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Global Village Idiot: One sports period daily for developing life skills
What makes matters worst is that schools often adopt a repressive approach to kids’ opinions, smothering dissent and debates with judgmental ferocity
Growing up, I studied in two schools under two different boards: St Joseph’s High School, Juhu Mumbai (Grades 1-7) under Maharashtra State Board and Union Academy Sr Secondary School, New Delhi (Grades 8-10) under Central Board of Secondary Education.
I have a million memories from each school, and most of them fall into four categories: discipline, discussions with teachers, results and playing. In figures: 10% of memories are related to discipline, 10% related to results, 30% are related to discussing and arguing with teachers, and the remaining 50% of memories are of playing in school with friends. I don’t remember studying in school.
St Joseph’s is a co-ed school and I remember playing langdi, lagori, sakhli, and running and jumping. Athletics was segregated by gender while play was often boys versus girls or mixed teams. We also had regular PT (physical training) which was for drills and march practice. We also had team sports which meant all the boys and girls in each team were strategizing, discussing, making decisions, failing and succeeding and learning to deal with it all on a weekly basis. This naturally led to a sense of ownership and belonging to your classmates, house teams, and the school. There were regular sporting events, leading up to the annual sports week culminating in sports day.
Union Academy is a government-aided school and fees in 1984 were around 35 bucks a month (Rs350 a year) if I remember correctly. We had a scheduled PT period and two sports periods every week. In addition, we could - and did - go to the school ground every time a teacher was absent or if we were done with our science lab work. On average, we had 60 to 90 minutes of physical activity every day. No teacher ever stopped us from using the school ground if we had a free period.
It was a time when it was a matter of pride to get picked for your school team and represent it as an ambassador of the school’s values, sporting spirit and competence. Values are reflected in behaviour and conduct; sporting spirit showed your understanding of ethics and the ability to stay on the right path; competence showed that a student could be resilient in training to achieve proficiency. School life built a clear understanding of how it takes all kinds to build a whole. There were debate teams, sports teams, artists, drama troupes, academic achievers, social work exponents, extracurricular drivers (Olympiads, UNESCO competition achievers) - everyone did not have to do everything, and even if you did nothing but were a good team supporter that was good enough because you belonged to the whole.
It is a different world for school children now and not all in a good way. Most private schools, especially the international schools, have very good sports infrastructure on the basis of which they charge upwards of Rs1.5-2 lakh as annual fees, talk politically correct jargon and use buzzwords such as holistic education, design thinking, mental health, social responsibility, self-expression et al. But most seem to lack the understanding of what children need during growth years and build a timetable driven by pure cognitive, intellectual and pseudo-social convictions. What makes matters worst is that schools often adopt a repressive approach to kids’ opinions, smothering dissent and debates with judgmental ferocity.
For the past few months, I have been speaking with parents of teenagers across Pune, who have escalated repressive approaches and lack of physical activities to respective principals. A trend that emerged was the general apathy of private school administrators to sports and physical activity. I spoke to quite a few teens as well (some boys, some girls). I asked them two questions: how many periods of sports do you have in your school and how many do you think you need. The answers were: one a week, and: one every day.
What does a teen need at the current age? More intellectual workload with even less physical activity? In their growth years when muscles and bones and ligaments and neural networks and psyche grows? And how exactly will they have better mental health by doing more mental work and not getting the minimum physical exercise that a growing body needs?
An individual’s learning and growth occur across three domains: cognitive (intellect), psychomotor (muscle memory) and affective (attitudes). Focusing only on cognitive development and giving lip service to the other domains has been the Achilles heel of educators. Ignoring the physical and psychological development of youngsters is like providing fertiliser for the proliferation of mental health issues.
Children spend 6-7 hours in school. And they seem to be getting 45 minutes or less of sports or physical activity. All other extra and non-curricular work in schools nowadays is sedentary with expectations of forced collaboration and regimented expression.
Kids need to be burning energy, not turning good restless energy into a negative force waiting to explode or implode. The way education is developing at the moment, schools could easily become responsible for generating a good bit of mental health issues with their repressive approach to students in higher grades.
Parents have to step up to protect the needs of their children. Being a young parent or working parent is never really a reason to abandon foresight and the right to question school policies. It is known that schools are grappling with a shortage of adequately experienced and mature staff. While I support school management in their endeavours, I never forget that no matter how much I admire the philosophy, the proof of the pudding lies in the successful delivery of the promised service, a holistic education.
There is a lot more to holistic education than academics and cognitive activities. And if schools want to incorporate design thinking into their approach, the first thing they need to do is put the child at the centre of the process.
Meanwhile, upgrading sports to a daily period may be a very good start since it would allow students to channelise their energies. It could also lead to a more attentive classroom.
Sanjay Mukherjee, author, learning-tech designer and management consultant, is founder of Mountain Walker and chief strategy advisor, Peak Pacific. He can be reached at thebengali@icloud.com
