Better late than never: Recess gets some support, 14 years after Ohanian's "What happened to recess?"

Comment posted in response to "Texas School Triples Recess Time And Sees Immediate Positive Results In Kids," at: Posted at: http://www.scarymommy.com/texas-school-triples-recess-time-and-sees-immediate-positive-results-in-kids/

 As Susan Ohanian has chronicled in What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten? (published in 2002), recess has been a causality of the standards movements and the preoccupation with test preparation. Now, 14 years later, we are finally beginning to understand that children have more school success when they are allowed generous breaks.

Great thinkers uniformly recognize the value of some kind of "recess": According to biographer Ronald Clark, whenever Einstein "felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work … he would take refuge in music, and that would resolve all his difficulties … with relaxation, there would

often come the solution."

I wonder if those opposed to recess could get through the day without their coffee breaks.

Clark, R. 1971. Einstein: The Life and Times. New York: The World Publishing Company. 

Ohanian, S. 2002  What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten? New York: McGraw Hill.