I opened an article on the BBC's website today and remembered with relish my childhood days in California and Asia playing outside in the sun.
It seems that young children need sunlight in order to develop healthy eyes. Keep children indoors studying for hours on end without adequate exposure to sunlight and they'll all end up needing glasses by the time they're adults--seriously, nearly 90% will.
This, by the way, seems to be happening in many Asian societies where studying hard is job #1 and eye-strain is common.
When I was in high school I worked up a little garden plot where I raised vegetables. I also built an irrigated terrace below our house. Neither project was particularly successful or well-thought-out, but just finding fun things to do outside was perhaps all that mattered.
In grade school, when living in Dhaka, some friends and I had a small rowboat made in the carpenter's bazaar. We rowed up and down the small lake in our neighborhood; 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds all out on the water in a large city in a foreign country without adult supervision. Hard to believe.
The sunlight was pure, though, and in that latitude, intense.
