Editorial: Playing is how we learn

Rock pools at low tide. An old bicycle with no brakes. Half a dozen trees and a brain-damaged cat that will bite you if you pick it up the wrong way.

Throw in a handful of kids (preferably with sticks and pets) and allow them to run riot round the neighbourhood climbing trees and being shouted at by other parents.

Allow them to make something, without instructions, out of entirely forbidden items in someone's garage. If no one loses an eye give them back to me.

The director of studies blinked. She'd asked me what was needed to make these children more successful and blitz all the other kids from competing "bushibans" (cram schools) and after-school academies.

I think she meant more in the way of textbooks and audio-gear, but I was entirely serious. These children needed space to do nothing but play and exercise their imaginations. Lots of it. And time. Lots of it.

They needed to observe more (rock pools are great for this) and fall out of, off of and into stuff as a result of their bad choices or lack of focus. They did not need any more book or screen or organised activity time in their lives.

I was appalled that 8-year-olds could have the low joie de vivre of 40-year-old car salesmen. They were drowning in all the force-fed opportunities their parents hadn't had and so the academic hot-housing had succeeded in eradicating any vestige of excitement, imagination or curiosity in them.

In a desperate bid to generate interest, I faked a ghost sighting, an ill-advised yet highly successful inspiration of dubious academic value. It was ghost month in Taiwan and the kids were susceptible.

It resulted in a stampede of 27 terrified, screaming 8-year-olds down four flights of stairs. One of them broke a leg. Which was embarrassing for me, but none of the kids missed a class after that.

I recall having to write a report on the pedagogical purpose of making small children flee onto traffic-jammed streets.

Once, as an experiment, I asked the class what they'd do right now if they had all the money in the world and could choose anything at all. I had images of helicopter rides to glaciers, driving ridiculously huge trucks or going to the world's best chocolate shops in my mind.

They all, without exception said: "Sleep."

I called their bluff thinking it would last two seconds and they'd be kicking each other under the desks and generally going mental in an eye-blink. Within two minutes they were all sound asleep.

They stayed that way for the next two hours - again, embarrassing as the Director popped her head round the corner to find me, feet up, reading my novel with 27 fee-paying students sound asleep in my charge.

I assured her that this was how it was done in New Zealand.

These kids were exhausted from their high pressure highway to success. They didn't get to refuel by just running around and being kids.

Paradoxically, it was ruining their academic ambitions. In short, their lack of freedom to frolic was making them stupid.

Not in New Zealand, though. Then I read the Milo study on children's play which revealed that only half of New Zealand children get to play every day.

That means that half of them are not falling out of, into and off of stuff often enough before they're bought some low-riding speed machine on their 16th birthday and learn about consequences the really hard way.

As I wrote this by hand, because yet another young driver had ploughed into a power pole on my road, causing a power outage, where two girls died and a young, very inebriated treasure took out the pylon at the top of my drive not so long ago, I wondered if the crashes on the Xbox had felt quite the same, or if a bit more time on bikes would have helped.