Kids Spend Less Time Outdoors Than Prisoners

School might as well be prison for kids

A maximum security inmate gets to spend more time outdoors than the average American or British student, a study has found.

The Dirt is Good initiative recently released a study involving children aged 5-12 in the United States and 9 other countries which found some disturbing facts. The average prisoner spends two hours outdoors, while children in the study averaged less than an hour day outside and in Britain the average is down to a mere half-hour a day.

As the Dirt is Good group points out, schools in the United States often resemble heavily regulated prisons.

This is further evidence of the ongoing conversion of schools into indoctrination camps and corporate labor training facilities, with aims other than enlightening children and teaching them to be critical thinkers.

The real goal is herding children into a program called Limited Learning for Lifelong Labor, as pointed out by former Senior Policy advisor for the U.S. Department of Education, Charlotte Thomson-Iserbyt in her highly-rated book The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.

They’re looking at [your child] as a cog in the wheel to be trained, not educated.

George Carlin talked about the education system in one of his most brilliant standups:

I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.

You know what they want? Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.

Even the Washington Post pointed out another aspect to the insanity of cutting playtime and recess in a country with an obesity epidemic:

The problem: children are constantly in an upright position these days. It is rare to find children rolling down hills, climbing trees, and spinning in circles just for fun. Merry-go-rounds and teeter-totters are a thing of the past. Recess times have shortened due to increasing educational demands, and children rarely play outdoors due to parental fears, liability issues, and the hectic schedules of modern-day society.

I personally know of schools where playtime or recess has been cut down to 15 minutes a day. As far as educational demands: learning how to take standardized tests and follow orders is not the sin qua non of a well-rounded education. The Dirt is Good initiative points out time spent outdoors helps children develop better social skills, fights depression, helps mental development, and helps them grow athletically.

The fact a group had to be formed to point this out only shows how increasingly debased our society has become. B.F. Skinner would marvel at the operant conditioning now being implemented in the education system. And Orwell would marvel at the fact it is even called an education system, when in fact it is more about social engineering than enlightenment and instilling the values of freedom into the next generation.

Help us grow by making a purchase from our Recommended Reading and Viewing page or our Politically Incorrect Apparel and Merchandise page or buy anything from Amazon using this link. You can also Sponsor The New Modern Man for as little as $1 a month.