A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article about how enrolling kids in summer schools that are structuring their classes and activities in a way similar to the normal school days is not as productive as perceived.
The premise of that article was that teacher-led classes, especially for young kids, prohibit their development. Kids need free time to play, to discover, to take a break from homework and rules so they could explore their own creativity and sense of adventure.
The article was not received well by a couple of my friends. Their counter argument is simple — no school means time wasted in front of TV and video games, etc, which definitely is not healthy for kids.
Scientific evidence does support their argument, as too much “couch” time is bad for children. However, my friends’ argument is based on a flawed assumption that a vacation without any “proper” activity like summer school means a waste of time.
According to many researches in the field of education and psychology, a successful summer vacation is a mix of structured and unstructured activities. Structured activities are those meant to create a bond between the kid and his or her parents. A summer travel like visiting a theme park or a museum is a kind of structured activity. Finishing a storybook together also falls in this category. Teaching your kid how to ride a bike is a structured activity. In short, a structured activity is something planned by an adult with the aim of teaching the kid something significant in a fun way or light manner.
During unstructured activities, children themselves choose their own projects and set playtime rules. Invite a group of your kid’s friends to your place and allow them to spend the afternoon together and they would definitely find a lot of things to do.
The common denominator between all those activities is allowing the kids to play. “The experience of play changes the connections of the neurons at the frontend of your brain,” says Sergio Pellis, a researcher at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada.
“And without play experience, those neurons aren’t changed.”
In that sort of activities, the kids learn how to think, how to solve problems and how to build social connections. It is almost impossible to teach young children such kind of skills in a math or a science class. “Whether it’s rough-and-tumble play or two kids deciding to build a sand castle together, the kids themselves have to negotiate, well, what are we going to do in this game? What are the rules we are going to follow?” Pellis says. “The brain builds new circuits in the prefrontal cortex to help it navigate these complex social interactions.”
The problem with most of local schools that offer summer programs, even when they do not provide teacher-led classes, is that they overburden their activities with rules and “do’s” and “don’ts,” inhibiting the kids’ abilities to freely discover, to interact, to create, and to make mistakes and learn from them.
“I think kids need time just to play around, to be creative, to be bored, to reflect, to figure out who they are and what they’re interested in,” said Carolyn Shields, dean of the College of Education at Wayne State University in Detroit. “I think if we’re always putting them in structured activities that can’t happen.”
The underlying goal in all of this goes deeper than a plan for a summer vacation. It is all about developing the personalities of an entire generation. As the world is moving toward an economy that is based on knowledge, you need individuals who are not afraid of inquiring that knowledge, of thinking extraordinarily and asking the tough questions and pursuing the truth while, at the same time, appreciating and understanding the outlines of laws and culture. Raising such a generation cannot be done without striking a balance between “play” and “seriousness.”
Michael Fullan, former Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s long-time education adviser, said “Parents need to be more self-aware regarding the summer period, avoiding over-programing kids, or the opposite of too much free time. Awareness and balance is the answer.”
