5: Recess

So sometimes you think the entire week is your birthday and you kind of forget that you’re obliged to write a weekly blog, and for that, I am sorry, because I know you’ve all been waiting. Moving on, not important…

The other day I read an article talking about the lack of recess, on top of the already documented lack of art, music, and gym classes, in Detroit Public Schools. In many elementary schools in the city, recess simply is not on the agenda, but in the few where it appears, there’s always a catch: it’s not everyday, it’s not for every grade, or it’s part of an ad hoc system where the schools’ brief 30 minute lunch break — which barely allows time to properly finish eating — doubles as ‘recess.’ What are young kids to choose? What will they choose? Refueling their bodies or quickly escaping the crumbling walls of many of the schools they attend?

This issue is reflective of a bigger problem, where grades and numbers are prioritised over any other learning indicator, shunning a more holistic view of what school should entail. Learning through creativity, visual organisation and arrangement, the mathematics of music, physical movement, free peer interaction, queries, and discussions don’t matter. In fact, these become a privilege belonging only to those schools that can prove first that they know how to ace the state’s exams. Arbitrarily, test makers choose those confined subjects, contained in a couple hundred questions and a few hours, which must first be mastered, or at least manipulated in order to appear so, before those schools can then move on to what are perhaps more important learning activities. And, as shown to be true over and over, the schools with the most money consistently do the best — mastering or manipulating? Do they simply have the money to train teachers to show their students how to get around the questions? Are they simply better matched with the demographics that these exams are targeting? Privileged schools are often whiter schools. Less-privileged schools have less designated time for creativity, so often we’re squandering and minimising the imagination and inventiveness of children of color. We’re overshadowing it with creativity and thought from privileged, white students who can also beat a test. We’re further disadvantaging kids from already disadvantaged schools and less-privileged backgrounds, stifling what they have to offer in terms of innovation and originality and pondering and wondering.

The point is that these schools, the privileged ones who know how to take tests, are the ones who also gain access to the creative and holistic learning that many schools in Detroit are simply too disadvantaged to be allowed. And because of these tests and the “right” indicators dictating our school days, Detroit schools, and many other similarly less-privileged districts, are forced to squeeze out art and music and physical activity until it simply disappears from student life — all in hopes of better numbers. But we fail to ask if perhaps these numbers would actually grow better if we allowed some freedom and childhood back into our brick buildings. Clearly the opposite has not worked.