08-01-2019, 10:12 AM
The oversubscribed child is an experiment in social engineering that may very well backfire in a monumental way. For the life of me, I can't see how the social skills developed by unorganized childhood activities can be replicated, to say nothing of improved, by scheduling every spare minute of children's' lives.
I observe my own grandchildren. They will return to class as 9th graders on the 19th of August. This will complete a summer of perpetual organized activities that began the Monday following the end of the last school year. All told, they will have gotten less than 2 weeks of open-schedule time, and most of that will be spent in front of screens of one sort or another. It's sad that they only relate to others their age in organized settings. Yes, they can be teammates or competitors, but only very rarely just companions.
Soon enough, they will be adults. I'm less than sanguine about their ability to march their way through the labyrinth of adult life without having an artificial structure to conform to.
I observe my own grandchildren. They will return to class as 9th graders on the 19th of August. This will complete a summer of perpetual organized activities that began the Monday following the end of the last school year. All told, they will have gotten less than 2 weeks of open-schedule time, and most of that will be spent in front of screens of one sort or another. It's sad that they only relate to others their age in organized settings. Yes, they can be teammates or competitors, but only very rarely just companions.
Soon enough, they will be adults. I'm less than sanguine about their ability to march their way through the labyrinth of adult life without having an artificial structure to conform to.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.