My roommate Adam often accuses me of working “too hard.” I find this silly — if I have work to do, I intend to do it. Last year, as the methodic tapping of my fingers attacking the keyboard brought the tension in the room to a boiling point, Adam would spring from his seat and say, “You know what? I think it’s time to play some basketball!”

“Basketball? Now? Listen bud, I don’t know about you, but I have work here, and there is simply no time to play,” I would protest. Defeated, Adam would slink back into his chair, and I would cap off my Arabic studies with a quick revision of my Great Books paper.

But these summer months off have taught me something I couldn’t have learned if I hadn’t put the work away from time to time: play (and all the dangers of procrastination that accompany it) is a necessity for the human brain. From the healthy development of children to the sanity of University students, decades of research indicate that play is essential for the cognitive, physical and emotional development of individuals.

I have always operated under the assumption that if I’m not working I’m wasting time. Perhaps it’s the years of academic conditioning and a depressingly thin social life that has developed such a slave-driver mentality. But a study conducted by the American Academy for Pediatrics suggests that play “is integral to the academic environment.” Furthermore, play has been shown to help individuals (including anxious incoming freshmen) adjust to school settings and enhance learning readiness. But as initiatives like No Child Left Behind continue to force American schools to prioritize and as manic college students anxiously prepare for the rest of their lives, the value of play seems to have been forgotten.

Today, children are indoctrinated into a society that demands and preaches achievement. Even before birth, programs like Baby Mozart are used to help children, still unable to speak, develop spatial intelligence, creativity and memory. In many schools, No Child Left Behind has indirectly incentivized administrators to do away with recess, creative arts and physical education classes. Viewed by many as irrelevant, these valuable times to run and create and play have been replaced with extra study sessions.

But what lawmakers and teachers alike fail to understand is that some of the most valuable learning is taking place outside the classroom. The American Academy of Pediatrics goes on to explain that undirected play teaches children to work in groups, share, negotiate, resolve conflicts and develop self-advocacy skills. Perhaps parents should scrap their volumes of Baby Mozart, cancel the extra tutoring session and allow children to do what they do best: play.

Because lawmakers and educators clearly aren’t taking up the cause, an organization known as Right To Play has become the unofficial flagbearer for playtime everywhere. With a presence in 23 countries, Right To Play uses games to cross ethnic, cultural, gender and linguistic barriers in order to enhance child development. Though you may scoff at these lofty goals, the results reported on the group’s website speak for themselves: according to a 40-year-old refugee from Benin, “For us parents, Right To Play is in fact a whole school. Right To Play complements what school does not give, what we parents are unable to give our children.”

According to school principals in Azerbaijan, student attendance increased 15 to 20 percent as a result of Right To Play programming. Furthermore, parents and teachers in Tanzania noted that children are more diplomatic and less violent after playing games and learning how to communicate. Perhaps American lawmakers and educators can learn from Tanzania, Benin and the rest of the Right To Play community: The skills learned when one is engaged in play may not be quantifiable — there is no “teamwork” section on the SAT. But the real-world applications of these skills, not to mention the resultant increase in productivity, cannot be ignored by those whose job it is to educate and better our nation’s children.

Adam persisted and I eventually played basketball. It took us thirty minutes of sports to learn what American lawmakers and educators still do not grasp: time away from work is not time wasted. The human brain cannot operate on all cylinders without time to recuperate. So, on behalf of the inner eight-year-old in all of us, put the work down, find a game of basketball and play.

Tyler Jones can be reached at tylerlj@umich.edu.