Yesterday I was doing talkback on a couple of related stories.

The first was on the thoughts of Dr Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish education expert who’s just started at the University of New South Wales. He believes all smartphones should be banned at primary school and managed at secondary school because they are a distraction and impediment to learning.

This is a similar view to France who banned phones in school in 2017. Then their education minister said "These days the children don't play at break time anymore. They are just all in front of their smartphones, and from an educational point of view, that's a problem."

That dovetailed nicely into another story out of Lower Hutt, where a survey showed that 88% of kids don’t play every day and 96% of parents said their children weren’t playing daily.

In a social experiment, the kids were given chalk and told to draw pictures of what they do at home. The kids drew TVs, phones, gaming setups and one kid even drew the YouTube logo.

The 2 stories show just how in thrall our next generation is to screens. It showed how many parents have forgotten the art of letting their kids play and how many just throw a tablet at their children to keep them quiet and entertained.

After the show, I was contacted by Jim Young who’s just written a book on project management for businesses and he included an excerpt from the book which I think is very relevant

He argues that project management is not learnt at school but it is learnt through play.

Play is the key to the physical, mental, intellectual and social well-being of our children. For children, play is serious learning and the work of childhood. But it seems that the current parental zeitgeist is one of worry and fear for our children, often far out of proportion to the actual dangers involved. Yet bullrush is how he first learned about the essential ingredients of risk, reward, and group dynamics - all during the lunch break.

He directed me to watch “The Secret Life of Four Year Olds” a spy-cam documentary recently shown on TVNZ. It is about the leadership, planning, conflict, mischief, lies, rivalry, pestering, negotiation, dictatorship, decision-making, recruiting, gang warfare, delegation, rejection and violence of preschool life. It’s terrifying, but perhaps good preparation for a robust life as project managers and participants in the real world.

That said, in the documentary, several participants seem more interested in playing computer games than making friends.

So it’s a reminder to the new generation of parents and kids that taking the screens away and kicking the kids out the door is more educational than any Ted talk they’ll see on an iPad.

The message is let the children play. It’s the greatest educational tool in the world.