Learning and playing

Yesterday NPR’s Morning Edition ran an intriguing spot on education and play, pointing out that the kind of play that children used to do—unsupervised, highly imaginative, and structured by children themselves—has been replaced by time spent in parent-supervised activities and prefab ones like watching tv and playing video games. This is bad, the program suggested—children aren’t learning the capacity to self-regulate, for one. It even cited researchers who claim that this shift is one cause for the rise in ADHD diagnosis.

This seems spot-on to me. But get a load of NPR’s example of a curriculum that supposedly does teach children to self-regulate: Tools of the Mind. Its activities are highly structured and highly supervised. For example, children have to fill out paperwork describing games they want to play or making plans for what they want to do at recess—eek! Seems to me this misses the point altogether—among the crucial ways children learn is by getting to create their own structures. Creating your own game and even fighting out what the rules are is intellectually demanding, not to mention empowering. And it seems to me that becoming a self-controlled person later on in life means getting tastes of taking control early on, which is to say freedom and self-control are intertwined. Sure, there’s a definite place for fitting into a structure that already exists—take learning music, for example. But it seems to me that what NPR was getting at was the importance of do-it-yourself creative play, and that’s what kids today have lost.

I think the impulse toward freeing kids for this kind of learning is behind a remark an acquaintance made to me about her philosophy of parenting: “I studiously avoid teaching my child anything.” I presume she intended a certain irony here, but I’m not sure if she’s fully aware of how contradictory her position is. She advised against the conscious teaching of manners my partner and I are doing with our daughter—asking her to say please when she demands something, for example. Her daughter is perfectly polite for her age, but I can’t help assuming that’s because the mother teaches more than she lets on. She strongly shapes her daughter’s environment, for example by cutting her hair in a decidedly androgynous style and dressing her in boyish clothes (to resist the tendency to lock children into gender roles). She argues that she sees a difference between that and trying to shape her daughter directly—what she apparently means by “teaching.” I presume that she is motivated by a value I share—the impulse to cultivate her daughter’s freedom. Problem is, the freedom to do many things comes only through learning skills that are difficult to acquire unless you’re offered them, or even pushed into them, early. Obvious example: music. You’re not free to play the oboe unless you’ve learned how to do it, so if you want your children to have that freedom later you may well have to push them now to do what they don’t always want to do (like practice). And the discipline and even memorization involved in learning to play an instrument pave the way for later creativity.

All this makes me realize how much I mis-stated what I believe about education in an earlier post. I do believe parents and teachers have to take major responsibility for teaching, even though I also think effective education means calling forth the impulse to learn, not trying to pour information into the child. Live and learn.