“Back in my day…”
You seem to hear the phrase all the time. Older folks telling the younglings how back in their day, things were different—how a nickel could buy you a candy bar, or how life was a simpler time, or how they had to walk 5 miles uphill both ways to school. And I bet I can predict what we’re going to tell our kids in the future, 30 years down the road: Back in my day, we had to go to school during a pandemic.
Most of the time, when I hear this, I figuratively roll my eyes, but I think there is one area where this is valid: playgrounds.
According to this New York Times article, “engaging in risk is actually very important in preventing injuries”. The best playgrounds are the ones that look the most dangerous, but are completely safe. How could this make sense? Well, the playgrounds of today are very structured, and all of the “risk” is removed: you can go down the slide, or play on the swings, but that’s it. There are very specific activities that you can do. And what ends up happening is that children get bored and seek out dangerous activities like doing handstands on the monkey bars, leading to injury.
On the contrary, these “risk-playgrounds” have controlled risk—that is, there is “risk” involved, but nothing that would cause a child to seriously get hurt. Instead, there may be nails and the like everywhere, but children learn how to assess and avoid danger, while also having more fun by being wild and creative. It’s easy to see the practical value of this—in the real world, not everything is perfectly laid out and made out of nice shiny plastic. There are fast moving chunks of metal—cars—and lots of people, and sometimes random debris on the ground. Being able to quickly adapt to unfamiliar situations and navigate them is a skill that is bound to be useful, no matter where life takes them.
There was a time where children played in the streets, or outside, in natural “playgrounds”. However, as years and decades passed, the modern playground, with all of its plastic contraptions, appeared, and children slowly began to lose their interaction with risk that is so vital to their development.
But why stop at playgrounds? We can apply this to other situations as well.
Have you ever stopped to consider how our high school system works? The expectation is to get what, an A, or a B, 80% or higher. If you get a C? That’s okay, but not as bad as the fact that you fail the class if you get less than a 70%. There is no room for error or experimentation.
Now, I don’t propose having teachers give lower grades (at least, not within the current system). Rather, I say keep the letter grades but make the percentages lower, or just get rid of the percentages. The school system should encourage risk taking and experimentation, since that is how our society progresses. If scientists never tried anything new, and writers never tried new literary techniques and styles, and artists never tried new art forms, then we wouldn’t have the technology, literature, and art canon we have today. This would also mean that curriculums would have to be restructured, since right now they are focused too much on perfection and the expectation is that everyone can get a 100% if they work hard enough.
(Yes, I know that a lot of college classes are structured like this, and I think that introducing it at a high school level would be beneficial.)
So, what do you think? What do you think about our children’s playgrounds? Should our classrooms be restructured?