Work and Play

Aug 13, 2008 Editorial

For the parents of many schoolchildren it may sound like heaven: August holidays and the Olympics on television. At least there will be something on to keep the little tykes occupied for some of the seemingly interminable hours without hearing that dreaded whine, “Mommy I’m bored!”

But there is another connection between those Olympics and our young ones that we ought to give some serious attention.

The original Olympics were organised by the ancient Greeks because, in the considered judgement of their civilisation, the development of the mind was not considered complete it if was not accompanied by a commensurate development of the body. “A healthy mind in a healthy body” was their goal of life.

The British educational system that we inherited also accepted this credo and it was therefore not by chance that every school built by them also had a large schoolyard that functioned as a “sports ground”. An “educated” child was supposed to be a well-rounded child, not a couch potato who would only relate to sports by viewing it on television, as does our present generation.

Queen’s College was the archetype of what our schools were supposed to become and the curriculum of Queen’s was dominated as much by sports as by academic pursuits.

It was not too long ago that the Queen’s College cricket team played the highest level of club cricket in Guyana; today they would be hard pressed to field a credible eleven.

This decline of sports within our educational institutions is even more pronounced in the rural schools and it is not too much of a stretch to assert that the decline in the overall academic performance of our young ones may be integrally related to the decline in sports in those same institutions.

It is commonplace to note that academic abilities are randomly distributed in our youth population as it is in all populations. One of the crucial goals of any educational system is to try to motivate those who may not be that gifted academically to give of their best and to maintain their self-esteem in the face of conceded difficulties in academic subjects.

For many of these individuals, sports provide that motivation because here was an arena where they often were far more proficient than their academically gifted peers. They had an opportunity to shine and in the lifting of their recognition factor in their world, they were spurred to give that extra effort in other areas of life – including academics.

Values, it has been noted, cannot be transferred by mere exhortation. In the British school system many of the values, such as teamwork and determination, which are crucial for success in life, were transmitted to the young in games at school.

It has often been said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, the elite high school in England that was the model for Queen’s. It is not the same as a teacher reading from some text to declare that their young charges “should not give up when adversity strikes” as when the situation presents itself in a game.

Today the stress on “education” as obtaining the most passes at the CXC can be gleaned not only in the decline of sports programmes in the government schools or the proliferation of “lessons schools” but in the acceptance by the authorities of private schools being built and accredited without any facility for their students to engage in any sporting activity.

These schools are the culmination of the commodification of education into modules, which are to be force-fed into children in factory-like environments so that they leave as automatons that can regurgitate entire chapters of many books but yet find no joy in the pursuit of knowledge.

Beyond the instrumental benefit of sports in producing more balanced young people, the Olympics ought to remind us that our youths should to be able to experience the simple but profound joy of “play”. This need to play is wired into the very genes that make us human and to deny them expression is to destroy not a little piece of our humanity.

We remind our educators of the old schoolyard adage: all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy – and the same for Jill.

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