Juno News - February 25, 2019


More schools must let kids be kids


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

193.13063

Word count

686

Sentence count

38

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Two elementary schools in Quebec have done away with their bans on rough play and put in a novel concept that in the long run, studies show will actually make kids less prone to injury and make it certainly more enjoyable for them to get out into the recess yard.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 The sun is bright, water is wet, and kids are going to sometimes hurt themselves when
00:00:06.500 they play.
00:00:07.920 You can of course do things to mask these realities.
00:00:11.080 You could put something in a watertight container, you could put on sunglasses, or you could
00:00:15.520 keep kids locked up in the classroom all day, but it's not going to change the fundamentals
00:00:19.400 that these things are in fact going to happen.
00:00:22.980 They're the realities of the universe, and I'm glad that some schools are finally realizing
00:00:27.180 that and embracing it rather than discouraging it.
00:00:30.700 Two schools in Quebec, elementary schools, have done away with their bans on rough play,
00:00:35.960 and they've put in a novel concept that in the long run studies show will actually make
00:00:40.040 kids less prone to injury and will make it certainly more enjoyable for them to get out
00:00:44.900 into the recess yard.
00:00:46.860 The first Quebec school to really investigate making this change was the Quatrevain Elementary
00:00:51.340 School in Saint-Apollinaire, Quebec.
00:00:54.060 This school put a rule in where there is a play fighting zone.
00:00:57.980 The zone is marked by cones.
00:01:00.100 Inside the cones, you are allowed to rough house.
00:01:02.840 This means you can pull people's coats, you can pile up, you can push them over, you can
00:01:07.120 roll around on the ground together.
00:01:09.120 You can really do anything that's in these rough games with the exception of violence itself.
00:01:14.160 So kicking, hitting, biting, or throwing objects.
00:01:17.740 If you don't want to do this, you don't go into the zone.
00:01:20.480 If you say stop, all the kids around you have to stop.
00:01:23.820 And the school has even told kids there are ways to fall without making it as likely for
00:01:29.160 them to hurt themselves.
00:01:31.020 So this is a great example of putting some limits and boundaries in place but letting
00:01:35.280 kids be kids.
00:01:37.160 So successful has the program been that another elementary school in Quebec nearby has adopted
00:01:42.560 identical rules to put forward this plan for itself.
00:01:46.480 And some parents are raising concerns, but for the most part, parents are liking this.
00:01:50.940 Parents are liking it.
00:01:51.940 Kids are liking this.
00:01:52.940 The school is liking this.
00:01:53.940 What's the problem?
00:01:54.940 Well, we've had a lot of litigiousness in society, which certainly contributes to the 1.00
00:01:58.960 idea, the fear of lawsuits, of being a mitigating factor in letting kids or not letting kids do
00:02:04.740 certain things.
00:02:06.300 But for the most part, it's generally speaking been this mentality of coddling.
00:02:10.160 That if you want to protect someone from getting hurt, you have to do all of these things
00:02:13.640 short of or including bubble wrapping them.
00:02:16.560 And this will eventually mitigate injury.
00:02:19.900 But the problem is it takes away the rights and the abilities of kids to learn how to play
00:02:24.340 and navigate the world without getting injured.
00:02:27.580 So when they are put in a situation where harm is possible, it becomes probable.
00:02:33.800 You know, one trailblazer in dealing with this was actually a school in Auckland, New Zealand,
00:02:37.760 the Swanson School, which about five years ago introduced policies banning the bans.
00:02:43.640 They banned a lot of the bans that existed on rough play and let students navigate the
00:02:48.140 world around them.
00:02:49.400 And one great story that the principal told was of a parent whose kid broke their arm.
00:02:53.660 The parent summoned a meeting with the principal and said, please don't change the rules.
00:02:58.040 Kids are going to break their arms.
00:02:59.680 I hope we're getting to an age where we're realizing that the helicoptering of kids is not
00:03:03.680 helping anyone in the long run.
00:03:05.680 Calgary, for example, has introduced a junk playground, which has a lot of things that
00:03:09.460 you wouldn't think are toys on it and things that, yes, could potentially be harmful.
00:03:13.920 But the goal is to allow kids to navigate the world themselves.
00:03:17.640 When we talk about a snowflake generation, we have to look into what we're going to do 1.00
00:03:21.620 to make it easier for kids to navigate the world themselves.
00:03:25.240 And eliminating the rules that keep them from just being kids is a great step in a necessary
00:03:30.520 direction.
00:03:31.520 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.