If you are in education, you know the education landscape has gotten a bit crazy as of late. The demands, the pace, the content, and the assessments have all been thrown into overdrive. My kindergartner, who attends full-day kindergarten, only had unstructured play time on Fridays-and that’s if they earned it. Can you imagine, a five year old having to earn his time to play! It’s crazy! But that’s the environment we are operating in. Days are packed full of learning goals and assessing those learning goals. And if teachers aren’t busy doing these things, they are told they’re not doing their job.
According to many organizations who study future-readiness, one of the most important things we can be doing for our children is fostering their creativity. And ironically, an important ingredient for creativity is boredom or downtime, in other words, unstructured time with no agendas, plans or goals.
How to fill their free time, having time to dream, to tinker, to discuss their ideas freely and openly, to wonder and wander is what the most creative and innovative people that the world has ever known have been able to figure out. Sounds kinda like unstructured playtime, doesn’t it?
If it were up to me, boredom would be a standard.
Trevor (@trevorabryan)