Jeff Stahler for August 30, 2016

or TV watching; video games’ fast food

The choice of sensationalist stories to get eyeballs (ouch) leads to a belief in increasing crime by those who don’t understand how many ‘stories’ there are in a day, and how few the press actually devotes space to.

My concern is more attached to this strip, which is that high schoolers are under phenomenal pressure to perform, to have extracurricular activities — more than one, to do community service, to play sports, etc., etc., etc. There’s a reason more kids are taking “gap years” before college — they’ve been burnt out by high school!My children are both significantly above-average intelligence, highly talented in the arts, clever verbally, socially adept, and nice, attractive people generally, but they struggled in high school. I know what it takes to get into an Ivy League school, having gone to one myself, and my younger child (a high school senior) appears to be “in the zone,” but there was a point where we were concerned for a total meltdown a couple of years ago. It’s a problem. Play is vital to sanity and is an indicator of intelligence, and kids aren’t getting it.

Kip WEven back when children could still play freely, there was the motto: “If it bleeds, then it leads.”

We are sort of at odds with out kids over the raising of the grandchildren. The parents decide what the kids will be doing every minute of the day. There is no such thing as “down time.” It’s either sleep, school or some other structured activity like music lessons or sports.

Of course this runs the parents ragged and they sometimes have to farm out one of the kids because the two of them can’t be in three places at once.

However, this must be normal for the kids. It was nice to see in a recent visit when they had some “unstructured time” that they filled it with imaginative play inventing ad hoc games with rules similar to Calvinball.

I knew a couple of boys who didn’t do well in high school. One flunked 11th grade. He had to take both senior and junior courses. They didn’t fit in because they had no interest in any of the extra-curricular activities so encouraged and demanded by the school.They both went to their parents wanting to quit school. One of the Moms found an alternate home schooling program.Both boys finished high school, one in 6 months and the other in 3 months. I looked at the materials. They were real high school subjects structured for self study. The tests were administered by a representative of the program. The boys got real high school diplomas. A neighbor girl was a senior last year. She didn’t go to school half the time. When she did, class time was taken up with videos and “free time,” along with field trips. Which she refused to go on. Long bus rides to nowhere, she claimed. They visited a lot of college campuses, amongst State Parks and amusement parks.Boy, I can just see my Dad worried about whether or not I had structured play time. As long as I got my chores done, my time was my own. Rural Arkansas, 1940s and 1950s no electronics, no radio, no TV, no electricity.

“Isn’t this really just a subtle form of child abuse?” — George Carlin