Recess

It is excellent exercise

It is during recess that children learn to socialize

Break time allows children to return to class better able to concentrate

. Recess gives children a stake in coming to school

Dr. New, wisely quoted experts who observe that the reason that children stay in school, instead of dropping out, as they get older, is primarily because they have friends and a social network there. How on Earth can we promote this important social network if the children lack sufficient time in which to make friends

One argument I have heard several times is that recess should not be lengthened at the expense of other activities in the current school day, and that therefore the length of the school day should be increased to accommodate more recess time

Indeed I see it as one benefit of a campaign to restore recess that it creates just a little pressure counteracting the enormous institutional weight operating in favor of more, more, more of everything (except free time) in each school day. Our slogan should be “more is less.” Further increases in instructional time, especially for young students, would be highly counterproductive.

This concern with not losing a minute of possible instructional time highlights one particularly unfortunate aspect of the recess situation at present. School children are in no way entitled to recess. It is perfectly permissible for a school to do away with it altogether, and restricting of recess time seems to be increasingly used as a collective punishment in some classes (how much better would it not be if recess could be used as a reward instead of a punishment, if teachers had the freedom to augment recess to encourage good collective behavior?) Adult workers are protected by legal statutes and precedents which, for instance, prevent employers from claiming that preparation time in the morning must come out of their employee’s free time. Employers are not allowed to bring their employees in from the playground 15 minutes early so that they are standing at their station at 8am, unless the employees are paid for those 15 minutes. Similarly employees are entitled by law to a certain amount of break time for so many hours of labor. Why would we deny to our children what we as adults demand for ourselves? And this is all the more wrongheaded because recess has so many developmental and educational benefits to children.