When
I was a child in the 1950s, my friends and I had two educations. We had
school (which was not the big deal it is today), and we also had what I
call a hunter-gather education. We played in mixed-age neighborhood
groups almost every day after school, often until dark. We played all
weekend and all summer long. We had time to explore in all sorts of
ways, and also time to become bored and figure out how to overcome
boredom, time to get into trouble and find our way out of it, time to
daydream, time to immerse ourselves in hobbies, and time to read comics
and whatever else we wanted to read rather than the books assigned to
us. What I learnt in my hunter-gatherer education has been far more
valuable to my adult life than what I learnt in school, and I think
others in my age group would say the same if they took time to think
about it.
For more than 50 years now, we in the United States have
been gradually reducing children’s opportunities to play, and the same
is true in many other countries. In his book
Children at Play: An American History
(2007), Howard Chudacoff refers to the first half of the 20th century
as the ‘golden age’ of children’s free play. By about 1900, the need for
child labour had declined, so children had a good deal of free time.
But then, beginning around 1960 or a little before, adults began
chipping away at that freedom by increasing the time that children had
to spend at schoolwork and, even more significantly, by reducing
children’s freedom to play on their own, even when they were out of
school and not doing homework. Adult-directed sports for children began
to replace ‘pickup’ games; adult-directed classes out of school began to
replace hobbies; and parents’ fears led them, ever more, to forbid
children from going out to play with other kids, away from home,
unsupervised. There are lots of reasons for these changes but the
effect, over the decades, has been a continuous and ultimately dramatic
decline in children’s opportunities to play and explore in their own
chosen ways.
Over the same decades that children’s play has been
declining, childhood mental disorders have been increasing. It’s not
just that we’re seeing disorders that we overlooked before. Clinical
questionnaires aimed at assessing anxiety and depression, for example,
have been given in unchanged form to normative groups of schoolchildren
in the US ever since the 1950s. Analyses of the results reveal a
continuous, essentially linear, increase in anxiety and depression in
young people over the decades, such that the rates of what today would
be diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder and major depression are
five to eight times what they were in the 1950s. Over the same period,
the suicide rate for young people aged 15 to 24 has more than doubled,
and that for children under age 15 has quadrupled.
The decline in
opportunity to play has also been accompanied by a decline in empathy
and a rise in narcissism, both of which have been assessed since the
late 1970s with standard questionnaires given to normative samples of
college students. Empathy refers to the ability and tendency to see from
another person’s point of view and experience what that person
experiences. Narcissism refers to inflated self-regard, coupled with a
lack of concern for others and an inability to connect emotionally with
others. A decline of empathy and a rise in narcissism are exactly what
we would expect to see in children who have little opportunity to play
socially. Children can’t learn these social skills and values in school,
because school is an authoritarian, not a democratic setting. School
fosters competition, not co-operation; and children there are not free
to quit when others fail to respect their needs and wishes.
In my book,
Free to Learn
(2013), I document these changes, and argue that the rise in mental
disorders among children is largely the result of the decline in
children’s freedom. If we love our children and want them to thrive, we
must allow them more time and opportunity to play, not less. Yet
policymakers and powerful philanthropists are continuing to push us in
the opposite direction — toward more schooling, more testing, more adult
direction of children, and less opportunity for free play.
I
recently took part in a radio debate with a woman representing an
organisation called the National Center on Time and Learning, which
campaigns for a longer school day and school year for schoolchildren in
the US (a recording of the debate can be found
here).
Her thesis — consistent with her organisation’s purpose and the urgings
of President Barack Obama and the Education Secretary Arne Duncan — was
that children need more time in school than currently required, to
prepare them for today’s and tomorrow’s competitive world. I argued the
opposite. The host introduced the debate with the words: ‘Do students
need more time to learn, or do students need more time to play?’
Learning
versus playing. That dichotomy seems natural to people such as my radio
host, my debate opponent, my President, my Education Secretary — and
maybe you. Learning, according to that almost automatic view, is what
children do in school and, maybe, in other adult-directed activities.
Playing is, at best, a refreshing break from learning. From that view,
summer vacation is just a long recess, perhaps longer than necessary.
But here’s an alternative view, which should be obvious but apparently
is not: playing is learning. At play, children learn the most important
of life’s lessons, the ones that cannot be taught in school. To learn
these lessons well, children need lots of play — lots and lots of it,
without interference from adults.
I’m an evolutionary
psychologist, which means I’m interested in human nature, its
relationship to the nature of other animals, and how that nature was
shaped by natural selection. My special interest is play.
The
young of all mammals play. Why? Why do they waste energy and risk life
and limb playing, when they could just rest, tucked away safely in a
burrow somewhere? That’s the kind of question that evolutionary
psychologists ask. The first person to address that particular question
from a Darwinian, evolutionary perspective was the German philosopher
and naturalist Karl Groos. In a book called
The Play of Animals
(1898), Groos argued that play came about by natural selection as a
means to ensure that animals would practise the skills they need in
order to survive and reproduce.
This so-called ‘practice theory of
play’ is well-accepted today by researchers. It explains why young
animals play more than older ones (they have more to learn) and why
those animals that depend least on rigid instincts for survival, and
most on learning, play the most. To a considerable degree, you can
predict how an animal will play by knowing what skills it must develop
in order to survive and reproduce. Lion cubs and other young predators
play at stalking and pouncing or chasing, while zebra colts and other
prey species play at fleeing and dodging.
Groos followed
The Play of Animals with a second book,
The Play of Man
(1901), in which he extended his insights about animal play to humans.
He pointed out that humans, having much more to learn than other
species, are the most playful of all animals. Human children, unlike the
young of other species, must learn different skills depending on the
culture in which they are developing. Therefore, he argued, natural
selection in humans favoured a strong drive for children to observe the
activities of their elders and incorporate those activities into their
play. He suggested that children in every culture, when allowed to play
freely, play not only at the skills that are valuable to people
everywhere (such as two-legged walking and running), but also at the
skills that are specific to their culture (such as shooting bows and
arrows or herding cattle).
My own research and ideas build on
Groos’s pioneering work. One branch of that research has been to examine
children’s lives in hunter-gatherer cultures. Prior to the development
of agriculture, a mere 10,000 years ago or so, we were all
hunter-gatherers. Some groups of people managed to survive as
hunter-gatherers into recent times and have been studied by
anthropologists. I have read all the writings I could find on
hunter-gatherer childhoods, and a number of years ago I conducted a
small survey of 10 anthropologists who, among them, had lived in seven
different hunter-gatherer cultures on three different continents.
Hunter-gatherers
have nothing akin to school. Adults believe that children learn by
observing, exploring, and playing, and so they afford them unlimited
time to do that. In response to my survey question, ‘How much time did
children in the culture you observed have for play?’, the
anthropologists unanimously said that the children were free to play
nearly all of their waking hours, from the age of about four (when they
were deemed responsible enough to go off, away from adults, with an
age-mixed group of children) into their mid- or even late-teenage years
(when they would begin, on their own initiatives, to take on some adult
responsibilities).
For example, Karen Endicott, who studied the Batek
hunter-gatherers of Malaysia, reported: ‘Children were free to play
nearly all the time; no one expected children to do serious work until
they were in their late teens.’
This is very much in line with
Groos’s theory about play as practice. The boys played endlessly at
tracking and hunting, and both boys and girls played at finding and
digging up edible roots. They played at tree climbing, cooking, building
huts, and building other artefacts crucial to their culture, such as
dugout canoes. They played at arguing and debating, sometimes mimicking
their elders or trying to see if they could reason things out better
than the adults had the night before around the fire. They playfully
danced the traditional dances of their culture and sang the traditional
songs, but they also made up new ones. They made and played musical
instruments similar to those that adults in their group made. Even
little children played with dangerous things, such as knives and fire,
and the adults let them do it, because ‘How else will they learn to use
these things?’ They did all this, and more, not because any adult
required or even encouraged them to, but because they wanted to. They
did it because it was fun and because something deep inside them, the
result of aeons of natural selection, urged them to play at culturally
appropriate activities so they would become skilled and knowledgeable
adults.
In another branch of my research I’ve studied how children
learn at a radically alternative school, the Sudbury Valley School, not
far from my home in Massachusetts. It’s called a school, but is as
different from what we normally think of as ‘school’ as you can imagine.
The students — who range in age from four to about 19 — are free all
day to do whatever they want, as long as they don’t break any of the
school rules. The rules have nothing to do with learning; they have to
do with keeping peace and order.
To most people, this sounds
crazy. How can they learn anything? Yet, the school has been in
existence for 45 years now and has many hundreds of graduates, who are
doing just fine in the real world, not because their school taught them
anything, but because it allowed them to learn whatever they wanted.
And, in line with Groos’s theory, what children in our culture want to
learn when they are free turns out to be skills that are valued in our
culture and that lead to good jobs and satisfying lives. When they play,
these students learn to read, calculate, and use computers with the
same playful passion with which hunter-gatherer kids learn to hunt and
gather. They don’t necessarily think of themselves as learning. They
think of themselves as just playing, or ‘doing things’, but in the
process they
are learning.
Even more important than
specific skills are the attitudes that they learn. They learn to take
responsibility for themselves and their community, and they learn that
life is fun, even (maybe especially) when it involves doing things that
are difficult. I should add that this is not an expensive school; it
operates on less than half as much, per student, as the local state
schools and far less than most private schools.
The Sudbury Valley
School and a hunter-gatherer band are very different from one another
in many ways, but they are similar in providing what I see as the
essential conditions for optimising children’s natural abilities to
educate themselves. They share the social expectation (and reality) that
education is children’s responsibility, not something that adults do to
them, and they provide unlimited freedom for children to play, explore,
and pursue their own interests. They also provide ample opportunities
to play with the tools of the culture; access to a variety of caring and
knowledgeable adults, who are helpers, not judges; and free age-mixing
among children and adolescents (age-mixed play is more conducive to
learning than play among those who are all at the same level). Finally,
in both settings, children are immersed in a stable, moral community, so
they acquire the values of the community and a sense of responsibility
for others, not just for themselves.
I don’t expect to convince
most people, any time soon, that we should abolish schools as we know
them today and replace them with centres for self-directed play and
exploration. But I do think there is a chance of convincing most people
that play outside of school is important. We have already taken too much
of that away; we must not take away any more.
President
Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, along with other
campaigners for more conventional schooling and more tests, want
children to be better prepared for today’s and tomorrow’s world. But
what preparation is needed? Do we need more people who are good at
memorising answers to questions and feeding them back? Who dutifully do
what they are told, no questions asked? Schools were designed to teach
people to do those things, and they are pretty good at it. Or do we need
more people who ask new questions and find new answers, think
critically and creatively, innovate and take initiative, and know how to
learn on the job, under their own steam? I bet Obama and Duncan would
agree that all children need these skills today more than in the past.
But schools are terrible at teaching these skills.
For more than
two decades now, education leaders in the US, the UK and Australia have
been urging us to emulate Asian schools — especially those of Japan,
China, and South Korea. Children there spend more time at their studies
than US children, and they score higher on standardised international
tests. What US Education Secretary Duncan apparently doesn’t realise, or
acknowledge, is that educational leaders in those countries are now
increasingly judging their educational system to be a failure. While
their schools have been great at getting students to score well on
tests, they have been terrible at producing graduates who are creative
or have a real zest for learning.
In an article entitled ‘The Test Chinese Schools Still Fail’ in
The Wall Street Journal
in December 2010, Jiang Xueqin, a prominent Chinese educator, wrote:
‘The failings of a rote-memorisation system are well known: lack of
social and practical skills, absence of self-discipline and imagination,
loss of curiosity and passion for learning…. One way we’ll know we’re
succeeding in changing China’s schools is when those scores [on
standardised tests] come down.’ Meanwhile, Yong Zhao, an American
education professor who grew up in China and specialises in comparing
the Chinese educational system with the system in the US, notes that a
common term used in China to refer to graduates is
gaofen dineng,
meaning ‘high scores but low ability’. Because students spend nearly
all their time studying, they have little opportunity to be creative,
take initiative, or develop physical and social skills: in short, they
have little opportunity to play.
Unfortunately, as we move
increasingly toward standardised curricula, and as we occupy ever more
of our children’s time with schoolwork, our educational results indeed
are becoming more like those of the Asian countries. One line of
evidence comes from the results of a battery of measures of creativity —
called the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) — collected from
normative samples of US schoolchildren in kindergarten through to 12th
grade (age 17-18) over several decades. Kyung-Hee Kim, an educational
psychologist at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, has
analysed those scores and reported that they began to decline in 1984 or
shortly after, and have continued to decline ever since.
As Kim puts it
in her article ‘The Creativity Crisis’, published in 2011 in the
Creativity Research Journal,
the data indicate that ‘children have become less emotionally
expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less
humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and
passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant
things, less synthesising, and less likely to see things from a
different angle’.
According to Kim’s research, all aspects of
creativity have declined, but the biggest decline is in the measure
called ‘creative elaboration’, which assesses the ability to take a
particular idea and expand on it in an interesting and novel way.
Between 1984 and 2008, the average elaboration score on the TTCT, for
every grade from kindergarten onwards, fell by more than one standard
deviation. Stated differently, this means that more than 85 per cent of
children in 2008 scored lower on this measure than did the average child
in 1984.
If education ‘reformers’ get their way, it will decline
further still as children are deprived even more of play. Other
research, by the psychologist Mark Runco and colleagues at the Torrance
Creativity Center at the University of Georgia, shows that scores on the
TTCT are the best childhood predictors we have of future real-world
achievements. They are better predictors than IQ, high-school grades, or
peer judgments of who will achieve the most.
You can’t teach
creativity; all you can do is let it blossom. Little children, before
they start school, are naturally creative. Our greatest innovators, the
ones we call geniuses, are those who somehow retain that childhood
capacity, and build on it, right through adulthood. Albert Einstein, who
apparently hated school, referred to his achievements in theoretical
physics and mathematics as ‘combinatorial play’. A great deal of
research has shown that people are most creative when infused by the
spirit of play, when they see themselves as engaged in a task just for
fun. As the psychologist Teresa Amabile, professor at Harvard Business
School, has shown in her book
Creativity in Context (1996) and
in many experiments, the attempt to increase creativity by rewarding
people for it or by putting them into contests to see who is most
creative has the opposite effect. It’s hard to be creative when you are
worried about other people’s judgments. In school, children’s activities
are constantly being judged. School is a good place for learning to do
just what someone else wants you to do; it’s a terrible place for
practising creativity.
When Chanoff and I studied Sudbury Valley
graduates for our paper ‘Democratic Schooling: What Happens to Young
People Who Have Charge of Their Own Education?’, we asked about the
activities they had played as students and about the careers they were
pursuing since graduation. In many cases, there was a direct
relationship between the two. Graduates were continuing to play the
activities they had loved as students, with the same joy, passion, and
creativity, but now they were making a living at it. There were
professional musicians who had played intensively with music when they
were students, and computer programmers who had spent most of their time
as students playing with computers. One woman, who was the captain of a
cruise ship, had spent much of her time as a student playing on the
water, first with toy boats and then with real ones. A man who was a
sought-after machinist and inventor had spent his childhood playfully
building things and taking things apart to see how they worked.
None
of these people would have discovered their passions in a standard
school, where extensive, free play does not occur. In a standard school,
everyone has to do the same things as everyone else. Even those who do
develop an interest in something taught in school learn to tame it
because, when the bell rings, they have to move on to something else.
The curriculum and timetable constrain them from pursuing any interest
in a creative and personally meaningful way. Years ago, children had
time outside of school to pursue interests, but today they are so busy
with schoolwork and other adult-directed activities that they rarely
have time and opportunity to discover and immerse themselves deeply in
activities they truly enjoy.
To have a happy
marriage, or good friends, or helpful work partners, we need to know how
to get along with other people: perhaps the most essential skill all
children must learn for a satisfying life. In hunter-gatherer bands, at
Sudbury Valley School, and everywhere that children have regular access
to other children, most play is social play. Social play is the academy
for learning social skills.
The reason why play is such a powerful
way to impart social skills is that it is voluntary. Players are always
free to quit, and if they are unhappy they will quit. Every player
knows that, and so the goal, for every player who wants to keep the game
going, is to satisfy his or her own needs and desires while also
satisfying those of the other players, so they don’t quit. Social play
involves lots of negotiation and compromise. If bossy Betty tries to
make all the rules and tell her playmates what to do without paying
attention to their wishes, her playmates will quit and leave her alone,
starting their own game elsewhere. That’s a powerful incentive for her
to pay more attention to them next time. The playmates who quit might
have learnt a lesson, too. If they want to play with Betty, who has some
qualities they like, they will have to speak up more clearly next time,
to make their desires plain, so she won’t try to run the show and ruin
their fun. To have fun in social play you have to be assertive but not
domineering; that’s true for all of social life.
Watch any group
of children in play and you will see lots of negotiation and compromise.
Preschoolers playing a game of ‘house’ spend more time figuring out how
to play than actually playing. Everything has to be negotiated — who
gets to be the mommy and who has to be the baby, who gets to use which
props, and how the drama will unfold. The skilled players use tag
questions to turn their assertions into requests: ‘Let’s pretend that
the necklace is mine. OK?’
If it’s not OK, a discussion ensues.
Or
watch an age-mixed group of children playing a ‘pickup’ game of
baseball. A pickup game is play, because it’s directed by the players
themselves, not by outside authorities (coaches and umpires) as a Little
League game would be. The players have to choose sides, negotiate rules
to fit the conditions, decide what’s fair and foul. They have to
co-operate not just with the players on their team, but also with those
on the other team, and they have to be sensitive to the needs and
abilities of all the players. Big Billy might be the best pitcher, but
if others want a turn at pitching he’d better let them have it, so they
don’t quit. And when he pitches to tiny Timmy, who is just learning the
game, he’d better toss the ball gently, right toward Timmy’s bat, or
even his own teammates will call him mean. When he pitches to walloping
Wally, however, he’d better throw his best stuff, because Wally would
feel insulted by anything less. In the pickup game, keeping the game
going and fun for everyone is far more important than winning.
The
golden rule of social play is not ‘Do unto others as you would have
them do unto you.’ Rather, it’s something much more difficult: ‘Do unto
others as
they would have you do unto
them.’ To do
that, you have to get into other people’s minds and see from their
points of view. Children practise that all the time in social play. The
equality of play is not the equality of sameness. Rather, it is the
equality that comes from respecting individual differences and treating
each person’s needs and wishes as equally important. That’s also, I
think, the best interpretation of Thomas Jefferson’s line that all men
are created equal. We’re not all equally strong, equally quick-witted,
equally healthy; but we are all equally worthy of respect and of having
our needs met.
I don’t want to over-idealise children. Not all
children learn these lessons easily; bullies exist. But social play is
by far the most effective venue for learning such lessons, and I suspect
that children’s strong drive for such play came about, in evolution,
primarily for that purpose. Anthropologists report an almost complete
lack of bullying or domineering behaviour in hunter-gatherer bands. In
fact, another label regularly used for such band societies is
egalitarian societies.
The bands have no chiefs, no hierarchical structure of authority; they
share everything and co-operate intensively in order to survive; and
they make decisions that affect the whole band through long discussions
aimed at consensus. A major reason why they are able to do all that, I
think, lies in the extraordinary amount of social play that they enjoy
in childhood. The skills and values practised in such play are precisely
those that are essential to life in a hunter-gatherer band. Today you
might survive without those skills and values, but, I think, not
happily.
So, play teaches social skills without which life would
be miserable. But it also teaches how to manage intense, negative
emotions such as fear and anger. Researchers who study animal play argue
that one of play’s major purposes is to help the young learn how to
cope emotionally (as well as physically) with emergencies. Juvenile
mammals of many species deliberately and repeatedly put themselves into
moderately dangerous, moderately frightening situations in their play.
Depending on the species, they might leap awkwardly into the air making
it difficult to land, run along the edges of cliffs, swing from tree
branch to tree branch high enough that a fall would hurt, or play-fight
in such a way that they take turns getting into vulnerable positions
from which they must then escape.
Human children, when free, do
the same thing, which makes their mothers nervous. They are dosing
themselves with fear, aimed at reaching the highest level they can
tolerate, and learning to cope with it. Such play must always be
self-directed, never forced or even encouraged by an authority figure.
It’s cruel to force children to experience fears they aren’t ready for,
as gym teachers do when they require all children in a class to climb
ropes to the rafters or swing from one stand to another. In those cases
the results can be panic, embarrassment, and shame, which reduce rather
than increase future tolerance for fear.
Children also experience
anger in their play. Anger can arise from an accidental or deliberate
push, or a tease, or from failure to get one’s way in a dispute. But
children who want to continue playing know they have to control that
anger, use it constructively in self-assertion, and not lash out.
Tantrums might work with parents, but they never work with playmates.
There is evidence that the young of other species also learn to regulate
their anger and aggressiveness through social play.
In school,
and in other settings where adults are in charge, they make decisions
for children and solve children’s problems. In play, children make their
own decisions and solve their own problems. In adult-directed settings,
children are weak and vulnerable. In play, they are strong and
powerful. The play world is the child’s practice world for being an
adult. We think of play as childish, but to the child, play is the
experience of being like an adult: being self-controlled and
responsible. To the degree that we take away play, we deprive children
of the ability to practise adulthood, and we create people who will go
through life with a sense of dependence and victimisation, a sense that
there is some authority out there who is supposed to tell them what to
do and solve their problems. That is not a healthy way to live.
Researchers
have developed ways to raise young rats and monkeys in such a way that
they experience other forms of social interaction but not play. The
result is that the play-deprived animals are emotionally crippled when
tested as young adults. When placed in a moderately frightening novel
environment, they freeze in terror and fail to overcome that fear and
explore the novel area, as a normal rat or monkey would do. When placed
with an unfamiliar peer they might cower in fear or lash out with
inappropriate and ineffective aggression, or both.
In recent
decades we as a society have been conducting a play-deprivation
experiment with our children. Today’s children are not absolutely
deprived of play as the rats and monkeys are in the animal experiments,
but they are much more deprived than children were 60 years ago and
much, much more than children were in hunter-gatherer societies. The
results, I think, are in. Play deprivation is bad for children. Among
other things, it promotes anxiety, depression, suicide, narcissism, and
loss of creativity.
It’s time to end the experiment.
Peter
Gray is a psychologist and research professor at Boston College. He
writes the Freedom to Learn blog, and is the author of Free to Learn
(2013) and Psychology
(2011).
This post originally appeared on Aeon
and was published June 5, 2018.