The Importance of Play in Education

Interior of the 1855 one room schoolhouse in Eldred Township, Monroe County Pennsylvania

Many of you probably don't know this but I moonlight as a history podcast creator. That's right, in my spare time (ha!) I research, write, and record a weekly podcast called History Fix that's all about lesser known and often misunderstood stories from history. Recently, I put out an episode about the history of education. Education is obviously a topic that is near and dear to my heart so I was excited to delve into this one. But honestly, I was a bit surprised at what I uncovered. Listen to the full podcast episode below or read about key takeaways underneath that:

One of the key unexpected takeaways from this episode was the importance of play in a child's education. Despite forcing rote memorization and tedious mundane tasks on them constantly in schools, children learn best through play and they literally always have. While researching for the episode, I stumbled upon an article written by psychologist and Boston College professor, Peter Gray. In this article, Gray traces the history of education all the way back to the very beginning of humans as hunter gatherers. He says "In relation to the biological history of our species, schools are very recent institutions. For hundreds of thousands of years, before the advent of agriculture, we lived as hunter-gatherers. Elsewhere I have summarized the evidence from anthropology that children in hunter-gatherer cultures learned what they needed to know to become effective adults through their own play and exploration (Gray, 2012). The strong drives in children to play and explore presumably came about, during our evolution as hunter-gatherers, to serve the needs of education. Adults in hunter-gatherer cultures allowed children almost unlimited freedom to play and explore on their own because they recognized that those activities are children's natural ways of learning."

So what happened? Why are schools today so very averse to play if play is a child's natural way of learning? Gray has an answer for that too. He writes "The hunter-gatherer way of life had been skill-intensive and knowledge-intensive, but not labor-intensive. To be effective hunters and gatherers, people had to acquire a vast knowledge of the plants and animals on which they depended and of the landscapes within which they foraged. They also had to develop great skill in crafting and using the tools of hunting and gathering. They had to be able to take initiative and be creative in finding foods and tracking game. However, they did not have to work long hours; and the work they did was exciting, not dreary. Anthropologists have reported that the hunter-gatherer groups they studied did not distinguish between work and play—essentially all of life was understood as play."

"Agriculture gradually changed all that. With agriculture, people could produce more food, which allowed them to have more children. Agriculture also allowed people (or forced people) to live in permanent dwellings, where their crops were planted, rather than live a nomadic life, and this in turn allowed people to accumulate property. But these changes occurred at a great cost in labor. While hunter-gatherers skillfully harvested what nature had grown, farmers had to plow, plant, cultivate, tend their flocks, and so on. Successful farming required long hours of relatively unskilled, repetitive labor, much of which could be done by children. With larger families, children had to work in the fields to help feed their younger siblings, or they had to work at home to help care for those siblings. Children's lives changed gradually from the free pursuit of their own interests to increasingly more time spent at work that was required to serve the rest of the family."

Agriculture - the Agricultural Revolution - first delineated a stark contrast between work and play. Later, industry would do the same. Young children were needed to work in factories completing menial tasks and schools were used as a way to train children to take orders, follow directions, and complete mind numbingly boring tasks without complaint. Gray says "Employers in industry saw schooling as a means to create better workers. To them, the most crucial lessons were punctuality, following directions, tolerance for long hours of tedious work, and a minimal ability to read and write. From their point of view (though they may not have put it this way), the duller the subjects taught in schools the better."

Incorporating play in the classroom isn't as hard as you think. It's as easy as swapping out a math worksheet for a math game, or a science reading passage for a hands on experiment or STEM activity. Ditch the textbooks and try incorporating project based learning into your instruction repertoire.

Gray concludes "In sum, for several thousand years after the advent of agriculture, the education of children was, to a considerable degree, a matter of quashing their willfulness to make them obedient laborers. A good child was an obedient child, who suppressed his or her urge to play and explore and dutifully carried out the orders of adult masters. Such education, fortunately, was never fully successful. The human instincts to play and explore are so powerful they can never be fully beaten out of a child. But the philosophy of education throughout that period, to the degree that it could be articulated, was the opposite of the philosophy that hunter-gatherers had held for hundreds of thousands of years earlier… School today is the place where all children learn the distinction that hunter-gatherers never knew—the distinction between work and play. The teacher says, 'you must do your work and then you can play.' Clearly, according to this message, work, which encompasses all of school learning, is something that one does not want to do but must; and play, which is everything that one wants to do, has relatively little value. That, perhaps, is the leading lesson of our method of schooling. If children learn nothing else in school, they learn the difference between work and play and that learning is work, not play. Will we ever wake up and overcome this terrible history?"

I sincerely hope so!