Public school

If you have good memories of your elementary public school then you are either one of the rare few who do or you are remembering it very wrong. Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in The Wall will be a good tool to refresh your memory. School used to be simply sitting at a desk, following and taking orders from a teacher who was as bored if not more bored than you and the two of you were desperately waiting for that short recess between classes where you get to live for two minutes before getting back into the chain memorization task of being a school pupil. That’s what school used to be like, now it’s worse.

• In fact, school children nowadays are having a lot of trouble simply surviving their school years. Obviously, they aren’t dying per se, but the number of children attained by chronic diseases and mental conditions has multiplied over the last few decades due to overworking and lack of interest and concentration in the content and methodology of classes. We now have a sudden spreading of diseases like ADHD and child sleep apnea and ODD.

In this light, a few countries such as Iceland have jumped ahead of the curve and affected some radical changes to their school systems. However for the rest of us normals, the change comes slow. Though that still doesn’t mean that they are ineffective. In many schools now, meditation has become a regular part of every school day. Many other schools thought of giving the children the time to be children, i.e run and play around and do fun things without necessarily having to learn throughout the entire day. That is the kind of thinking that many schools in Texas have adopted when they tripled the duration of recess.

The results of this change were amazing. The schools reported that the students were now learning more since they have already spent all their playing energy on recess. They became more focused and more receptive to new knowledge. This obviously led to a remarkable decrease in the number of cases of ADHD in these schools which points us to the fact that the system does indeed need to change.