Recess Isn’t a Break From Learning

Malcolm Gladwell's book review of Stephen Johnson's "Everything Bad is
Good For You" confirms something I've been telling nervous Asian
parents for over a decade: the best education has very little to do
with what goes on in the classroom. Johnson argues that video games,
far from dumbing kids down, require a vast amount of memory,
processing, and decision-making. "Playing a video game is, in fact,
an exercise in constructing the proper hierarchy of tasks and moving
through the tasks in the correct sequence. It's about finding order
and meaning in the world, and making decisions that help create that
order."

Gladwell cautions that we shouldn't swing to the other end of the
pendulum and throw out explicit learning like memorizing trig
functions and historical events. But he finds it telling that some
schools are shortening recess, thinking it a frivolous break from real
learning, when in fact recess is when some profoundly deep learning is
taking place: "unstructured environment that requires the child
actively to intervene, to look for the hidden logic, to find order and
meaning in chaos."

Asian parents can tend to stress explicit learning instead. Yet even
though the fields they want their children to end up in, like medicine
and engineering, require a lot of explicit learning, even greater
success will come to those who are also well-versed in more fluid
forms of thinking: fast situation recognition, simplifying complex
situations, creatively solving problems.

This notion takes on special meaning for me as a new parent. Where
our children go to college, high school, even elementary school: these
are important choices that will affect their competitiveness, their
quality of life, their maturity. And so in reading Gladwell's book
review, I am reminded that what I am looking for isn't just stellar
academics but also an environment that can foster the kinds of
cognition that make for effective people. Recess, after all, isn't a
break from learning; it's when the learning really takes place.