Primary schools must learn through structured play and end standardized testing, post covid-19.

For many of you who earnestly imagined what schooling will look like when the building finally reopen and the leadership of this country have determined it is safe for children and adults to resume their lives beyond their own homes?

To the thousands of parents, educationalists and school managers who wondered if things would simply pick up, relatively unchanged at least from where they left off before the crisis or will there be big changes in the way Ghanaians view and do school, I sincerely hope and pray for the latter, especially for younger students who largely are not given the time to do what research suggests is good for them: learning through structured play and an end to standardize testing.

The COVID-19 crisis has traumatized one of the most dysfunctional pillars of childhood education. Last year March, the Education Secretary, Betsy De Vos of the Trump administration took a profoundly Godly decision to suspended the federal requirement for the mass standardized testing of children announcing “Neither students nor teachers need to be focused on high – stakes testing during these difficult moments”. Other countries including England and Australia duplicated this Godly decision. However, these decisions must be critically examined in Ghana and permanently consider it.

Like countless other parents, we now have an increase in having to home – school our young children even after President Nana Akufo Addo announced the resuming of schools for the fear of the COVID-19. We should build our schools upon a foundation of what the Pediatrics society calls “the ideal educational and developmental milieu for children”: play, in all of its forms.

The evidence is clear. A wide range of research indicates that intellectual and physical play confers a host of cognitive, social, emotional and health benefits. Play is the learning language of children, and pediatricians know it has the power to supercharge more conventional, and equally necessary, forms of academic instruction.

With the instruction from the President of the Republic of Ghana, Nana Akufo Addo and for the fear of the spread of COVID-19, many schools have abandoned active sports periods on their curriculum however, schools must restructure all subjects to be taught using the ‘POWER OF PLAY’ language. A worst – case scenario would be for schools to say, “we missed many months of academic subjects and tests so we’re going to compress it all into the shortest frame of time and catch up”.

This kind of thinking is a terrible idea, since it would just accentuate the stress children are already experiencing and undermine their capacity for productive learning.

In these times of uncertainty, pain and fear, play can be a big part of the cure.

During this crisis, parents should resist the temptation to overstress their children with excessive, often screen-based “remote at-home learning” in an attempt to “not fall behind.”

In this bizarre, tragic chapter in world history, children need parental attention and love, comfort, safety, nondigital play, healthy routines, songs, books, basic art supplies, and, whenever possible, physical activity, much more than they need academic pressure, graded assignments and excessive screen time.

In this health emergency, government leaders around the world are urgently seeking the advice of medical and scientific experts. They should do the same when it comes to education. When the covid-19 pandemic passes and the world opens up again, we should redesign our schools using the best expert evidence, just as we are doing in response to the global health pandemic.

We should give our children schools that follow doctor’s orders, by giving them lots of physical activity and play to energize learning and boost health and happiness.

The mission of childhood education can no longer be the generation of standardized test data, but learning powered by the physical, mental and emotional health and well-being of every child and every teacher. Schools should be the favorite place of every child. It’s time we made them so.