what children want

China Post editorial:

What children need is not more classes, but their childhood back

Three additional classes of English per week will be taught in elementary schools starting in September, Taipei County's government has announced. Despite claiming that more than 80 percent of parents support the changes, the educational department tried to smuggle these hours onto the curriculum under the titles of “international cultural learning,” “advanced reading” and “flexible usage.”

This last was particularly pernicious since these courses will be held in time that is currently allocated for “flexible classes.” This is time that is intended for the provision of special activities tailored to children's broader learning and individual needs.

Young people already spend far too much time in formal learning and too little in organized play. Or disorganized play, for that matter.

Fearing their children will fall behind and get stuck in dead-end jobs, many parents feel pressured into joining the educational arms race and send their offspring to after-school classes and cram schools in ever increasing numbers and for ever increasing numbers of hours.

This word — numbers — is a clue to the problem. Since quality is so difficult to assess, the world increasingly resorts to the seemingly simple notion of quantity, not just in education but in many areas of life. If parents cannot know their children's teachers' true worth or quality, they solve the problem by sticking their children in front of more teachers for more learning time. If officials in education departments cannot impress parents with the quality of teaching given to pupils, they certainly can force them to swallow more hours of rote learning at the expense of trips to museums, art classes, sports or, heaven forbid, play.

Play can definitely be fun, but it is more important than that. It is where human beings — and many other mammals - undergo intellectual and emotional development, rehearse life situations, and learn interactive skills. Children will not learn these nearly so well by watching television, playing online games or social networking on their cell phones and bedroom computers.

The great irony is that the primary concern of most parents is their children. When asked why they work so hard in jobs they don't like, many say it is so their children won't have to. They also say it is to pay for university tuition, school fees, cram schools and even nursery provision. In this vicious cycle, they end up working extra hours to pay people to care for their children while they work.

But this is not what children want. A survey released on Children's Day this month showed that they would like to spend more time with their parents. A whopping 30 percent of children do not regularly eat dinner with their parents. This flies in the face of the common-sense view (as well as academic research) that children learn almost all their values and life skills at home and not in the classroom.

So parents should leave work at a reasonable time (which might require legislative assistance), cancel most if not all their children's after-school classes, eat dinner with them, develop shared hobbies and play with them, put them to bed at a sensible time (going to bed early wouldn't hurt adults either), and send them off to school after an energizing breakfast (one thing guaranteed to disrupt pupils' attention is poor nutrition).

None of this is rocket science, of course, and none of it is new. Many parents have felt trapped by the cram school culture since it started with the hiring of private tutors. The reforms of 1968 aimed, in part, to end this by providing compulsory nine-year education for all children, but things continued apace. Similarly, the education minister of Taiwan's first democratically elected administration took office in 1996 with a slogan of “giving students back to their families, giving youth back to students.” But nothing changed for the better, as things just got worse.

Being a child is not only not being an adult; childhood is not only waiting for the clock to tick until adulthood begins. It is a process during which important lessons are learned and skills are acquired. Lessons and skills that are needed to function in adult society, and which society needs people to have for its own smooth running.

But these things are not readily quantifiable, so their quality is difficult to assess. No wonder government departments are tempted to resort to simplistic measures that can be counted on the fingers of one hand. “Three more hours” — it sounds positive, but it is not. It is yet another attack on childhood.

Let us hope Taipei County's announcement was an example of the widespread technique, practiced at all levels of local and national government, of announcing “changes” well in advance of implementation so that, should there be significant pubic opposition, they are quickly canceled as merely announcements of “policy options under consideration.”

So, let them be policy options, but let the public outcry be loud, and let us set about giving children back their childhood.