My rather late response!
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Keith

While the theory of your pick-up games has traction, even the sportiest of kids seem to prefer to wedge themselves in front of some sort of screen, playing virtual games and consuming junk food and fizzy drinks for hours on end. While there is some value in the games (don’t get me wrong), this does not engender good health. There needs to be balance. We cannot abdicate our role as adults in the lives of these children. To simply allow them to take the line of least resistance without encouraging and guiding them to fulfill their potential is not going to be doing them any favours in the long run. As adults, we attend performance appraisals, a two-way discussion where we, together with a line manager, can identify areas of excellence and areas of potential development, thus being encouraged to engage in lifelong learning. At my sons’ school, we have similar meetings on a three-way basis: child, tutor and parent, where goals can be set and past performance evaluated. The child’s own voice has as much validity as either of the adults and the trio is seen as a team working towards a common goal. I set store by these meetings and hold my sons accountable for their stated goals. That’s part of my “job” as long as they are minors and my responsibility.

It would be wonderful if everyone always strove to be the very best that they can, but the harsh reality is that this is not the nature of the human population of this world.

A partial answer might be reversing the trend toward programmed, adult-supervised leisure, and a return to the kind of informal neighborhood pick-up games that were common in the days when most socialization was informal, self-supervised, and outside of school.

One of the worst aspects of modern publik skool culture is the barracks society atmosphere, and organized leisure is only one aspect of it. To the list we can add the encouragement of careerist values among the little resume-builders, the tendency of excessive homework to encourage the belief that the only worthwhile goal is one assigned by an authority figure, and the atmosphere of snitching encouraged by zero-tolerance, D.A.R.E., and the like. Put all these things together, and the schools are teaching the behaviors needed to function in a bureaucratic anthill or a police state.

The government schools were originally created to fulfill factories’ needs for “human resources” trained to cheerfully obey orders from people behind desks, line up on command, and eat and piss at the sound of a bell. They serve a similar function today, but adapted to the white collar toadyism of the modern corporation.

In secondary school, the children get one 9-week block of physical education each school year. We augment this with extra-curricular sports, which we pay for. In our case, it’s competitive swimming three days per week and Tai Kwon Do twice a week. I think that opting out of school would probably improve fitness levels around here.

I realise that my view is likely to be unpopular, since I notice that many people have adopted a cynical view of the value/relevance of team sports, but I also notice that a fairly large percentage of those are not particularly fine examples of glowing good health and vitality. I come from a sporty family and a sporty nation, and have a high regard for the value of physical endeavour, teamwork and healthy competition. In fact, I would offset a lot against the assurance that my sons would have the opportunity to participate in such activities several times a week, if not daily.