When I was in Year 7, a teacher wrote something on the bottom of one of my project reports.
I'd built a volcano so big it barely fit in the car. She gave me an A+++.
Then underneath it, she wrote a single line: if you keep going the way you're going, you'll burn out.
I didn't think about that sentence again for close to twenty years. It sat there, quietly true, while I built an entire adult life proving her right.
I told that story recently to Ernest Tan, an educator who's spent the last twenty years working with young people in Singapore. He laughed and told me I must be a closet Singaporean, because in his world, an A+++ is basically a national trait.
It was a throwaway joke. But it landed on something real.
Two different countries, two different school systems, and the shape of that story was instantly recognisable on either side of the world.
The Line That Stuck With Me
Ernest runs Leaven Academy, teaching financial maturity, personal leadership and communication to Singaporean teenagers, almost entirely through games and hands-on activity rather than lectures.
Partway through our conversation, he said something I haven't stopped thinking about since.
"Education is very good at informing kids, and far less good at forming them."
- Ernest Tan
Informing is easy. You can measure it, test it, put a number on a report card.
Forming, teaching a kid to actually own a decision, recover from a mistake, stay curious when nobody's watching, is slow. It doesn't show up anywhere official.
So it's the first thing that gets cut when the timetable fills up.
Is An Unscheduled Hour Actually A Wasted One?
There's real research behind the feeling that something has quietly gone missing.
Researcher Kyung Hee Kim spent years analysing creativity test scores from nearly 300,000 children and adults. She found that while IQ scores have climbed steadily for generations, creativity scores have been falling since 1990. Not levelling off. Falling.
Kids today, on average, score lower on creative thinking than the average child did in 1984.
Psychologist Peter Gray has tracked a parallel decline: unstructured, unsupervised free play has been dropping for decades, alongside a well-documented rise in childhood anxiety.
These aren't two separate stories. They're the same story, told by two different fields of research.
We didn't get here by accident, exactly. We got here by optimising. An empty hour started to feel like a wasted one, and wasted felt like the one thing none of us could afford.
I still catch myself doing it as an adult. Give me an unscheduled hour and I'll find something productive to fill it with before I've even noticed I've made the choice.
But an unscheduled hour was never wasted. It was invested, in the kind of thinking that doesn't happen on command.
Creativity. Resilience. The ability to actually sit with a problem instead of reaching for the first answer. None of that shows up when every minute already has a job to do. It shows up in the gaps.
Play In A Culture That Doesn't Always Make Room For It
What struck me most wasn't the content of what Ernest teaches. It was what his work confirms.
This isn't a Singapore problem, or a mining problem, or a school problem.
It's what happens in any system, any family, any workplace, that quietly starts treating stillness as a failure of ambition.
Ernest's own business is proof it doesn't have to stay that way. He teaches some of the most consequence-heavy subjects there are, money, leadership, decision-making, entirely through play, in a culture that doesn't always have an obvious place for play at all.
If it can work there, it can work anywhere.
Play of the Week
This week, invest fifteen minutes in a relationship.
Anyone in your life. A child. A colleague. A friend. A parent.
No agenda. No outcome. Nothing scheduled around it.
Just fifteen minutes, genuinely theirs, genuinely yours.
See what happens.
This article is part of Articles & Reflections from The Element of Play, Jodi Salmond's work exploring adult play, burnout recovery, playful leadership, self-connection and more human ways of living and leading.