In a Hechinger Report essay, Lenore Skenazy, president of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence and resilience, and author of “Free-Range Kids”, asks, How do kids learn how to kick a ball?
If you think that’s a silly question — kids just kick things, don’t they? — you are thinking like me: Old school.
Recently Ginny Yurich, host of the “1000 Hours Outside” podcast, sent me some pages from a pre-K curriculum. Kicking is just one of the skills it offers instructions for. And it’s not just, “Give ’em a ball and get out of the way.”
No, the guidance is much more granular. Teachers facing the complex and detailed task of teaching kids to kick are told to first “invite” kids outside, earnestly discuss safety issues (kids must stand far apart!) and then “Demonstrate how to kick the ball, and talk through each step as you complete it.”
Next, “Tell the child to place the ball on the ground and take at least four large steps back.” Then: “Have the child move quickly up to the ball and place the non-kicking foot next to the ball. Help him or her swing the kicking leg forward so the foot hits the ball below its center. …”
Kids don’t need to be taught to kick a ball. Put a ball in front of one and see if you can keep them from kicking it. They really don’t need much instruction in having fun. So why does this “curriculum” exist? It has to do with the way we think of education and fun itself.
Once the modern model of education took hold, “school” gradually became synonymous with “learning.” That connection has become so cemented that it can be hard to think of kids learning anywhere but school or learning in any way but being taught by a teacher.
Once that’s the case, we forget how much they learn through curiosity and the simple impulse to try things. If you think of kids as basically lying fallow anytime they aren’t being formally instructed, it becomes the adults’ job to make sure that all fallow time is minimized. We rush to fill it with something officially useful.
This explains why kids are so busy today. It also explains why adults are so busy: We’re driving kids to and from all those lessons and often staying to watch.
Eventually this leads to the point where we can’t imagine kids developing almost any skills, even how to play, without adult tutelage. So someone draws up instructions to teach kids how to do something every human kid (and probably every primate) has done since the invention of legs: kick.
Here I must quote a little more from the manual, because it is such a perfect example of the adult takeover of childhood. To “teach” kids to bounce a ball: “Ask the children to hold the ball out in front of their bodies and drop or throw it to the ground. Explain that when you drop or throw down a ball, and it comes back up, it is called bouncing a ball. ‘Watch as the ball hits the ground and then bounces back up!’”
Because they otherwise wouldn’t watch?
The teacher is told to turn the ball-dropping (which is not how you bounce) into an even-more-teachable moment by pointing out “how high the ball bounces when it is simply dropped and how hard it bounces when it is thrown to the ground.”
But watch out! The manual warns teachers: Don’t let kids play too long. They are delicate! The manual’s hopping instructions (“Spring off the floor on one foot and land on the same foot”) tell teachers that “hopping can be tiring for many children. This skill is difficult for young children to master; they may lack the strength and balance to hold one leg in the air while hopping on the other.”
So our kids are going to preschools at age 3 or 4 where they are treated as clueless, exhausted, dumb, dull, decrepit near-humans who need boring, didactic and confusing instructions — as do their teachers.
If we really want kids to learn how to kick, bounce, hop or be happy, here’s the best advice: Give ’em a ball. Get out of the way.
The Hechinger Report
