Myth: Children Learn by Sitting
| July 2024It’s hard to know where to begin when addressing the many consequences of the myth that children learn best while sitting. Alfred North Whitehead (1929) writes, “I lay it down as an educational axiom that in teaching you will come to grief as soon as you forget that your pupils have bodies.” Nearly one hundred years later, we still haven’t taken his words seriously.
Among the examples of “grief” we’re seeing are escalating behavior challenges in early childhood settings. Over the past couple of decades, an increasing number of veteran teachers have told me they’ve never before witnessed so many behavioral disruptions. It doesn’t come as a surprise to me. The timing coincides with the period during which children’s movement and play opportunities decreased and unrealistic expectations increased. As I write in Acting Out!:
"Just like any other young animal, young children are born to move! When we remove that option, they become restless and frustrated. Restless, frustrated children fidget. They act out. When they’re told over and over again to sit still, they begin to feel like failures—at three or four years old—because they can’t do what an important adult is asking them to do. When a teacher repeatedly sends home notes with a three-year-old child because he’s not able to sit still...what happens to his natural joy? How can he comply when he’s not developmentally equipped to do so? How can he see school as a place he wants to be? As a place that’s safe? Because he has no choice but to be there, how can he not act out?" (Pica 2019, 2)
Young children don’t have the emotional or verbal ability to express their frustration and dismay. Acting out is the way children tell us things are not OK with them.
There are also physical reasons for the children’s distress. Because our bodies were designed to be upright, walking, running, and generally on the move—not sitting for extended periods—children forced to do the latter become tired and unable to concentrate. This naturally makes them cranky! Educator and author Eric Jensen tells us that sitting for more than ten minutes at a time reduces our awareness of physical and emotional sensations, even for adults. Also, the pressure on a person’s spinal discs is 30 percent greater while the person is sitting than while the person is standing, reducing blood flow. Jensen (2000) writes, “These problems reduce concentration and attention, and ultimately result in discipline problems” (30).
Lack of movement creates other problems that show up in classrooms as well. Many teachers are seeing more children unable to cross the midline of the body (the invisible vertical line that extends from the head to the toes and divides the body into left and right sides). Further research indicates that because reading and writing involve moving the eyes from left to right and an inability to cross the midline impacts visual tracing, problems can arise with reading and writing (Carter 2019).
A more recent phenomenon is that children are falling out of their chairs (Strauss 2017). One first-grade teacher counted the number of occurrences and reported forty-four in a week, likening it to twenty-three penguins trying to sit in chairs. Experiences like these aren’t isolated to this one classroom. Many teachers have raised their hands when I’ve asked if they’ve witnessed this. Pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom (2016) explains that children are getting too few opportunities to develop their proprioceptive and vestibular senses, which are typically developed by age six. The activities nature intended to develop these senses are among those we often warn children against these days: spinning, swinging, hanging upside down, running and changing directions, and rolling down hills. Such movements are part of nature’s plan to prepare children to be able to sit still.
Many adults seem to believe that if we simply insist the little ones be still, those who are “well-behaved” will comply. But the truth is, complying will require the concentration they could be using to complete a more important task. Being still is actually a very challenging form of balance requiring mature proprioceptive and vestibular sense. Motor development literature tells us that three-year-olds can sit still for only five to ten minutes at a time, five-year-olds for fifteen minutes, and seven-year-olds for just twenty-five minutes. Yet school practices often require sitting for far greater lengths at far younger ages.
Last but not least, this myth is directly detrimental to children’s learning—the one thing sitting is supposed to achieve. Active, experiential learners who acquire and retain information using multiple senses simply will not learn optimally when seated. And “active, experiential learner” perfectly describes young children.
The Truth
The truth here is two-pronged: the research proves that physical activity improves brain functioning, and young children are not yet abstract thinkers, which means they require active, experiential learning. We’ll look at both aspects in this section.
Clearly, nature’s plan for the development of both the brain and the body didn’t involve sitting. And if sitting causes fatigue and a lack of concentration, how can anyone with this knowledge imagine that children learn best when seated? As teacher Dee Kalman once said to me, “When the bum is numb, the mind is dumb.” That contention is not only backed up by her personal experience but also by research. For example, the University of Illinois’s Dr. Chuck Hillman has shared images online of two brain scans, in which one shows the brain after sitting quietly and the other following a twenty-minute walk. The difference is remarkable, with the latter far more “lit up” than the former. That’s because, as education expert Eric Jensen once told me, “The brain is constantly responding to environmental input. Compared to a baseline of sitting in a chair, walking, moving, and active learning bump up blood flow and key chemicals for focus and long-term memory (norepinephrine) as well as for effort and mood (dopamine).”
Researchers from the Institute of Medicine (Adams 2013) report that “children who are more active show greater attention [and] have faster cognitive processing speed...than children who are less active.”
We also know that moderate-to vigorous-intensity physical activity—the kind that increases breathing and gets the heart pumping a little or a lot, respectively—provides the brain with water, glucose, and oxygen. This is brain food, without which optimal learning can’t occur. Annie Murphy Paul (2021) tells us that “moderate-intensity exercise experienced for a small length of time increases humans’ ability to think both during and immediately after (for as long as two hours after) the activity.” She adds:
“The positive changes documented by scientists include an increase in the capacity to focus attention and resist distraction; greater verbal fluency and cognitive flexibility; enhanced problem-solving and decision-making abilities; and increased working memory, as well as more durable long-term memory for what is learned.” (51)
We can’t ignore fidgeting, which, Paul (2021) contends we associate with moral shiftiness. While teachers may not necessarily relate it to morality, they may often consider fidgeting misbehavior, or at the very least find it distracting and insist that it stop. But that will prove counterproductive. Occupational therapist Angela Hanscom (2014) tells us:
“Children are going to class with bodies that are less prepared to learn than ever before. With sensory systems not quite working right, they are asked to sit and pay attention. Children naturally start fidgeting, in order to get the movement their body so desperately needs and is not getting enough of to 'turn their brain on'. What happens when the children start fidgeting? We ask them to sit still and pay attention; therefore, their brain goes back to 'sleep.' ”
While adults often believe children must stop moving in order to focus, researchers have discovered that the opposite is true. When children are involved in an experience requiring working memory and cognitive processing, they need to move so they can focus (Nicholas 2020). This can be even truer for children with attention disorders, as their brains are continually under-aroused. In a 2015 study, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) researcher Dr. Dustin Sarver found that movements like moving and spinning in a chair meant children with ADHD performed better on tasks requiring concentration because the small physical motions awakened the nervous system and increased alertness. These movements, according to Sarver, work much in the same way the stimulant drug Ritalin does (Kamenetz 2015; Sarver et al. 2015). According to Sarver, when we tell children to sit still or stop moving, they are using all of their mental energy to focus on that rule, which prevents them from focusing on whatever task we want them to do (Sarver et al. 2015).
As active learners, children need to physically experience concepts to fully grasp them. Pumping data through their eyes, their ears, and the seat of their pants is not ideal. Because they’re not yet abstract thinkers, seeing a word such as enormous on a worksheet, even if accompanied by an illustration, is not nearly as impactful as demonstrating enormous with the body. The latter is a concrete experience. The children not only hear the word but also feel it and look at their classmates and see it. Once they’ve been enormous, they never forget the word. Similarly, when children move over, under, around, through, beside, and near objects and others, they better grasp the meaning of these prepositions and positional concepts (falling under both emergent literacy and geometry). When they perform a slow walk or hop lightly, adjectives and adverbs become much more than abstract ideas. When children physically experience long, short, wide, and narrow shapes with their body or body parts, quantitative (math) concepts are no longer abstract. Scientific concepts such as balance and stability, action and reaction, and gravity are also understood best when physically experienced. Seeing these concepts on a worksheet or computer screen does not lend itself to authentic learning, which involves true comprehension. Children require active learning. Active learning may take many forms, but few of them involve sitting.
Here are the words of one of my education heroes, neurophysiologist Carla Hannaford (2007), who writes:
“The notion that intellectual activity can somehow exist apart from our bodies is deeply rooted in our culture.... This idea is also the basis of a lot of educational theory and practice that make learning harder and less successful than it could be.”
“Thinking and learning are not all in our head. On the contrary, the body plays an integral part in all our intellectual processes from early movements in utero right through to old age.” (15).
This is what families, administrators, and policy makers need to understand: children do not exist only from the neck up, and our persistence in acting as though they do results in negative consequences for both their bodies and their brains.
References
Adams, Jill U. 2013. "Physcial Activity May Help Kids Do Better in School, Studies Say." Washington Post, October 21. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/physical-activity-may-help-kids-do-better-in-school-studies-say/2013/10/21/e7f86306-2b87-11e3-97a3-ff2758228523_story.html
Carter, Danielle. 2019. "The Importance of Crossing Midline." Kidspeak. November 22. https://kidspeakltd.com/importance-crossing-midline/
Corso, Marjorie. 1993. "Is Developmentally Appropriate Physcial Education the Answer to Children's School Readiness?" Colorado Journal of Health, Physcial Education, Recreation, and Dance 19 (2): 6-7.
Deardorff, Julie, 2012. “Standing Desks: The Classroom of the Future?” Chicago Tribune, August 7. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2012/08/07/standing-desks-the-classroom-of-the-future/
Hannaford, Carla. 2007. Smart Moves: Why Learning Is Not All in Your Head. 2nd. Ed. Salt Lake City, UT: Great River Books.
Hanscom, Angela. 2014. “The Real Reason Why Kids Fidget.” HuffPost. Last modified December 6, 2017. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-real-reason-why-kids-fidget_b_5586265
_______. 2016. Balanced and Barefoot: How Unrestricted Outdoor Play Makes for Strong, Confident, and Capable Children. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger.
Jensen, Eric. 2000. Learning with the Body in Mind: The Scientific Basis for Energizers, Movement, Play, Games, and Physical Education. San Diego, CA: Brain Store.
Kamenetz, Anya. 2015. “Vindication for Fidgeters: Movement May Help Students with ADHD Concentrate.” National Public Radio, May 14. https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/05/14/404959284/fidgeting-may-help-concentration-for-students-with-adhd
Nicholls, Emma, 2020. “Everything You Need to Know about Fidgeting.” Healthline. Updated on January 30. https://www.healthline.com/health/fidgeting
Paul, Annie Murphy. 2021. The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking outside the Brain. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Pica, Rae. 2019. Acting Out! Avoid Behavior Challenges with Active Learning Games & Activities. St. Paul, MN. Redleaf Press.
Pica, Rae. Spark a Revolution in Early Education. Redleaf Press, 22 Nov. 2022.
Ratey, John. 2008. Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. New York: Little, Brown.
Sarver, Dustin E., Mark D. Rapport, Michael J. Kofler, Joseph S. Raiker, and Lauren M. Friedman. 2015. “Hyperactivity in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Impairing Deficit or Compensatory Behavior?” Journal of Abnormal Child’s Psychology 43 (7): 1219-32. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25863472/.
Strauss, Valerie. 2017. “The Consequences of Forcing Young Kids to Sit Too Long in Class.” Washington Post. March 17. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/03/17/the-consequences-of-forcing-young-kids-to-sit-too-long-in-class/.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1929. The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Macmillan.
Willis, Judy. 2016. “Memorizing: Faster, Easier, Longer Lasting, and More Fun.” Psychology Today, September 5. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/radical-teaching/201609/memorizing-faster-easier-longer-lasting-and-more-fun.
