Why Play?

Introduction

There is a small band of nurses gathered around a hospital bed. They speak reassuringly to the mother as she focuses on her breathing. The woman is in labor and when the doctor comes in, it’s time to begin the delivery. The baby is born healthy, no complications, and as those who took part in this special moment look down at this gift of life in their arms, they see a world of potential. This potential will be guided, shaped, and refined until the baby, now old, dies. From the moment that the child is born, they have begun a lifelong journey of learning.

      It is largely agreed that when babies are born, they are blank slates, much like the painter’s canvas. From the moment they leave the womb, they are met with a series of stimuli that they have no ability to comprehend or make sense of. The first months of a baby’s life, then, is dedicated to learning how to interpret the signals their brains are receiving. They slowly understand that the blobs they see are not just blobs, but faces and objects. The sounds they hear are not just random noises, but words.

      Once a child has learned to make sense of these senses, their learning takes the shape of mimicry. They copy the sounds they hear, reflect the faces that others make at them, and imitate the actions of those around them. This act of mimicry is a method that will be used throughout the rest of the child’s life. In uncertain situations, they will mimic behavior of those around them. When learning new skills, they will watch another perform them and try to do as that person did. But in order to mimic, a child needs a safe space to perform the same behaviors that they are observing and test the knowledge they are trying to receive. This is where children begin to play with others as a way to practice the knowledge they are obtaining, and is the start of children engaging in imaginative play.

Stages of Play

Imaginative Play

When children first begin to play with one another, they typically stick to very simplistic measures such as “we’re superheroes and beating up the bad guys.” And it stays as simple as that. They have their “powers” and use them to beat up the imaginary foes around them until they decide the game is won. This might also be something they do by themselves, where they might pretend they are a mother taking care of a baby doll. Imaginative play is crucial in a child developing an understanding of how an individual accepts and performs their role in society.

Role Playing

Role playing is perhaps the most crucial of all forms of play that a child can engage in. This is the stage where they are not only engaging in imaginative play, but they are putting it to the test with others. In this stage of play, a child learns how to engage with the children around them, how their chosen role interacts with society, how their actions can influence the events around them, how to compromise, and so much more. Much of a child’s morality is also developed through their imaginative play. They develop the ability to read other’s emotions and know how to react and respond to them. They can safely explore consequences of actions by imagining how one bad action might affect another.

      As a child, the most vivid of all my play memories was a game a friend and I played at recess. This game developed into a story and took multiple days for us to get through. We began as alien hunters, roaming around on the moon, occasionally using the swings as our spaceships, trying to find and defeat the alien queen. When at last we reached what we decided would be the end of the game, it was revealed that the entire time I was the alien queen and was actually evil. But throughout this time, my character had developed a friendship with the hero, and, as good must always win in the end, he killed me to save the universe. But even in our seven-year-old minds, we knew that such a choice would be devastating to the one who had to do it and his character was grieved by the ending before we called the game done.

Team Playing

As children age, they no longer want to sit around playing school or house with one another. By the time a child reaches teenagerhood, their forms of playing become much more sophisticated and less obvious. Having already created a concept of what various roles of society do, children now seek to find their own identity within the culture. This means that their play is based more on conversation, discussion, and putting themselves into working positions. For a teenager, playing means having joined a club, sport, organization, or friend group with which they can interact. They have at this point developed specific interests and may get into hobbies such as crafting, sports, or being in the outdoors. Some may even get jobs, or perhaps double down on their studies.

What does this have to do with academic learning?

There are multiple levels of mastery and understanding when learning in academia. This ranges from memorization where a definition or formula can be restated word for word, to understanding, where a concept can be rephrased in new ways, to application and recall in all environments. This final level of mastery is the level that promotes the most retention, demonstrates the greatest understanding, and creates the ability to make the information useful to an individual. One of the most common complaints about modern curriculum is that children are required to learn information that they are never going to use in their day to day lives. Part of this is because while children learn basic concepts, this final step of information mastery is often disregarded in public education systems. Even adults fail to see the value and applications of the information studied.

      This is not to say that everything learned in a public education system is of worth to every person. Someone whose goal is to become an engineer need not spend all their time in English courses, and someone who anticipates being an artist need not learn calculus. But there is value in the education received by others that should be taken into account. For example, if you are not going to be an engineer or someone working with shapes, why is it important that you take geometry? Let’s say that you are at a dining establishment and you want a large pizza. This isn’t one of those places where they make the pizzas on demand, but rather, they have them already made and when they run out of stock, they run out of stock. You order a large pizza and are charged for it, only to have the cashier realize that they are out of their large pizzas and only have the medium available. He gives you two medium pizzas to make up for it. At first you may be thinking, “Sweet! Extra pizza!” but in reality, you are being duped. Calculating the area of a circle, you can see that two medium pizzas does not have the same area as a large pizza. Had you paid attention in geometry, you would not have been taken advantage of and lost money. Knowledge is security and power. Many school programs, especially in English courses, are designed to teach critical thinking skills. Yet, these are never explained to the children learning them, the parents who are trying to help convince their kids to do well, or sometimes even the teachers who are required to teach it.

      Instead of sitting at a desk and doing worksheets or writing papers, imagine that you learn geometry while you are engaging in skill learning. Trying to fit together a car engine, so you have to calculate how big a dowel needs to be, or playing a sport and needing to calculate the angle of the ball to get it in the goal. This not only creates a fun environment that makes students more engaged in their studies, but gives them adaptive applications for their knowledge, the ability to think critically, and understand how to combine concepts of learning to achieve a result. This also allows for children to be active, getting rid of excess energy, promoting healthier bodies, and teaching children how to focus for more sustained periods of time. After leaving school, our children would be equipped with applicable skills to enter the work force and contribute in meaningful ways.

      Activities, of course, should be geared towards children of varying age groups. A kindergartener would not be building a car the way that a high school senior would. Likewise, a high school senior would be bored if they were gathered into groups to do physical activities for learning basic addition and subtraction.