David O'Halloran, Headmaster - Saint David's School, New York City

In the second entry of our Teaching Boys Initiative's quarterly blog series, "The Wisdom Within," Saint David's reflective practitioner and Master Teacher Cathy O'Neill explores the pedagogical power of play in the education of young boys. BRINGING SOUND TO SPACE It began with a mound of mangled metal and the vapor of a vision gleaned from recent comments and random fact-dropping by the Pre-K boys. Unsure of what exactly I was looking for, but fueled by the idea of a makeshift rocket to dovetail with our upcoming space unit, I gingerly picked through the scrap pile until my hands grazed an old VW control panel devoid of its dashboard. Eureka! An array of knobs, dials, and buttons - while in reality, dead as doornails - in the right small hands, would become the epicenter of our NASA-inspired dramatic play corner. With a couple of lawn chairs and some old CB radio microphones to round out the set, engines would be ignited by the power of imagination. All systems go...

It has been reported that even elite college students are unable to handle assignments that involve reading large amounts of text. The average adult human attention span is said to have decreased. We are constantly multi-tasking, scrolling through social media feeds, contending with distractions that beckon us. Much praise is often given to multitaskers, but science tells us that the human brain cannot focus effectively on two things at once. While social media's algorithms may hook us into spending extended periods of time on a particular feed, we are losing our ability to devote time to deep thought, critical analysis, problem-solving, and the encoding and decoding associated with person-to-person communication—all essential to securing and maintaining high level employment and leading a meaningful, purposeful life. So what to do? Great schools often need to be countercultural. At Saint David's, we stand committed to the written word and the book. Reading asks us to engage in...