You Can't Get There on a Treadmill

Not long ago I spent time with a man who does not have children, doesn't want children, and, in fact, told me, "I don't even like being in places that allow children."

For people like us, it's an outrageous thing to say. I wanted to ask, "Who broke you?" but instead I just asked, "Why?"

He answered, "Because they're always moving."

Well, he's right about that, at least compared to adults: young children do move far more than most adults. Not only that, they run when they could walk. They jump, they climb, they wiggle, clap, dance, balance, and swing even when there is no obvious reason. Studies find that young children engage in moderate to vigorous physical activity, on average, for three hours a day. By the time they're teens, it's down to less than one hour. 

This discrepancy is typically dismissed as developmental. Childhood is the time for play and play usually involves movement and lots of it. But humans aren't the only animal that plays. Indeed, play seems to be universal, at least among higher order animals, but no other species of which I'm aware has such a movement gap between juveniles and adults. This probably has to do with the fact that wild adult animals must spend a large percentage of their waking hours hunting and foraging, whereas modern human's tend to earn their living in increasingly sedentary ways.

Sadly, this doesn't just hold true for adults. Children today spend far less time in physical activity than we did as kids, but the gap between adult movement and child movement hasn't narrowed. In other words, as a species, we simply aren't moving as much as we once did.

The impact on physical fitness is obvious, but it goes beyond that. As neuroscientist Patrick House writes, "This must be the ultimate purpose of consciousness: to control a body." Cognitive philosopher Andy Clark says we have inherited "a mind on the hoof," brains built to hunt and forage, to think and react while moving about an environment. 

Today's world increasingly demands the opposite. As play-based early childhood educators, we are among the rare professionals who actually spend our days "on the hoof," but the rest of the world is fighting their bodies into chairs, training themselves for long hours on screens or in cars. 

We try to correct for this with the modern invention of "exercise," an idea that emerged from the idle rich of previous centuries, movement strictly for the sake of fitness. Back then they took "constitutionals." Today's idle middle class jumps on a treadmill.

Rebecca Solnit writes in her book about walking, Wanderlust: "The treadmill is a corollary to the suburb and the autotropolis: a device with which to go nowhere in places where there is now nowhere to go. Or no desire to go: the treadmill also accommodates the auto mobilized and suburbanized mind more comfortable in climate-controlled indoor space than outdoors, more comfortable with quantifiable and clearly defined activity than with the seamless engagement of mind, body, and terrain to be found walking out-of-doors."

Treadmills are now regular features in our public schools.

Those of us who come from the world of play, of self-directed learning, tend to criticize the increasingly academic nature of schooling as "developmentally inappropriate," usually meaning "cognitively inappropriate." But it's equally inappropriate in that the way this type of curriculum is delivered requires young children to fight their bodies into chairs, and rein in their mind on the hoof. We are literally dumbing our children down in order to "prepare" them for their sedentary future.

We cannot separate our minds and bodies. We have inherited a mind on the hoof and when we are not allowed to move, our body-minds rebel by becoming flabby, stiff, distracted, anxious, hypertensive, diabetic, and depressed. There are few modern ailments, physical or psychological, that aren't connected to lack of meaningful movement.

"For my part," writes Robert Lewis Stevenson, "I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."

This is our heritage as a species, a mind on the hoof. Movement is not only our native language, but it is the universal language. Attention during action is our natural state. To move is the great affair. Movement literally defines life. And here we are, as a culture, attempting to become a strange kind of creature on this planet, one that is so sedentary that we even find the movement of others annoying.

Reacting to Stevenson, poet Diane Ackerman writes, "The great affair, the love affair in life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between."

And you can't get there on a treadmill.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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