Stephanie, a reader, sent this short video.

Please stop and watch it.

The point is about how important play is.

It happens that play matters for little children, but it matters for adolescents and for adults.

When we rob our children of play, we rob them of their childhood.

When we rob adolescents and adults of play time, we rob them of time for laughter, time for creativity, and time to have fun.

When we subtract creativity, laughter, and fun from our society, we get a drab world.

We get a world where no one is silly, no one has a new idea, no one jumps for joy.

When we lose those qualities, we become grad grinds, churning out grades and scores to please the computer.

That’s not a healthy world, or a world that brings out our best, or a world where humans can thrive and grown. Not little ones, and not big ones either.

You may recall that ACT is developing a test for college-and-career readiness for children in kindergarten. And a number of districts and states are developing tests for kindergartners to test their cognitive skills. The U.S. Department of Education is promoting these assessments, as there can never be too much data to go into the vast data storage warehouses that every state is now building to track every person as early as possible. And of course the tests are absolutely necessary to provide the data to evaluate the kindergarten teacher.

This is a time of madness. Why can’t we leave the little ones alone and let them play and dance and sing and make things?

This kindergarten teacher saw the writing on the wall. So should we all. Not to leave, as he did, but to stand up and shout No, not with my child, and not with anyone else’s child. No, stop, this is wrong. Let children have a childhood.