Adults teaching kids games

This story from Scotland caught my eye today:

CHILDREN are being taught skipping and traditional games in schools by specialist instructors, costing up to £160 a day, as part of a move to tackle inactivity and obesity among Scotland's young people.

One in five Scottish 12-year-olds is classified as obese and, as children spend more time playing sedentary video games than in active play, it is feared many playground games like skipping and hopscotch, which used to provide exercise, are in danger of being permanently forgotten.

. . .

The lessons, once written off by cynics who claimed children did not need to be taught how to play, have sparked a craze for skipping and other games unseen in playgrounds for years.

In one Glasgow primary school, hand-clapping games are back in vogue, with children learning complicated rhymes in English and French to impress their friends.

Kellie Currie, who teaches for Skipping Workshops, said: "You wouldn't believe the number of schools I go into where kids don't know how to play games....

I'm all for kids learning how to jump rope, play 4-square, hopscotch, or rhyming games. It's just kind of sad that adults have to teach them, instead of other kids.

What kids really need, in terms of the big S-word (socialization), is lots of free and largely unsupervised time with other kids. Soccer practice and the classroom are too highly structured for this purpose, in my opinion. One of the benefits of just "hanging out" with other kids is that you come to see each other as a resource for preventing boredom. I might suggest Chinese jump-rope, my friend might later suggest a game of "round the world" (basketball, of a sort), someone else might come along and want to ride our bikes down the Big Hill. That's the bond that spurs friendships and social groups... you need each other for entertainment (even if it's just Canasta and Connect Four).

One expert quoted in the above article blamed the lack of physical games on a "safety culture" that fears injury, particularly on the school playground. Parents don't want to let their kids roam the neighborhood either, they way parents used to, due to similar fears of accidents or worse. And then, there's the pressure to fill up a kid's time with "meaningful" activities that look good on paper or can be seen as "investing in the future." It's not all the fault of TV and Xbox.

The fact that these games are now being taught in school by adults not only indicates a problem with physical inactivity; it also points to problems with socialization. Next time you're gritting your teeth as someone mutters vaguely about "social issues," just remember that homeschoolers have enough free time, at least, to learn hopscotch.