Many other teachers feel the same. But public policy is against them, and they feel forced out of their field. Teaching requires great love, wisdom, and patience. It takes time to discover the best in each child, and then to draw it out. What happens when teachers are robbed of this precious time? When will they get the chance to build a relationship with each child through simple interaction and play, which is when the best teaching moments actually occur?
In Australia, educator Maggie Dent speaks out boldly in defense of play:
Unstructured, child-centered play has enormous benefits for young children, and those benefits cannot be tested by benchmark testing. Our capacity to be creative thinkers and innovative problem-solvers comes from using our own mental processing to explore the world. How much do we need to value creative thinking, given the speed of change sweeping our modern world? There are no answers in textbooks about how to manage unexpected change, and this is why we are disabling our children by stealing their capacity to use play to learn, to explore, to question, and to solve problems without an adult’s assistance. They are biologically wired to learn from their experiences, provided those experiences are engaging and interesting.4
Every year children are further pressured to do “too much, too soon.” But it’s inspiring to hear stories of educators who bend or even break the rules for the sake of children. Dr. Sherone Smith-Sanchez, an educational administrator in New York City, shares her story:
My husband and I flatly refused to let our son sit for the New York State tests. We chose to opt out when he was in third grade, and again this year for fourth grade. As educators, we’re convinced that he is too young to understand the concept of testing for what a child doesn’t know at the beginning of the year, then testing at the end to verify what he has or has not managed to memorize.
Testing at such a young age does not synchronize with our aims for our son to become a critical thinker and a life-long learner. We know that children learn by association and hands-on action. We also know that if the pinnacle of his third or fourth grade educational experience is a test, then our son will go through anxiety whenever he’s expected to share his knowledge in the future. We decided not to support this injustice to his age. We have shared our simple protest with others, and continue to encourage other parents and educators to speak up.
Madeleine, a mom from suburban Connecticut, tells of her search for a child-friendly alternative:
In the end, several of us young families banded together to create our own kindergarten, so we could postpone academics, at least until first grade, spending lots of time outdoors “learning with our hands.” The best part of our little school is its location in a senior care center, where our children interact daily with the elderly, hearing their fascinating stories, becoming reading and lunch buddies, playing bat-the-balloon with the residents in the Alzheimer’s wing.
Instead of learning their ABCs by memorizing a wall chart, they learn it by playing bingo with eighty-year-olds. They may not yet be as advanced in their studies as their public school counterparts, but we parents are not worried. The kids are bubbling with curiosity, excited to soak up new ideas, and ready to pick up “reading, writing, and arithmetic” as they apply to the experience at hand.
I watch my five-year-old daughter having a conversation with a grandmother who can now only speak with her eyes and her smiles. She’s bent and wrinkled, she needs a wheelchair, and she’s as full of life as the preschooler at her elbow. Across the room, there’s the grandpa who says anything that comes into his head. Not once have I heard a sentence that I can put into any context of sense. The little boy who’s chatting with him obviously has no such hang-up. They have been talking for ten minutes.
These children have been given a great gift. No longer afraid of age and disability, they receive as much as they give through these intergenerational interactions – and, without knowing it, are helping to mend the torn social fabric. For millennia, children have sat at the feet of the village elders to learn about life. Then, they would run off and play with whatever they could find to interest them. That, too, is learning.
In Finland and several other European countries, children only start academic instruction at age seven. These students have the lowest number of classroom hours in the developed world, yet they consistently score at the top of world education rankings by the end of their public school years. In these countries, it is simply understood that until age seven, children learn best when they’re playing; by the time they finally get to school, they are eager to learn in a more formal setting. There is also greater public respect for teachers than in the United States, and correspondingly higher pay.5
There is profound truth in Plato’s thought: “What is honored in a country is cultivated there.” What is really honored in our country? Is it the forming of children’s hearts and minds? Or is it career readiness?
In The Education of Man, Froebel writes:
Protect the new generation; do not let them grow up into emptiness and nothingness, to the avoidance of good hard work, to introspection and analysis without deeds, or to mechanical actions without thought and consideration. Guide them away from the harmful chase after outer things and the damaging passion for distraction. . . . I would educate human beings who with their feet stand rooted in God’s earth, whose heads reach even into heaven and there behold truth, in whose hearts are united both earth and heaven.6
Every child is different. Each has a unique set of abilities, created for a special purpose. So why force a common educational standard on them? We know children learn best through playing, but play also brings joy, contentment, and detachment from the troubles of the day. In our frantically over-scheduled culture, every child should have a right to play.
Chapter 3
Great Expectations
I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
Henry David Thoreau
In a magazine piece I read about a Kenyan school that holds its classes in a shady grove outdoors, the headmaster, who had helped plant the trees as a child, recalled an African saying: “When you plant a tree, never plant only one. Plant three – one for shade, one for fruit, and one for beauty.” On a continent where heat and drought make every tree valuable, that’s wise advice.
It’s also an intriguing educational insight for a time like ours, when vast numbers of children are endangered by a one-sided parental approach that sees them solely in terms of their ability to be fruitful – that is, to “achieve” and “succeed.” This pressure is destroying childhood as never before. Child therapist Katie Hurley writes:
Academic pressure is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to fast-tracking childhood. Yes, learning is accelerated across the board, but so is childhood in general. We’ve experienced a gradual cultural shift in this country, and it’s becoming more and more prevalent with each passing year.
It’s true that young children are more likely to face intense academic pressure right now, but they are also overloaded with extracurricular activities. They play competitive sports (sometimes two sports during each “season”), they take the best music and art classes available, they join community-based programs and they fill their weekends with play dates and parties.
Children are losing childhood because they aren’t given the gift of time to play. That cultural shift – the intense need to raise competent, successful people – don’t we all bear some responsibility for it? As a country, we need to wake up to the increased stress levels among children and learn how to dial it back. If we want to raise happy kids, we need to start by taking back childhood.1
Naturally, parents have always wanted their children to do well, both academically and socially. No one wants their child to be the slowest in the class, the last to be picked for a game on the field. But what is it about the culture we live in that has made that natural worry into such an obsessive fear, and what is it doing to our children? For many, the trend toward fast-track academics makes school a place that they dread, a source of misery they cannot escape for months at a time.