While psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation has gained a lot of traction for its central argument that smartphones have “rewired” the mental state of an entire generation for the worse, his other prominent claim in that book has gained less attention: that children now live highly controlled “real world” lives and that this is also hugely damaging to their mental health.
Haidt suggests that a lack of space and permission to play, experiment and make mistakes without adult oversight has left young people unable to cope with - and adapt to - modern life.
It’s an argument that various campaigns over the past decade have applied to education: that a trend towards a more controlled school environment is creating students who can’t think for themselves, have poor soft skills and suffer from mental health and physical challenges - all of which affect their academic outcomes.
Overprotected childhood?
As with Haidt’s arguments, these campaigns have struggled to propel that message into sustained widespread mainstream discussion that forces change.
Those campaigns do have a compelling case: the research is clear that “free time” in the school day has been vastly reduced over a 25-year period, and that what is left tends to be highly controlled.
There has also been a trend in lessons to shift away from group work and practical tasks (which tend to enable more student autonomy) and towards highly regulated whole-class instruction (which tends to be more restrictive of student autonomy).
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Both have happened despite there being good evidence that physical activity is good for learning as well as physical and mental health, and that student autonomy matters to things like pupil engagement.
So, what’s going on? Is the argument flawed? Or is something else at play?
Those running schools and trusts need to have an answer to that question because it’s unlikely that the movement pushing for more autonomy for young people will be kept at arm’s length for much longer.
Attendance and behaviour challenges
With mental health, attendance and behaviour in schools failing to improve with the status quo, Labour will be forced to look at other ways of shifting the dial - and there is significant pressure from within its own ranks to look again at play, breaktimes and student autonomy.
And the release this week of the Raising the Nation Play Commission’s interim report calling for guidelines on play will push the issue even further: several members of the commission are influential within the Labour Party.
So if school leaders do not buy the research arguments but are asked to change, then the reasoning not to switch will need to be solid.
And if they do buy the argument and believe that, actually, there are challenges that prevent it from being put into action, then those points need to be readied, too.
Tough questions
Is behaviour such a problem that schools won’t risk longer, less supervised breaktimes? Is there so much content to be taught that efficiency of lesson delivery trumps any benefits of more student-centred pedagogy?
But then how sure are you that the behaviour issues are not partly caused by the lack of unsupervised time? How sure are you that those “more efficient” methods of teaching mean the content is being learned properly?
It’s a complex issue - more complex than many of the aforementioned campaigns have acknowledged.
And perhaps the complexity is why the issue has failed to gain enough momentum to force change.
Now may be the time that changes, though. School leaders need to be ready.
Jon Severs is editor at Tes
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