Ken Robinson on Education Reform, Animated

Why Kids Can't Sit Still in School

There's a article by a pediatric occupational therapist making the rounds about the way that the normal, sedentary school day contributes to a host of problems including childhood obesity, sensory integration difficulties, lack of core body strength, balance trouble, and learning difficulties.  Parents, not surprisingly, have jumped to the task of finding solutions to the problem the author lays out.

In a follow-up piece, the author addresses those solutions.  Are exercise ball seats or brief exercise breaks throughout the day the answer?  In a word: no.  These quick fixes are cosmetic solutions for a bone-deep problem.  Exercising a minute or two out of every hour is not enough.  Children need to run, roll, spin, swing, and play for hours every day in order to develop normally.  Our schools, unfortunately, don't support that.  Actually, the number and length of recess breaks have done nothing but decrease in the last few years, and the few recesses allowed to our kids are routinely cancelled due to inclement weather and replaced with alternate sitting still activities.

Ask at your local elementary school how many minutes of recess children receive a day.  Ask what happens instead when it rains or when the temperature is below zero.  The answers will not reassure you.  As the article so memorably puts it: when the bum is numb, the brain is dumb.

We can do better.

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The Problem with a Narrow Education

The handful of politicians and business people making decisions about the future of education in our country would like parents to believe that the key to success is laser-like focus on a handful of subjects.  They have declared that in the earliest grades, our children should focus on literacy and math six hours a day, to the exclusion of the arts, the humanities, and science.  In the later grades, these self-styled experts have decided that our children should focus on both literacy and the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (S.T.E.M.) to the continued exclusion of the arts and humanities.  

This laser focus approach does a disservice to our children.  First of all, because we cannot know for sure that S.T.E.M. careers are in fact the jobs of the future.  More importantly, however, because such narrow focus impoverishes education.  

Allow me to illustrate with a story.  My good friend Elizabeth has a Ph.D. in organic chemistry.  During her post-graduate education, Elizabeth was performing research that built on previous studies in organic chemistry.  Unfortunately, the original research published on the specific area of her work was written in German.  In order to succeed in her S.T.E.M. field, Elizabeth needed to understand German so she could read the original papers.

An education with a narrow focus on literacy and S.T.E.M. would not have prepared her for the learning she needed to do later in her life.

Our children need the opportunity to study a broad range of subjects.  Project-based learning is ideal, because it allows for the student to find every type of knowledge and form of expression grounded in the topics they love most.

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