oldschool

In the new school there will very possibly be naptime, not only in the primary grades but right on up through. Schools already provide breakfast and lunch, and sleep is just as necessary as food.

There will not, however, be sports the way we have now. There will be recess every day over the lunch break, and a little gym class every morning or afternoon, but afterschool sports will have to be reduced, and in a very particular way. There will be no coaches as such; a teacher or staff member will sponsor the team, but players will organize their own sessions and any games against other schools. The focus will be on enjoyment, camaraderie, sportsmanship, exercise—and disengagement from the win-at-all-costs mentality perverting every level of sport today.

Equipment will be kept to a minimum: bats, gloves and balls for baseball, footballs for football, and nothing for cross-country. Sports will be just like any other club, having a sponsor to supervise and mediate in any disagreements but springing completely from the prerogative of the interested students. And if they choose, of course, the students need not make their pick-up games an official club at all—that is what we are moving towards, the voluntary, the seamless life, in which schools become as nearly as possible what they were in Athens, a marketplace, an open square in which to read and discuss, a grove in which to meditate, rather than what they were in Egypt and are again, offices in which to train a scribe class in thrall to business and the state religion.

Of course, this level of independence in going to learn is not to be expected from the very young; but while they should be given more time to play and talk amongst themselves, they absolutely must continue being sent to school and subjected to a certain amount of discipline when it is time to learn to read, write, and count. We must inculcate a certain respect for school, not make it a game, a place to sit on the floor and play with counting manipulatives. This is the crucial time in which the whole world is new, and it must be the foundation for the whole endeavor in good living the school is meant to direct, as a trellis on which the vines grow upward and outward.