Category: Essays

Adults often underestimate the value of play. They look at it as merely recreation, a break from the serious stuff, a way to de-stress from work. Take a look at how school is structured and you will see that very little time is devoted to play. 15 minutes of recess in the morning and then another in the afternoon. The rest is devoted to work.

Class activities that include games don’t count. Playing according to a teacher’s rules, without the option to not play, is not really play. It is still work. The child is not playing because they want to, but because an adult said so, and disobedience can have serious consequences.

Real play is about freedom — doing what one wants instead of what one has been told to do, and along with that is also the freedom to quit when one doesn’t want to play anymore, or to do something else. Playing, then is not just about the activity, but one’s state of mind in doing certain tasks.

When I write these articles, I am playing. It is something I want to do, and something I have immense fun in doing. That doesn’t mean I write gibberish and nonsense. I even induce pressure on myself by always writing in the early hours of the morning before the deadline. Does that contribute to my stress levels? Certainly not. I have fun beating the deadline this way and I’ve been doing it week after week for more than 6 years.

The benefits of play are enormous. A study published in 2002 by Howard-Jones, Taylor and Sutton on The Effect of Play on the Creativity of Young Children During Subsequent Activity found that children who were put in a playful mood 25 minutes before engaging them to create picture collages were assessed to have more creative outputs than those who were conditioned to do serious work (like copying text) before the actual task.

Other researchers have created similar studies, all showing that a playful mood results in creative, insightful and out-of-the-box problem solving.

Dr. Peter Gray writes, “Learning, creativity, and problem solving are facilitated by anything that promotes a playful state of mind, and they are inhibited by evaluation, expectation of rewards, or anything else that destroys a playful state of mind.”

So let’s go back to the title of this piece. What does all this have to do with how schools promote bullying?

By the act of forcing children into age-segregated classrooms; restricting their free play; coercing them to listen to lectures they may or may not be interested in, and then evaluating and judging them based on those; by hinging their self-worth on grades, promotion to the next level, commendations and medals; by imposing arbitrary rules on things like haircut, uniforms and the kind of shoes one ought to wear; by the explicit or implicit glorification of the sciences over the arts; by all these and more, the school system, and those who perpetuate it are the biggest bullies of all.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Before schools came along, there was no age segregation. Children were a natural part of the community. They would easily and freely interact with whoever — older kids, younger kids, and even adults. There was no formal distinction made between what a kid ought to be doing vis-a-vis other kids. One kid could be happily playing by herself, another could be helping his dad harvest the potatoes.

In older hunter-gatherer tribes, kids could be tasked with adult responsibilities like climbing trees for fruits or setting traps or even hunting wild animals — as long as they could show that they were up to the task. Age was not so much a factor as was ability and interest. A teenager may not be strong enough to bend a bow but may show an aptitude for plants and can assist the tribe herbalist in creating potions and medicines.

With mass schooling came the idea to group children together in batches, according to their age, and then expecting them to learn the same things at the same time. This was a novel idea and proved to be very efficient — much like mass production in factories. Children were yanked from the playgrounds, from the fields, and from whatever nook and cranny they were hiding in, and placed in neat little rows of desks listening to an adult delivering lectures on history, mathematics, science, and whatever else adults thought was important for the kids to learn.

Now, because of grades and the ranking system (discussed in part 1), the survival instinct to excel and be number 1 becomes more pronounced with batching. Kids were now being forcibly compared with others of their same age. “Hey, the neighbor’s boy can read already at age 7. You’re almost 8. Why can’t you read yet?”

So here people are labeled as “bright”or “dumb” and no matter how much we lecture on political correctness or tell people that kids have multiple intelligences and may develop in different degrees and speeds, the system itself makes us still use those two labels, even if only in our heads — because we are too polite or ashamed to say them out loud.

Even in play and sports, age segregation has a negative effect. Studies have shown that mixed-age play triggers the nurturing instincts of older children. At Sudbury Valley School, for example, where there is unrestricted age-mixing — a game of basketball could be played by a mixed group of teenagers and 8 year olds. The interesting thing one would notice is that the kids will naturally form opposing teams that would more or less have the same number of teenagers and 8 year olds. The teenagers would not group themselves together and say, hey, let’s pound those 8 year olds.

Even during the game, the teenagers would bump and shove against other teenagers but they would not be rough towards or even guard the 8 year olds — leaving the other 8 year olds on their team to deal with them. This allows the younger kids to learn and enjoy the game.

The same principle could hold true for any other endeavor. Kids like learning from older kids because they are, in general, contextually more in tune with them than adults. And older kids enjoy a sense of accomplishment when they are able to help younger kids.

This dynamic is lost in age-segregated schools. No matter how much we lecture on bullying, how to prevent bullying, and so on, the problem persists and gets even worse because we haven’t changed the system.

Dr. Peter Gray, in his book Free to Learn, says, “The age-segregated, competitive atmosphere of school…provides the ideal conditions for the generation of competitive coalitions, or cliques, which provide a foundation for bullying. Children who are not accepted into any of the prevailing cliques may be picked on mercilessly, and they have no way to escape.”

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

What I am about to say will be quite controversial so I would like to declare up front what I am NOT saying. I am not saying that teachers, school officials or administrators, school owners or school boards themselves actively promote bullying or are secretly in favor of bullying. Though I am not discounting the fact that some of these people can themselves be the biggest bullies of all. But in general, I will readily assert that most of these people are good and kind-hearted and only want the best for our kids.

What I am asserting when I say that schools promote bullying is that the traditional SYSTEM of schooling itself provides the structure and breeding ground of bullying, REGARDLESS of the desires or intentions of those who run the system.

Dr. Peter Gray, a research professor at the Department of Psychology of Boston College, names at least 3 structural elements in school that promotes bullying (in the book Free to Learn):

1. Grading/Ranking
2. Age Segregation
3. Lack of Free Play

Top Ten, Honor Roll, Honors’ Class, Valedictorian, Salutatorian, Gold Medal — from the time children start school all the way until they are of legal age, these terms ingrain upon their minds that school is ultimately a place for competition. Since the highest honor in most schools is to be the valedictorian, the implication is for each student to look out for himself or herself rather than to help others. Cooperation is not the highest goal, not if it means sacrificing one’s grade.

In the words of Dr. Gray, “By design, it teaches selfishness…Indeed, too much help given by one student to another is cheating. Helping others may even hurt the helper…Some of those students who most strongly buy into school understand this well; they become ruthless achievers, more interested in beating others than in helping them.”

Again, and I cannot stress this enough, it is the design, the system itself that teaches selfishness. I am certainly not saying that teachers teach selfishness, but that the structure itself rewards selfishness — and kids can see that very early on. They are more perceptive than we think.

Now of course, not everyone can be academic achievers and kids understand this very early on. So they try to find a niche where they can be at the top. They will try to excel in sports, in the arts, or in being the most fashionable, the coolest, the most notorious, the most daring, and so on. And while the latter may not earn them any medals from the school, they earn approval from their peer groups — which they will come to value more than any recognition they get from the school.

So although the school may have a system for ranking the best in academics and even the best in behavior, the students themselves have unconsciously devised a way of ranking themselves in other ways, inspired by the basic idea that life is about ranking and gaining approval even at the expense of others.

The stage is now set for bullying, and the atmosphere is exacerbated by the other two factors, which I will discuss in the following weeks.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

So are diplomas really meaningless?

There was an interesting discussion among my businessmen and executive-level friends about their hiring practices, whether or not they actually looked at the diplomas and transcripts of their applicants. Some said they shunned graduates of big name schools as they tend to have bloated egos and unrealistic expectations of high salaries even before having proven anything in terms of performance. Some said that they looked at the school as a measure of the applicants’ ability to do assigned work — whether desirable or not — meaning, the more difficult the school, then the more compliant and obedient the graduate was.

One remarked that the school could be an initial indicator of the applicant’s intelligence and ability, but that was only as a first impression — and only one part of the hiring decision and not a sure ticket to acceptance. Many have experienced being burned by high expectations of graduates from supposed top schools only to be underwhelmed by their performance (or lack of it). Quite a few also remarked that they had employees who were high school graduates but were top performers in their field.

What was interesting as I surveyed the group, was that those who were employees in high positions were the ones who valued diplomas and degrees more, while those who were the owners themselves couldn’t care any less. They just wanted people who could get the job done, diploma or none.

The owners were an interesting mix. Almost none of them were top achievers in school. A good number of them were troublemakers and underachievers in school. Many admitted to cheating or bribing their teachers just to get a passing grade. Yet, these were the ones with the highest incomes and biggest businesses in the group.

Is this just a fluke or a is it a microcosm of a pattern we see around the world?

Almost everyone today knows that Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg never had a college degree before building their empires, but did you know that the following people also don’t have diplomas?

1. Walt Disney – dropped out of high school at 16, founder of the Disney Corporation.
2. Ray Croc – worked as a salesman, partnered with the McDonalds brothers and eventually bought them out to build the multi-billion global franchise.
3. Oprah Winfrey – took a job at a local television station while in her sophomore year and never looked back.
4. Michael Dell – sold computers from his dorm room while he was a premed student and eventually dropped out because he was already making $80,000 a month.
5. Matt Mullenweg – discontinued his political science degree and started WordPress.
6. Larry Ellison – dropped out of not one, but two colleges. Later created a database for the CIA and named it Oracle.
7. Lady Gaga – left college to pursue a career in music. Think she made the right choice?
8. Ralph Lauren – did two years of college, joined the army, then became a tie salesman, then eventually experimented with his own designs.
9. Ellen Degeneres – left college after one semester, worked restaurant and customer service jobs, did a lot of stand-up comedy in small bars and coffee shops.
10. Brad Pitt – ‘nuff said.

Of course, the takeaway here is not that dropping out of school is the way to success. These people still had to endure a lot of challenges and hardships along the way, but they were meeting these on their own terms. They were following their own paths in pursuit of their own measure of success, not another person’s or institution’s measure — which is essentially what a diploma is.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.