Extra-Curricular Child Activities

The petition is entitled Encourage or require all primary and secondary school aged children to take part in at least two hours of organized extra curricular activities per week such as physical, sport, social or service based activities and the explanatory notes say

"We have all seen in the press recently about the failings of our society on children, largely due to lack of family values or children just not being brought up properly.

By encouraging children from an early age to take part in extra curricular activities (outside of school teaching time) such as school clubs, Youth clubs, Guides, Scouts, Sports, Cadets, Duke of Edinburgh’s Award etc will be one part of helping them to develop good values for life now and later, it will help to keep them off the streets, reducing boredom, street crime and anti social behaviour, also some activities will help with health and fitness, another problem in society."

If we just say "encourage", I agree, though I don't really know what the PM's supposed to do about it. Make a speech saying it's nice?

If we say require ... I used to help at my local Beaver and Cub Scouts. Having sufficient volunteers to run such things is such a big problem that most groups have long waiting lists. I suspect that this applies to other extra-curricular activities, too - "requiring" kids to take part in them will leave not enough people to run them. Which would obviously be a problem.

Then there's the purely semantic argument: if an extra-curricular activity is enforced, how is it extra-curricular? It becomes part of the curriculum ...