A survey published this week in Britain found that children were losing out by not having enough play time during their school years. There's too much concentration on the classroom and less time in the playground and this is having the knock-on effect of children not developing adequate social skills. Apparently, because too great a proportion of their day is being spent in a learning situation, they don't get enough opportunity to meet each other properly and know how to get on with others.
On the face of it, you'd think that pupils everywhere should be overjoyed by these findings. Any official-sounding survey which says they should have more free time surely has to be good news. And teachers, you might think, would be glad to have the extra half-hour here and there in the staffroom while the children were developing interpersonal skills in the yard.
And parents might be pleased to think that the children wouldn't be cross-eyed from concentration and would come home with cheerful stories about games played, friendships made and huge ease of communication achieved.
But if you thought all that then you live in an even more rose-tinted world than I do. The results of the survey were greeted with a great rumble of rage by almost everyone.
Parents said that there was little enough work done in schools these days without hearing sociologists telling them to do even less still. Teachers said that there's so much emphasis now on the curriculum and not nearly enough time to get through what is expected - all they need is more playground time eating into what they have.
And head teachers and administrators say that too much time at leisure is exactly what has caused so many problems in the past. Leaving a lot of children to congregate aimlessly is not only a recipe for trouble, it's exactly when the malcontents start to upset the others. When drugs get introduced, when shoplifting expeditions are planned, the interpersonal skills that are developed in lengthy playground sessions might be better not developed at all. School counsellors says that this is the area where bullying begins and grows to hugely unacceptable levels.
You can't torture another child in the classroom, you can't be an aching outcast if you are all sitting in rows being addressed by the same teacher.
The response seemed very negative and disappointing to me, I must say. Like, you have to imprison them otherwise they tear each other to bits. Give people any freedom and they abuse it. It reminded me of those gloomboots who got depressed when futurologists said that in the next century people will have much more leisure and should be educated for it.
More leisure! The alarmists went into a deep panic. Wide-eyed with terror, they said that people wouldn't know what to do with more leisure. They'd have nervous breakdowns, panic attacks, bouts of aimlessness. According to them, it was apparently better to go to a demeaning, mind-stifling, exhausting job during the daylight hours than to do what you wanted to do and try to face the world as it is.
And a friend of mine who ran a lovely peaceful hotel back in the 1960s said that his visitors, a lot of them English factory workers who had saved to come to this place, always asked in advance what they could do after three days when their tiredness had been cured. They were so programmed to follow a conveyor-belt existence, they feared that they wouldn't be able to fill empty days.
So he organised treasure hunts and general knowledge quizzes, art classes, flower arranging and escorted hikes, which satisfied them completely, and I am glad to say made him a small fortune.
But I thought those days were gone, and that this was a generation and society just coming out of the industrial revolution where hard meaningless work was the price you paid for survival. I thought things were much better now. Surely children wanted more free time?
Look back, look back to your own playground. I suppose it was more intimidating than the classroom. There was a year when everyone was doing hand-stands. For me that was a very bad year. If I didn't try to do hand-stands I was a pain. If I did try I was a clown. I can still see them stuffing their fists into their mouths to hide the guffaws. I used to hate the bell ringing for break in those days and yearned for the safety of the classroom again. And I was happy at school for heaven's sake! What must it have been like for those who weren't?
I asked a few people to try to remember, and yes it did come out that they remembered hurt, exclusion, people giggling, best friends suddenly abandoning you, stories of boys who might or might not fancy people. Dangerous schemes that you were terrified to join and even more terrified not to. Still, it didn't damage them and some friendships were made. That was the women.
I asked men to remember, and they couldn't really recall much, emotionally speaking. What else is new? you might ask ungraciously. But they tried to remember. And usually they remembered being bored or thumping people or being thumped, or smoking or kicking a ball or talking about sex, real or imagined.
They couldn't really understand why it might have been a cruel time - it was the way things were.
Those who were bullied didn't admit it, those who bullied others don't remember it. The playground probably is a preparation for life. And if you're called fatty, or spotty, or speccy-foureyes, or taunted about some damn thing or the other then it's a sort of a rehearsal, isn't it?
People will always put others down and it's madness to let children think that they won't. And usually as we get older, the insults become slightly less direct. But in a playground we get to know the people we like as well as those we are afraid of, the chat we enjoy, the futures that might be ahead. And eventually we learn that life doesn't have to be full of hand-stands and cartwheels.
So on balance, I'm with the findings of this survey. Let them learn how to get on with others, and learn what makes them liked and what makes them disliked as young as possible.
Keeping them caged in classrooms isn't any more preparation for the real world than letting them believe in the notion of a job for life.