Sport belongs on the school timetable, not after it

Every school promises holistic development and then timetables it out of existence. Games, when they survive, are the period sacrificed to syllabus pressure — the first hostage whenever a board exam approaches. We have collectively decided sport is what children do with time nobody important wants.

The evidence points the other way. The morning-games school produces calmer classrooms by second period; the child who trains learns to lose a point and reset — a skill no worksheet teaches; and the fitness data on our children argues for urgency, not electives.

The objection is always infrastructure, and it is mostly alibi. A timetable cell costs nothing. A ground shared between three schools costs scheduling. The stick library, the borrowed coach, the maidan at 7 am — every solution in this newspaper's sports pages this month was cheap. What is expensive is the habit of treating play as remainder.

Put sport before lunch, weight it in report cards, and watch what a generation looks like when sweat is curriculum instead of leftover. The mathematics will survive the company. It always has.