The Myth of Normal 159

community and, for many, ease otherwise intolerable isolation. However, we should not be lulled into false optimism or complacency by these upsides. The pleasures and boons of online connectivity can neither keep pace with the burgeoning crises of disconnection nor allay concerns about what the digital world is encoding into our kids’ cognitive and emotional operating systems. — When schools in the Canadian province of Quebec reopened after the COVID-19 lockdown in May 2020, omitted from the curriculum were the supposed nonessentials of music, drama, art, and physical education. The assumption was that academic subjects were more important—raising the question, More important for what? Prioritizing “job readiness” is a far cry from foregrounding healthy development, which ought to be the primary agenda of the educational system, as of child-rearing in general. Even on narrow “skill building” grounds, our prevailing educational ideologies miss the boat, since cognitive skills in fact depend on firm emotional architecture, of which play is an indispensable builder. “We used to think that schools built brains,” Gordon Neufeld said in Brussels. “Now we know that it is play that builds the brains that school can then use . . . It’s where growth most happens.” Those subjects deemed superfluous by Quebec school authorities tap into essential cerebral circuitry. All young mammals play, and for critical reasons. As the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp identified, we have a designated “PLAY” system in our brains in common with other mammals. Play is a primary engine of brain development and is also essential to the emotional maturation process. “As a species, we have evolved culturally in a large part because of our playfulness and all that it produces by way of intelligence and productivity,” James Garbarino writes.[15] And true play, Gordon Neufeld insists, is not outcome-based: the fun is in the activity, not the end result. Free play is one of the “irreducible needs” of childhood, and it’s being sacrificed to both consumerism and the digital culture. “The culture is not respecting normal developmental tasks,” the neuroscientist Stephen Porges told me.