TEXT 1

School is Bad for Children

from The Underachieving School by John Holt

Almost every child, on the first day he sets foot in a school building, is smarter, more curious, less
afraid of what he doesn’t know, better at finding and figuring things out, and more confident,
resourceful, persistent and independent than he will ever be again in his schooling – or, unless he is
very unusual and very lucky, for the rest of his life. Already, by paying close attention to and
interacting with the world and people around him, and without any school-type formal instruction, he
has done a task far more difficult, complicated and abstract than anything he will be asked to do in
school, or than any of his teachers has done for years. He has solved the mystery of language. He has
discovered it – babies don’t even know that language exists – and he has found out how it works and
learned to use it. He has done it by exploring, by experimenting, by developing his own model of the
grammar of language, by trying it out and seeing whether it works, by gradually changing it and
refining it until it does work. And while he has been doing this, he has been learning other things as
well, including many of the "concepts" that the schools think only they can teach him, and many that
are more complicated than the ones they do try to teach him.
In he comes, this curious, patient, determined, energetic, skillful learner. We sit him down at a desk,
and what do we teach him? Many things. First, that learning is separate from living. "You come to
school to learn," we tell him, as if the child hadn’t been learning before, as if living were out there and
learning were in here, and there were no connection between the two. Secondly, that he cannot be
trusted to learn and is no good at it. Everything we teach about reading, a task far simpler than many
that the child has already mastered, says to him, "If we don’t make you read, you won’t, and if you
don’t do it exactly the way we tell you, you can’t". In short, he comes to feel that learning is a passive
process, something that someone else does to you, instead of something you do for yourself.
In a great many other ways he learns that he is worthless, untrustworthy, fit only to take other
people’s orders, a blank sheet for other people to write on. Oh, we make a lot of nice noises in school
about respect for the child and individual differences, and the like. But our acts, as opposed to our talk,
says to the child, "Your experience, your concerns, your curiosities, your needs, what you know, what
you want, what you wonder about, what you hope for, what you fear, what you like and dislike, what
you are good at or not so good at – all this is of not the slightest importance, it counts for nothing.
What counts here, and the only thing that counts, is what we know, what we think is important, what
we want you to do, think and be." The child soon learns not to ask questions – the teacher isn’t there
to satisfy his curiosity. Having learned to hide his curiosity, he later learns to be ashamed of it. Given
no chance to find out who he is – and to develop that person, whoever it is – he soon comes to accept
the adults’ evaluation of him.
He learns many other things. He learns that to be wrong, uncertain, confused, is a crime. Right
answers are what the school wants, and he learns countless strategies for prying these answers out of
the teacher, for conning her into thinking he knows what he doesn’t know. He learns to dodge, bluff,
fake, cheat. He learns to be lazy! Before he came to school, he would work for hours on end, on his
own, with no thought of reward, at the business of making sense of the world and gaining
competence in it. In school he learns, like every buck private, how to goldbrick, how not to work when
the sergeant isn’t looking, how to know when he is looking, how to make him think you are working
even when he is looking. He learns that in real life you don’t do anything unless you are bribed, bullied
or conned into doing it, that nothing is worth doing for its own sake, or that if it is, you can’t do it in

1
school. He learns to be bored, to work with a small part of his mind, to escape from the reality around
him into daydreams and fantasies – but not like the fantasies of his preschool years, in which he
played a very active part.
The child comes to school curious about other people, particularly other children, and the school
teaches him to be indifferent. The most interesting thing in the classroom – often the only interesting
thing in it – is the other children, but he has to act as if these other children, all about him, only a few
feet away, are not really there. He cannot interact with them, talk with them, smile at them.
In fact, he learns how to live without paying attention to anything going on around him. You might say
that school is a long lesson in how to turn yourself off, which may be one reason why so many young
people, seeking the awareness of the world and responsiveness to it they had when they were little,
think they can only find it in drugs. Aside from being boring, the school is almost always ugly, cold, and
inhuman.
And so, in this dull and ugly place, where nobody ever says anything very truthful, where everybody is
playing a kind of role, as in a charade where the teachers are no more free to respond honestly to the
students than the students are free to respond to the teachers or each other, where the air practically
vibrates with suspicion and anxiety, the child learns to live in a daze, saving his energies for those
small parts of his life that are too trivial for the adults to bother with, and thus remain his. It is a rare
child who can come through his schooling with much left of his curiosity, his independence or his
sense of his own dignity, competence and worth.
Our compulsory school-attendance laws once served a humane and useful purpose. They protected
the children’s right to some schooling, against those adults who would otherwise have denied it to
them in order to exploit their labor, in farm, store, mine or factory. Today the laws help nobody – not
the schools, not the teachers, not the children. To keep kids in school who would rather not be there
costs the schools an enormous amount of time and trouble – to say nothing of what it costs to repair
the damage that these angry and resentful prisoners do every time they get a chance. Every teacher
knows that any kid in class who, for whatever reason, would rather not be there, not only doesn’t
learn anything himself but makes it a great deal tougher for anyone else. As for protecting the
children from exploitation, the chief and indeed only exploiters of children these days are the schools.
We need to get kids out of the school buildings, and give them a chance to learn about the world at
first hand. It is a very recent idea, and a crazy one, that the way to teach our young people about the
world they live in is to take them out of it and shut them up in brick boxes. Aside from their parents,
most children never have any close contact with any adults except people whose sole business is
children. No wonder they have no idea what adult life or work is like. A child learning to talk does not
learn by being corrected all the time – if corrected too much, he will stop talking. He compares, a
thousand times a day, the difference between language as he uses it and as those around him use it.
Bit by bit, he makes the necessary changes to make his language like other peoples. In the same way,
kids learning to do all the other things they learn without adult teachers – to walk, run, climb, whistle,
ride a bike, skate, play games, jump rope – compare their own performance with what more skilled
people do, and slowly make the needed changes. But in school we never give a child a chance to
detect his mistakes, let alone correct them. We do it all for him. We act as if we thought he would
never notice a mistake unless it was pointed out to him, or correct it unless he was made to. Soon he
becomes dependent on the expert. We should let him do it himself. Let him figure out what this word
says, what is the answer to that problem, whether this is a good way of saying or doing this or that.
Our job should be to help him when he tells us that he can’t find a way to get the right answer. Let’s
get rid of all this nonsense of grades, exams, marks. We don’t know now, and we never will know,
how to measure what another person knows or understands. We certainly can’t find out by asking
him questions. All we find out is what he doesn’t know which is what most tests are for, anyway.

2
Throw it all out, and let the child learn what every educated person must someday learn, how to
measure his own understanding, how to know what he knows or does not know.
People remember only what is interesting and useful to them, what helps them make sense of the
world, or helps them get along in it. All else they quickly forget, if they ever learn it at all. The idea of a
"body of knowledge," to be picked up in school and used for the rest of one’ s life, is nonsense in a
world as complicated and rapidly changing as ours. Anyway, the most important questions and
problems of our time are not in the curriculum, not even in the universities, let alone the schools.
Children want, more than they want anything else, and even after years of miseducation, to make
sense of the world, themselves, and other human beings. Let them get at this job, with our help if they
ask for it, in the way that makes most sense to them.

3
TEXT 2

Is Too Much Homework Bad for Kids' Health?

From kindergarten to the final years of high school, recent research suggests that some students are
getting excessive amounts of homework.

In turn, when students are pushed to handle a workload that’s out of sync with their development
level, it can lead to significant stress — for children and their parents.

Both the National Education Association (NEA) and the National PTA (NPTA) support a standard of “10
minutes of homework per grade level” and setting a general limit on after-school studying. For kids in
first grade, that means 10 minutes a night, while high school seniors could get two hours of work per
night. But the most recent study to examine the issue found that kids in early elementary school
received about three times the amount of recommended homework. Published in The American
Journal of Family Therapy, the 2015 study surveyed more than 1,100 parents in Rhode Island with
school-age children. The researchers found that first and second graders received 28 and 29 minutes
of homework per night. Kindergarteners received 25 minutes of homework per night, on average. But
according to the standards set by the NEA and NPTA, they shouldn’t receive any at all. A contributing
editor of the study, Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman, told CNN that she found it “absolutely shocking”
to learn that kindergarteners had that much homework. And all those extra assignments may lead to
family stress, especially when parents with limited education aren’t confident in their ability to help
kids with the work. The researchers reported that family fights about homework were 200 percent
more likely when parents didn’t have a college degree. Some parents, in fact, have decided to opt out
of the whole thing. The Washington Post reported in 2016 that some parents have just instructed
their younger children not to do their homework assignments. They report the no-homework policy
has taken the stress out of their afternoons and evenings. In addition, it's been easier for their
children to participate in after-school activities. This new parental directive may be healthier for
children, too. Experts say there may be real downsides for young kids who are pushed to do more
homework than the “10 minutes per grade” standard. “The data shows that homework over this level
is not only not beneficial to children’s grades or GPA, but there’s really a plethora of evidence that it’s
detrimental to their attitude about school, their grades, their self-confidence, their social skills, and
their quality of life,” Donaldson-Pressman told CNN.

Consequences for high school students

Other studies have found that high school students may also be overburdened with homework — so
much that it’s taking a toll on their health. In 2013, research conducted at Stanford University found
that students in high-achieving communities who spend too much time on homework experience
more stress, physical health problems, a lack of balance in their lives, and alienation from society. That
study, published in The Journal of Experimental Education, suggested that any more than two hours of
homework per night is counterproductive. However, students who participated in the study reported
doing slightly more than three hours of homework each night, on average. To conduct the study,
researchers surveyed more than 4,300 students at 10 high-performing high schools in upper
middle-class California communities. They also interviewed students about their views on homework.
When it came to stress, more than 70 percent of students said they were “often or always stressed
4
over schoolwork,” with 56 percent listing homework as a primary stressor. Less than 1 percent of the
students said homework was not a stressor. The researchers asked students whether they
experienced physical symptoms of stress, such as headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight
loss, and stomach problems. More than 80 percent of students reported having at least one
stress-related symptom in the past month, and 44 percent said they had experienced three or more
symptoms. The researchers also found that spending too much time on homework meant that
students were not meeting their developmental needs or cultivating other critical life skills. Students
were more likely to forgo activities, stop seeing friends or family, and not participate in hobbies. Many
students felt forced or obligated to choose homework over developing other talents or skills. "Our
findings on the effects of homework challenge the traditional assumption that homework is inherently
good," said Denise Pope, Ph.D., a senior lecturer at the Stanford University School of Education, and a
co-author of a study.

Working as hard as adults

A smaller New York University study published last year noted similar findings. It focused more
broadly on how students at elite private high schools cope with the combined pressures of school
work, college applications, extracurricular activities, and parents’ expectations. That study, which
appeared in Frontiers in Psychology, noted serious health effects for high schoolers, such as chronic
stress, emotional exhaustion, and alcohol and drug use. The research involved a series of interviews
with students, teachers, and administrators, as well as a survey of a total of 128 juniors from two
private high schools. About half of the students said they received at least three hours of homework
per night. They also faced pressure to take college-level classes and excel in activities outside of school.
Many students felt they were being asked to work as hard as adults, and noted that their workload
seemed inappropriate for their development level. They reported having little time for relaxing or
creative activities. More than two-thirds of students said they used alcohol and drugs, primarily
marijuana, to cope with stress. The researchers expressed concern that students at high-pressure high
schools can get burned out before they even get to college. “School, homework, extracurricular
activities, sleep, repeat — that’s what it can be for some of these students,” said Noelle Leonard,
Ph.D., a senior research scientist at the New York University College of Nursing, and lead study author,
in a press release.

What can be done?

Experts continue to debate the benefits and drawbacks of homework. But according to an article
published this year in Monitor on Psychology, there’s one thing they agree on: the quality of
homework assignments matters. In the Stanford study, many students said that they often did
homework they saw as "pointless" or "mindless." Pope, who co-authored that study, argued that
homework assignments should have a purpose and benefit, and should be designed to cultivate
learning and development. It’s also important for schools and teachers to stick to the 10-minutes per
grade standard. In an interview with Monitor on Psychology, Pope pointed out that students can learn
challenging skills even when less homework is assigned. Pope described one teacher she worked with
who taught advanced placement biology, and experimented by dramatically cutting down homework
assignments. First the teacher cut homework by a third, and then cut the assignments in half. The
students’ test scores didn’t change. “You can have a rigorous course and not have a crazy homework
load,” Pope said.

5
TEXT 3

School is a prison — and damaging our kids

Longer school years aren’t the answer. The problem is school itself. Compulsory teach-and-test
simply doesn’t work

Parents send their children to school with the best of intentions, believing that’s what they need to
become productive and happy adults. Many have qualms about how well schools are performing, but
the conventional wisdom is that these issues can be resolved with more money, better teachers, more
challenging curricula and/or more rigorous tests.

But what if the real problem is school itself? The unfortunate fact is that one of our most cherished
institutions is, by its very nature, failing our children and our society.

School is a place where children are compelled to be, and where their freedom is greatly restricted —
far more restricted than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, we have
been compelling our children to spend ever more time in this kind of setting, and there is strong
evidence (summarized in my recent book) that this is causing serious psychological damage to many
of them. Moreover, the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we
have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in
conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.

Compulsory schooling has been a fixture of our culture now for several generations. It’s hard today
for most people to even imagine how children would learn what they must for success in our culture
without it. President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are so enamored with schooling
that they want even longer school days and school years. Most people assume that the basic design of
schools, as we know them today, emerged from scientific evidence about how children learn best. But,
in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Schools as we know them today are a product of history, not of research into how children learn. The
blueprint still used for today’s schools was developed during the Protestant Reformation, when
schools were created to teach children to read the Bible, to believe scripture without questioning it,
and to obey authority figures without questioning them. The early founders of schools were quite
clear about this in their writings. The idea that schools might be places for nurturing critical thought,
creativity, self-initiative or ability to learn on one’s own — the kinds of skills most needed for success
in today’s economy — was the furthest thing from their minds. To them, willfulness was sinfulness, to
be drilled or beaten out of children, not encouraged.

When schools were taken over by the state and made compulsory, and directed toward secular ends,
the basic structure and methods of schooling remained unchanged. Subsequent attempts at reform
have failed because, though they have tinkered some with the structure, they haven’t altered the
basic blueprint. The top-down, teach-and-test method, in which learning is motivated by a system of
rewards and punishments rather than by curiosity or by any real, felt desire to know, is well designed
for indoctrination and obedience training but not much else. It’s no wonder that many of the world’s
greatest entrepreneurs and innovators either left school early (like Thomas Edison), or said they hated
school and learned despite it, not because of it (like Albert Einstein).

6
It’s no wonder that, today, even the “best students” (maybe especially them) often report that they
are “burned out” by the schooling process. One recent top graduate, explaining to a newspaper
reporter why he was postponing college, put it this way: “I was consumed with doing well and didn’t
sleep a lot the last two years. I would have five or six hours of homework each night. The last thing I
wanted was more school.”

Most students — whether A students, C students, or failing ones — have lost their zest for learning by
the time they reach middle school or high school. In a recent research study, Mihaly Czikszentmihalyl
and Jeremy Hunter fitted more than 800 sixth- through 12th-graders, from 33 different schools across
the country, with special wristwatches that provided a signal at random times of day. Whenever the
signal appeared, they were to fill out a questionnaire indicating where they were, what they were
doing, and how happy or unhappy they were at the moment. The lowest levels of happiness, by far,
occurred when they were in school and the highest levels occurred when they were out of school
playing or talking with friends. In school, they were often bored, anxious or both. Other researchers
have shown that, with each successive grade, students develop increasingly negative attitudes toward
the subjects taught, especially math and science.

As a society, we tend to shrug off such findings. We’re not surprised that learning is unpleasant. We
think of it as bad-tasting medicine, tough to swallow but good for children in the long run. Some
people even think that the very unpleasantness of school is good for children, so they will learn to
tolerate unpleasantness, because life after school is unpleasant. Perhaps this sad view of life derives
from schooling. Of course, life has its ups and downs, in adulthood and in childhood. But there are
plenty of opportunities to learn to tolerate unpleasantness without adding unpleasant schooling to
the mix. Research has shown that people of all ages learn best when they are self-motivated, pursuing
questions that are their own real questions, and goals that are their own real-life goals. In such
conditions, learning is usually joyful.

***

I have spent much of my research career studying how children learn. Children come into the world
beautifully designed to direct their own education. They are endowed by nature with powerful
educative instincts, including curiosity, playfulness, sociability, attentiveness to the activities around
them, desire to grow up and desire to do what older children and adults can do.

The evidence for all this as it applies to little children lies before the eyes of anyone who has watched
a child grow from birth up to school age. Through their own efforts, children learn to walk, run, jump
and climb. They learn from scratch their native language, and with that, they learn to assert their will,
argue, amuse, annoy, befriend, charm and ask questions. Through questioning and exploring, they
acquire an enormous amount of knowledge about the physical and social world around them, and in
their play, they practice skills that promote their physical, intellectual, social and emotional
development. They do all this before anyone, in any systematic way, tries to teach them anything.

This amazing drive and capacity to learn does not turn itself off when children turn 5 or 6. We turn it
off with our coercive system of schooling. The biggest, most enduring lesson of our system of
schooling is that learning is work, to be avoided when possible.

[...]

Mitra’s experiments illustrate how three core aspects of human nature — curiosity, playfulness and
sociability — can combine beautifully to serve the purpose of education. Curiosity drew the children
7
to the computer and motivated them to explore it; playfulness motivated them to practice many
computer skills; and sociability allowed each child’s learning to spread like wildfire to dozens of other
children.

In our culture today, there are many routes through which children can apply their natural drives and
instincts to learn everything they need to know for a successful adulthood. More than 2 million
children in the United States now base their education at home and in the larger community rather
than at school, and an ever-increasing proportion of their families have scrapped set curricular
approaches in favor of self-directed learning. These parents do not give lessons or tests, but provide a
home environment that facilitates learning, and they help connect their children to community
activities from which they learn. Some of these families began this approach long ago and have adult
children who are now thriving in higher education and careers.

My colleague Gina Riley and I recently surveyed 232 such families. According to these families’ reports,
the main benefits of this approach lie in the children’s continued curiosity, creativity and zest for
learning, and in the freedom and harmony the entire family experiences when relieved of the
pressures and schedules of school and the burden of manipulating children into doing homework that
doesn’t interest them. As one parent put it, “Our lives are essentially stress free … We have a very
close relationship built on love, mutual trust, and mutual respect.” She went on to write: “As an
educator I see that my daughter has amazing critical thinking skills that many of my adult college
students lack … My daughter lives and learns in the real world and loves it. What more could I ask
for?”

[...]

I don’t mean to paint self-directed education as a panacea. Life is not always smooth, no matter what
the conditions. But my research and others’ research in these settings has convinced me, beyond any
doubt, that the natural drives and abilities of young people to learn are fully sufficient to motivate
their entire education. When they want or need help from others, they ask for it. We don’t have to
force people to learn; all we need to do is provide them the freedom and opportunities to do so. Of
course, not everyone is going to learn the same things, in the same way, or at the same time. But
that’s a good thing. Our society thrives on diversity. Our culture needs people with many different
kinds of skills, interests and personalities. Most of all, we need people who are pursuing life with
passion and who take responsibility for themselves throughout life. These are the common
denominators of people who have taken charge of their own education.

PETER GRAY
Peter Gray is a research professor of psychology at Boston College. His most recent book is "Free to
Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self Reliant, and
Better Prepared for Life" (Basic Books, 2013). He is also author of an introductory psychology textbook
("Psychology," Worth Publishers, now in its sixth edition), a regular blog for Psychology
Today magazine called Freedom to Learn, and many academic articles dealing with children’s natural
ways of learning. Along with a number of colleagues, he recently launched a web site
(AlternativesToSchool.com) designed to help families find or create settings for children’s self-directed
learning.

8
TEXT 4

Is the lack of physical activity strategy for children complicit mass child neglect?
Child activity paradoxes
A rapidly burgeoning evidence base demonstrates a link between academic performance and physical
fitness (closely linked to physical activity) for children of all ages and socioeconomic groups. There is
also an inverse association between physical fitness and reported violent and antisocial incidents in
school. Physical education, games and sport for children have a demonstrable positive impact on
physical health, and affective, social and cognitive function. Furthermore, physical activity habits in
childhood seem to determine, in part, adult physical activity behaviour,which is a key determinant of
adult health.
A recent BMJ editorial suggested that child health in the UK lags behind most European
counterparts, and that despite numerous initiatives since 1999, only children from wealthier and more
advantaged families seem to have benefited. A recent British Medical Association (BMA) report called
for the need for a total prevention approach for children, but the leadership and strategy for such
urgent and challenging public health measures are totally absent. The apparent importance and
pervasiveness of physical inactivity among school children has led to a recent Lancet call for physical
activity to be ‘a priority for all schools’ that requires ‘whole school’ strategies and government
support and the Welsh government has committed ‘to make physical literacy as important a
development skill as reading and writing’, yet has failed to deliver this pragmatic strategy. The English
Secretary of State for Education recently announced a set of reforms to school curriculums for 2014,
but showed no commitment to revolutionising physical activity and physical education for children.
These physical activity-lacking reforms were announced with a great fanfare to the media and praised
by the Prime Minister as providing the ‘very best education for their future and for our country’s
future’.
School age boys and girls spend an average of 7–8 h a day being sedentary (ie, sitting). Much of this
waking time is spent in obligatory sitting in lessons at school. Thinking about the day-to-day context
for children's activity, reality bites: for substantial parts of their lives children seem to have little
choice and opportunity to be physically active and are practically forced to be sedentary, not only for
much of the school day, but also during travel to school, as safety is a concern to parents, and safe
access to recreational activities is heavily influenced by financial capacity and other political and
sociogeographical factors, always beyond children's control.
Physical activity promotion should not be the preserve of adulthood. Evidence suggests that many
disease processes may begin before birth in the mother's womb. The promotion of physical activity
for expectant mothers may be as important for the health of the child as activity promotion for young
children, a message frequently forgotten by the public, doctors and obstetricians. Physical activity
should be encouraged from birth, and children of preschool age who are capable of walking unaided
should be physically active daily for at least 180 min (3 h), spread across the day. Children and young
people (aged 5–18 years) should engage in moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity for at least
60 min and up to several hours every day, with vigorous intensity weight-bearing activities that
strengthen muscle and bone being incorporated at least 3 days a week. All children and young people
should minimise the amount of time spent being sedentary.
Despite the well-accepted benefits of physical activity and the recognised importance of schools in
delivering the crucial physical literacy and activity opportunities, the erosion of physical education in
9
schools combined with ever-reducing play facilities has the opposite effect, forcing the children to
literally sit for most of their school day.
Some experts have predicted that today's children will be the first generation in modern times to have
a lower life expectancy than their parents. Non-communicable chronic diseases were considered
afflictions of later life, but our children are now developing these conditions while still at primary
school. Childhood physical inactivity has been linked to cholesterol and fatty streaks appearing in the
aorta in the first decade of life and in the arteries of the heart, brain and peripheral arteries in the
second and third decades. Furthermore, obesity, insulin resistance and inflammation (ie, paediatric
metabolic syndrome), type 2 diabetes mellitus and other risk factors for cardiovascular disease have
been found to be common in inactive children, following a similar distribution pattern in adults. In the
UK, more than one in five children are obese when they start schooling, rising to one in three children
leaving primary school and 82% of these children will go on to become obese adults. The number of
children developing type 2 diabetes (which is directly linked to physical inactivity) is growing rapidly
and there are cases of children as young as 7 years developing this disease typically only affecting
adults. Higher levels of sedentary behaviour are associated with worse mental health and lower
cognitive function. Compared with their inactive peers, physically active children will be significantly
healthier and wealthier as adults.
Notwithstanding the well-recognised link between physical activity and health, objective data show
that only 33% of boys and 21% of girls aged 4–15 years old in England meet the minimum levels of
physical activity for basic health benefits (ie, the modest 60 min of moderate-to-vigorous activity a
day), while about another half number of boys and two-thirds of girls fail to achieve even half the daily
recommended levels. Academic examination grading is heavily measured and targeted; however, an
April 2013 Freedom of Information Act (2000) request to Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education,
Children’s Services and Skills) exposed that the curriculum time children spend in physical education
and activity at school is not monitored or known by the educational and regulatory authorities.
[...]
Can we really afford to continue allowing our children and schools to have no childhood physical
activity strategy, no mandatory school physical education time, no physical education quality
expectations, selling of school playing fields, virtually non-existent investment in physical education,
and lack of provision to non-sporting physical activity opportunities? We call on the state, education
authorities and the public to put a stop to the ongoing child physical activity neglect, take
responsibility and develop a strategy of substance.

Footnotes
Contributors: RW and SA conceived the idea. RW drafted the initial article and all authors contributed
equally to the further drafting and writing process. All authors critically revised and approved the final
version of the article. The authors would like to confirm that the content of this article reflects their
opinions and not necessarily those of their employers or funders.
Competing interests: None.
Provenance and peer review: Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

10