up the communication and collaboration between the kids and the experts, amazing stuff happened.
           
          That's one thing we need. The other is equitable funding. I think that it's Germany that does the opposite of what the US does. They still have standardized tests, but the results are secret. The lowest performing schools get more money, and the highest performing schools get less. That makes all of the schools roughly the same, and parents don't know which ones are better, so the rich parents can't move their kids out, leaving behind the poor (minority) kids. The US does the opposite - we openly publish our assessment scores, and we threaten to withhold funds from poorly performing schools. Since we also have wacky local funding, parents create these "ghetto schools", as rich parents move their kids to the best performing schools, and work to ensure that they don't need to pay for the schools they left behind. Great for their kids, but terrible for all the other kids. But who cares when you can live in a gated community with a guard to keep the rabble out, right?

        • let's just teach kids with teachers who are masters of their subject.

          How many could Stephen Hawking teach?

          Like the man from IBM said, about half a dozen physicists should be enough.

      • False, not discredited at all, some disagree with him but his influence has been huge.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Good teaching is hard. You have to know and understand those you teach to. You have to be flexible. You have to select a small set of things to do really thorough and a larger set to just touch on the surface. And then, if that was not hard enough (and apparently already impossible for the people that create these courses), you have to engage your students and earn their respect. You have to give them a lot of freedom to find out whether what you taught them actually works or not. You have to allow them to

  • Why is this bad? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @01:27PM (#52925537)

    I'm a dad of a new kindergartener. They're not solving differential equations at this level; it appears that they're trying to get them on a level playing field, accounting for differences in background, etc. If a kid has spent the last 5 years doing nothing but watch TV and has never been read to, they really have to catch them up quickly. First grade is apparently where the "rigorous academics" start. My kid already learned to read and has a pretty good background in the basics, so I imagine it's going to be a less than engaging first year.

    I know everyone hates the common core stuff, but I do see the point. Teachers aren't given a class full of kids with attentive parents who care about what their kid does in school. Maybe some are like that, but others are too busy, don't have the educational background, or the family is poor and education takes a back seat to living. Absent the nice home life, the schools have to do everything they can to ensure they give a kid a fighting chance education-wise.

    Also, having recess is almost optional in my mind. Chinese, Indian, Korean, Japanese and other countries' students spend way more time in school than our students do. Education is valued in those societies and they make sure they turn out well-educated students. Look at some of the university entrance exams from countries on this list and compare it to high school curriculum in the US. Compared to these countries, we're doing nothing near that level of work with students. Visiting faculty from other countries send their kids to private tutors to ensure they receive a level of education on par with their country's system so the kid won't be behind when they return home. I think the school day should be longer and the school year should be year-round. Only 2% of the population works in agriculture anymore, so there's no excuse for students to be out the whole summer anymore.

    • Re:Why is this bad? (Score:5, Informative)

      by oh_my_080980980 ( 773867 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @01:44PM (#52925689)
      India, with the lowest scoring educational system? Japan as recess. Perhaps you should stick to topics that you know something about or better yet research before you post. Ass.

      • Perhaps you should stick to topics that you know something about or better yet research before you post. Ass.

        Wow, and here people were going to take you seriously. Too bad.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You should look at some of the schools in Scandinavian countries and ask yourself why they are graduating after 10 years at around the level of a college sophomore while US schools are turning out people after 12 years that need remedial classes in college.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The US is 3400 different school system and not all yielding the same result. Upper middle class communities in the US are graduating globally competitive students ready for college and on the same level as any European graduates, but the US is very big and very socio-economically diverse and the poorer communities are graduating people not ready for college. We know how to graduate competitive students in the US. The problem is they have to be from households making $100k a year or over. Schools cant make u

      • You would need to control for demographics to make a comparison between Scandinavia and the US

    • Re:Why is this bad? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by PRMan ( 959735 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @01:50PM (#52925739)
      If these other countries' education systems are so great, then why is everything invented in America? Because we (used to) take the time to allow people to think creatively. This includes recess, music, art and after-school playing around the neighborhood. As these things disappear from the education system, so will our lead in invention.

      • "why is everything invented in America"

        Because there are tons of top level people with money to blow on a risky venture. How the hell do people who read slashdot not realize this.

    • Ding ding ding! I agree, I do not understand why this is bad. When my grandfather went to school, he was a rarity in rural India. My father went to school - he did well, and learned more than his father. I went to school, and learned more than my father. My son did kindergarden last year, and definitely learned more than I did at his age. And this is how things are and should be. Each generation should learn more than what the previous one did. And I don't think my son (or indeed, any of the other kids in

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by epyT-R ( 613989 )

      My kid already learned to read and has a pretty good background in the basics, so I imagine it's going to be a less than engaging first year.

      Then that school is doing your kid a disservice and wasting all that time you put in to his learning the basics. Why should your kid be held back by welfare funded children who weren't weaned properly?

      I know everyone hates the common core stuff, but I do see the point.

      I don't. School shouldn't be a model of Marxist equal outcome. Human beings are too diverse to work that way. This has been proven repeatedly over the last 80 years and the powers that be still haven't gotten the message.

      Also, having recess is almost optional in my mind. Chinese, Indian, Korean, Japanese and other countries' students spend way more time in school than our students do.

      and their societies praise conformity over free-thought and innovative approaches. In t

    • Tell me more about the great innovations from Chinese, Indian, Korean, Japanese adults.....

    • Also, having recess is almost optional in my mind. Chinese, Indian, Korean, Japanese and other countries' students spend way more time in school than our students do. Education is valued in those societies and they make sure
      they turn out well-educated students. Look at some of the university entrance exams from countries on this list and compare it to high school curriculum in the US. Compared to these countries, we're doing nothing near that level of work with students. Visiting faculty from other countries send their kids to
      private tutors to ensure they receive a level of education on par with their country's system so the kid won't be behind when they return home. I think the school day should be longer and the school year should be year-round. Only 2% of the population works in agriculture anymore, so there's no excuse for students to be out the whole summer anymore

      This is just opinions without any merit based justification. I will dismiss it as such.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sims 2 ( 994794 )

      That's mostly myth it was mostly done because the school buildings were too hot it the summer before air conditioning and it hurt attendance.
      http://www.pbs.org/newshour/up... [pbs.org]

  • entire school day... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Austerity Empowers ( 669817 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @01:38PM (#52925623)

    An entire school day here in Texas means from about 8-3, minus 40 minutes for lunch, 20 minutes for recess, and 15 minutes for morning announcements. Seems pretty sparse and there's plenty of time to go play somewhere before dinner and bed-time (which some shaman are insisting should be 730p). Since my kids go to school very near where this yahoo practices his quackery, I can honestly say they goof off at school in epic proportions. I can say for a fact that they didn't cover such complex topics as "the alphabet" or "adding numbers" in kindergarten. Whatever they were doing, wasn't strongly academic.

    All I see down here is more concentrated efforts to defund public schooling, pushing more interested parents into debt for private schools that still focus on academics. Public schools have always worked reasonably well, but it's clear that the more we defund and defocus them over the decades, the lower the quality of the graduates produced. In Austin they're talking about doing away with homework, and this fool is trying to provide the support needed. This is great way to cut pay to teachers who don't have to grade it, but whether we liked it or not as kids, there is is a time when you need to memorize certain things, and homework is the weapon of choice. Class time should be spent on questions and explanations, homework is the ideal time for reading new material and memorizing what things absolutely need to be memorized.

    The entire topic of "child initiated" blah blah "social development" is saying happy words that people like to hear but has absolutely zero substance. If I get home another paper that my son "collaborated" on with his peers that contains mistakes that I know he is far beyond but he tells me "well if I tell her she's wrong she cries and we all get demerits", I will scream. Sure it's an excellent opportunity to teach leadership, but on the spot it isn't happening because teacher is busy with the remedial kids who still can't do their ABCs, but we can't have remedial/normal/advanced classes because it marginalizes someone (read: that budget was cut). At home it's out of context and contrived, particularly on a child who is not destined for leadership by its current definition (i.e. Zaphod Beeblebrox's school of CEOing). Whatever fantasy land this asshat lives in, he should retreat to, he couldn't handle the world he's shaping.

    Let's keep school focused on academics, but when we get to the teenage years not be afraid to spend some money on kids who have no track record of academics, and help them with trade skills in a useful, non-profit, way. For now, if lack of play time is hurting children, it's probably all the after-school sports/band/dance/cheerleading/gymnastics/music/etc. stuff parents sign their kids in to as extended daycare. A friend of my son's has an after-school schedule that is full of more junk than my work calendar. Surely by the time they're done with all that they are exhausted and too tired for homework or required reading anyway.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Total nonsense. School funding is the highest its ever been. Kids are most definitely still split up by ability and they most definitely don't put the remedial kids in with the above average kids, and no one is really saying "do no homework," except for a handful of crazy charter schools trying to attract moron parents, but we have doubled the amount of homework nationally in the last 30-40 years and gotten nothing to show for it except for really stressed out kids. They certainly aren't doing better on tes

  • I visited my son's Kindergarten for a day last year. When it's cold or rainy, they have indoor recess, which was in the media room that day, sitting in the dark, asked to sit still and be quiet while they watched a vouple Curious George videos. OK, so a cartoon monkey is jumping around on a pogo stick trying to make a painting that way, making a huge mess, and 5 year olds watching are expected to sit still and be quiet? No talking, we don't want to start any social interaction either... Weird... It it any w

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Whatever... (Score:3)

    by TheSync ( 5291 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @01:46PM (#52925699) Journal

    John Stuart Mill was taught ancient Greek by the age of three. By the age of eight, he had read Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis, and the whole of Herodotus, and was acquainted with Lucian, Diogenes Laertius, Isocrates and six dialogues of Plato.

    My kids are way behind!

    I will admit two laments about modern education:

    1) Too much homework for young kids (pre-K, K, etc.) Not that homework is a bad thing, but when a kid can't even read, "homework" is really "parent work".
    2) Too many public school fundraisers. I thought this was all socialist schooling paid for at the point of a gun by taxes? If they expect me to pay for school, I'll send my kids to private school and move to some place that has lower taxes. I don't remember any of these crazy fundraisers when I was in school...

  • Already Implemented in Ontario, Canada (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Godai ( 104143 ) * on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @01:49PM (#52925721)

    My wife is a kindergarten teacher, and over the last four years there's been a push to 'play based learning', presumably resulting from the same kind of research mentioned in the article.

    By and large it seems fine, though it doesn't alleviate some of the problems they mention; specifically my wife still feels the pressure to move through the curriculum, but it's a little less clear how. Part of the 'learning through play' initiative also pushes heavily on 'self guided learning', and while all of this seems great, there's not a lot of guidance given on how to execute. I think most of us would agree that it's better if the student is interested & wants to learn the subject, but there's no real help about what to do if the student /isn't/ interested. Presumably the teacher just forces the kid to learn what has to be learned, but all the material provided leans heavily on instructing teachers not to do that.

    At any rate, this is mostly just typical of governments adopting something and not thinking through how to implement fully. Still, the impression I get from my wife & her colleagues is that the ideas are good (play-based learning) but it'd have been nice if there was better instruction on how to follow through.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Maybe this depends on what you're referring to as self-guided but the in vogue approach of not teaching multiplication tables, long division, etc. has shown to result in a poorer understanding of mathematics.

    • Re:Already Implemented in Ontario, Canada (Score:4, Interesting)

      by olau ( 314197 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @04:56PM (#52927221) Homepage

      I have two happy kids in a Waldorf kindergarten here in Denmark, and here's a biased opinion: basically you leave the kids alone and let them play with whatever they want to play with for most of the day, preferably outdoors in a calm setting.

      Kindergarten is not really for intellectual stuff. Your wife should forget the curriculum and let the school handle it - the fact she's called a teacher is part of the problem. She should see herself as someone providing inspiration and someone whose behavior is worthy of replicating, not as someone who instructs.

      In my kids' kindergarten, the adults study fairy tales so they can retell them to the children (recounting them orally, never reading directly from a book) to provide fodder for their imagination. They also cook and do other household chores each day, again setting examples for the children to participate in and replicate in their play.

      For a small child, there's a lot to be learned about self-motivation, inventing things, experimenting, self-confidence and important topics such as friendships and life. Counting and reading is easy, in comparison, for a determined, self-confident child. So better wait with that.

      In a nutshell, as far as I'm aware, you don't end up being a better reader by learning to read one year earlier. But you might end up being more self-confident and self-motivated by having entertained yourself through play for that year.

  • Society Advances? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mlw4428 ( 1029576 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @01:55PM (#52925781)
    Society is continuing to advance. Kids should have to learn more, because WE have learned more. 200 years ago they weren't being taught what we were being taught and 200 years before that the same thing. The problem is this antiquated notion that school should start at 7:45AM and end at 2-3PM with sports taking up until 7-8PM. Of course that 7 hours has to include lunch, breaks, gym, and anything else that isn't directly "education" related. Children have more history to learn, more science, more technoloy, and they have to be better thinker/problem solvers/etc. Perhaps I'm strange, but I just think that's a natural progression. What needs to happen, instead of cutting back on necessary education, is adding another hour or two to each day (especially to the older grade levels).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      A modern day "Renaissance Man" like Leonardo da Vinci would be a quack in everything from medicine to aerospace. Or brain surgeons need to know brain surgery, our rocket scientists rocket science but any one person would only know a tiny little fraction of all human knowledge even if he studied 24x7 from the day he was born to the day he died. Yes, obviously the more knowledge we accumulate the longer the climb before you can stand on the shoulders of giants but you can't just decide to make it go faster. I

  • It's not happening by accident, it's a feature. (Score:5, Informative)

    by LuxuryYacht ( 229372 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @01:59PM (#52925833) Homepage

    The solution to the problem is already known and long ignored in the USA.

    Michael Moore documentary clip of on Finland's school system:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
    Unless they just made that up for the film.

  • >There's pressure on me and the kids to perform at a higher level academically

    Because more results gets more funding.

    Which is just asking for shit. Begging for shit. ANY sort of automated yield is. People game the system if you chain them to one. Leaning on metrics is often a flawed equivalence right away, and if not it will be soon, by those affected.

  • Kindergarten in these United States is only half a day long.

    Cranks up antique horned vinyl record player with patriotic music repeatedly warbling higher than lower in proper pitch for background while the announcer proclaims, "The United States rose to greatness during era of one teacher/many grade school houses..."

  • They're there to get job training. Companies are tired of coddling your kids. They want workers to come out the door ready to go. They sure as hell aren't gonna pay to teach em...

  • Yikes - (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Ah, American public education: Where young minds go to die, and old mistakes live forever.

    When I was a kid in the early 1990's, things were a lot different than they are now. We didn't have uniforms. If we lived close enough to the school, we were allowed to walk, and very few people thought that this was unusual at the time. Recess came twice a day, first in the morning, then in the afternoon after lunch, each session lasting about 15 to 20 minutes depending on the day's schedule. We went outside and playe

  • Play makes good learners (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NotARealUser ( 4083383 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @03:17PM (#52926497)

    Some of my best learning opportunities came from play. I played in the woods and road my bike around town with friends (those big scary places that today's parents tell their kids to avoid). I had to fix my dad's computer after breaking stuff because I messed with IRQ settings to get my mouse and my sound working at the same time (and I had to do it before he got home from work and found out!). I played Axis and Allies, Risk, Chess, and other games that required thinking. I pieced together civilizations and learned how people react when playing Sim City and Civilization games. I tinkered with electronics. My parents let me build a fort. I planted seeds I found and watched them grow. I moved spiders to different parts of the yard, watched them build a web, then observed them eating mosquitoes.

    This is where I learned the most. Play keeps learners engaged. Strictly academics is boring. I think society is too focused on maintaining the status quo and it is killing the fire of desire for learning that burns in the hearts of young children. Without play, and with an overemphasis on memorization (as opposed to experimentation) you make dull, lifeless people who lose the ability to be more than cogs in the machine of society.

  • Well now that was a long time ago. One of the things I remember about high school was that the library was off limits unless you had a class that used it. Before school? Closed. Lunch? Closed librarian takes lunch same time. During class? I only ever had one class that used the library and that class only used it twice. After school? Closed.

    So when are you supposed to use it?

    As for kindergarten I just remember the neat little school play we did and all the toys that were always in varied states of missing.

  • Could this be a side effect of the "No Child Left Behind", that even though Bush signed was written by Ted Kennedy.

  • maybe it is about lawsuits (Score:3)

    by renegade600 ( 204461 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @04:19PM (#52926939)

    If they let the kids go out and play, and while playing they get hurt, the school gets sued. It is easier and cheaper to keep the kids in a controlled environment.

  • because in HS now, they don't do anything. A friend teaches at a underperformer school. No homework, name your grade, text, neck, whatever you want in class. So now kindegarden teaches and high school baby sits. Crazy world.

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