WHEN SCHOOLS hire coaches to teach children how to play, it shows just how much we’ve destroyed childhood.
The Conservatory Lab Charter School in Brighton is paying $23,500 to the national nonprofit Playworks to engage children in old-school activities like jump rope, hula hoops, four square, capture the flag, circle dodgeball, and kickball, according to a Globe story this week. Playworks says its mission is to help children, particularly in low-income urban districts, learn the principles of “fair play and positive conflict resolution’’ through “basic’’ playground games.
My issue is not with the Playworks folks or the schools that hire them. It is the fact that we adults have dumbed down creativity to unprecedented levels. We all conspire in this, from test-score politicians to helicopter parents building up their child’s college resume with rigid, adult-run sports and music programs. Whoever thought we’d need a national crusade for kickball?
“It is an extraordinarily sad commentary on our society that we have to give kids adults to teach them how to play,’’ said Boston College psychologist Peter Gray, who this year published an article in the American Journal of Play exploring how play and humor were critical to the development of hunter-gatherer societies.
“All cultures until modern times played in age-mixed groups, where younger kids learned skills from older kids and older kids learned to be nurturing and caring,’’ Gray said. “This is how kids educated themselves. This is how kids learned to assert themselves while not antagonizing other people.’’
This is on top of a July Globe story on the lack of sports and physical education in the Boston Public Schools. A quarter of students went without any physical education last year. Dorchester High girls basketball coach Clarzell Pearl told the Globe, “It hurts to see so little investment in athletics for kids in this city. They take away health classes and physical education classes, and then you wonder why kids are walking around with 56 percent body fat.’’
The taking away of physical education defeats the very reason they were taken away. Nationwide, regular physical education has been wiped out by the drive toward standardized tests. Yet, many studies show a positive relationship between physical activity and academic performance. One study this year in the Journal of School Health found that the odds of passing the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System math and English tests improved significantly with fitness, particularly in math.
The study, which included researchers from Harvard and Boston University medical schools, said their findings mirror others that strongly suggest that fit students are better motivated and have better self-esteem and display less stress. They wrote that “a convincing trend of evidence indicates a supportive role for physical fitness on school performance.’’
You can say the same thing about play. Studies linking childhood play to adult development are powerful enough to have the American Academy of Pediatrics stating that self-directed play is important for children to learn how to be “free agents, not pawns in someone else’s game.’’
In particular, the academy recommends that a significant portion of that play not be run by adults. Child-driven play builds “individual assets children need to develop and remain resilient.’’
In his article, Gray said, “Play, first and foremost, is what a person wants to do, not what a person feels obliged to do.’’ He says self-directed play is important for children to learn how to be “free agents, not pawns in someone else’s game.’’
In a telephone interview, he added, “The drive for children to play with children is still there. But it has to be something like true recess, where children feel completely free.’’
It may be a necessary emergency first step for schools to pay coaches to teach children how to play. But until we free them to be agents in their own games, they are still pawns in ours.
Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com. 
