I mentioned yesterday, in the post right below this one, that I wanted to come back to Malcolm Gladwell’s article about Steven Johnson’s book, Everything Bad Is Good For You.

Here’s the article: “Brain Candy.”

And here’s the part I wanted to return to. Let me highlight a segment first:

… an unstructured environment that requires the child actively to intervene, to look for the hidden logic, to find order and meaning in chaos.

Guess what he’s talking about? Recess for elementary school kids.

Now here’s the full quotation:

In recent years, for example, a number of elementary schools have phased out or reduced recess and replaced it with extra math or English instruction. This is the triumph of the explicit over the collateral. After all, recess is “play” for a ten-year-old in precisely the sense that Johnson describes video games as play for an adolescent: an unstructured environment that requires the child actively to intervene, to look for the hidden logic, to find order and meaning in chaos.

So, for elementary school kids, recess is “an unstructured environment that requires the child actively to intervene, to look for the hidden logic, to find order and meaning in chaos.” That sounds right. But if you think that only applies to elementary school, ask a middle-schooler / junior high schooler / high school student whether that same quotation applies to their social world.

For adolescent gamers, Johnson says, video games are also “an unstructured environment that requires the child actively to intervene, to look for the hidden logic, to find order and meaning in chaos.”

And how about you, Gentle Reader? To me, that quotation describes a major skill set we need for Life. So are recess, passing period, and video games essential Life Training? Ask yourself: Where is children’s energy, focus, and motivation at the highest? Is it when they’re doing homework, or when they’re discussing the latest social tangle with a friend? Personally, I suspect they have the priorities right.