According to Cambridge University, we should be doing more to protect children from the ’scholarisation’ of childhood. We’re creating a generation of school children who can’t escape the clutches of education - their free time is being eaten into by preschool breakfast clubs, after-school homework sessions and earnest attempts by parents to get involved in their homework.

While no-one can question the importance of play for child development, the report misses a crucial point - the dividing line between learning and play has always been at best blurred, and technology is making things even more obscure, says Stephen Crowne, chief executive of Becta…

We can lament the passing of a more innocent age, or we can get on and give our children the support they need to develop and succeed. Technology, one of the reasons why things have changed, is also one of the tools open to us for helping them.

Young people today have grown up with technology. According to research by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, children spend a lot of their free time using it. 41% of children aged 8-11 regularly use the internet. Over 75% of 11-year-olds have their own TV, games console and mobile phone. 56% of children aged 8-11 play computer games, and 7% of 10-year-olds have their own webcam.

Whatever you feel about these statistics, they describe the real world for our children. We need to help them use all this technology in as positive a way as possible.

The Cambridge University report urges us to “understand children’s lives outside school” - a valid point. But rather than keeping school time and playtime separate as the report seems to suggest, it would be far more effective to use learning methods that straddle the two.

Our children respond to technology because they have grown up with it. We shouldn’t exclude it from their education because we have a vague sense that it is “not a good thing”…

Encouraging children to carry out their studies at home using technology makes learning fun, because it feels like an extension of what many of them already do in their free time…

Source: Guardian Unlimited, UK
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/mortarboard/2007/11/why_learning_never_stops_with.html