Reinventing the 21st Century child: Whatever happened to play?

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, H. Rodney Sharp Professor of Education at the University of Delaware: “Play has unfortunately become a four-letter word when the truth is that play equals learning.”

4:08 p.m., Aug. 17, 2005--The quest for intellectual excellence through rigorous tutoring and testing routines has eroded the value of creativity and play to children and compromised America’s future, two authors argue in a new book, Einstein Never Used Flash Cards: How Our Children Really Learn and Why they Need to Play More and Memorize Less.

The coauthors, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, H. Rodney Sharp Professor of Education at the University of Delaware, and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, professor of psychology at Temple University, argue that preschools and kindergartens are like hothouses for children struggling to master intellectual tasks inappropriate for their age.

Here UDaily previews key questions and answers about the subject with Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek.

Q. What are some of the significant changes in how children learn and play?

A. Recess has been removed from 40 percent of American schools leaving more room for structured learning. Our best and brightest are arriving at college feeling “burned out.” Why? We suffer from “manic compression,” the curse of our time, constantly running faster to stay in place. Feeling that every moment must count, we use electronic gadgetry from cell phones to beepers to Blackberrys, working harder to make less. While manic compression is not healthy for adults, it is even worse for children.

Q. Besides technological advances, what has fueled the changes?

A. Rushing to create a generation of Einsteins, we paradoxically deprive children of experiences that build ingenuity and inventiveness. In the frenzy to fill children with facts, we are not educating children for the 21st Century but for the 19th. Our culture has forgotten that play is critical to children’s lives and that PLAY=LEARNING.

Q. How important is play and what happens without enough of it?

A. Forty years of research tells us that play is the work of childhood, crucially important to children’s intellectual, social, emotional and physical development. Play provides children with the opportunity to increase attention span, get along with peers, cultivate creative thinking, work through emotions and gain academic skills. In today’s fast-paced society where every moment counts, however, play is considered a waste of time. Playtime is shrinking, from 40 percent in 1981 to 25 percent in 1997.

The vacuum has been filled by an increased pressure to learn. Because many adults now have unrealistic views about how learning is defined, the number of preschool children on medication continues to rise. Preschool expulsion rates are at an all-time high, and preschool tutoring is an ever-growing, multimillion dollar industry.

Toddlers now sit at adult-size tables getting drilled on their ABCs. What leisure time remains is occupied with passive, noncreative activity like TV viewing. By the fifth grade, children watch an average of 40 hours a week--the equivalent of a fulltime job. It is little wonder that the number of children suffering from hypertension and childhood obesity is on the rise.

Q. Why are we in this state?

A. Researchers from all over the country recently convened at the PLAY=LEARNING conference at Yale University to ask this question. Our view of childhood is slowly and imperceptibly changing. Children are now seen as fact receptacles that learn best through memorization. Ironically, recent data from the Program for International Assessment suggests that despite Herculean efforts to fill our children with facts, the U.S. dropped toward the bottom of average-performing nations in science and math. Germany, Hungary, Spain, Poland, Portugal and Luxembourg showed considerable increases during the same three-year period.

Q. What can be done about it?

A. We seem to have gotten it backwards: Rather than educating for creative thinking, we seek to maintain our competitive edge against countries like China and India by building a nation of passive memorizers, unaccustomed to playing with ideas. Children of the Google generation need to do more than simply memorize facts; they have these at their fingertips.

Access to information is universal. It is the uses we make of this information that should distinguish us; novel, inventive combinations will gain us market share. Children need ordinary, everyday, unstructured play to expand their minds and discover their world. Play is where creative thinking is born and nurtured, where children are, as the Russian scientist Vygotsky wrote, “a head taller than themselves.” Play is also a necessary ingredient for learning the social skills that are the bedrock for children’s success in school as well as for the workplace. Emotional intelligence (EQ) counts just as much as IQ.

Our Yale conference endorsed a Manifesto on the Importance of Play for Children’s Development that stated, “Narrowly defined learning standards do not result in the development of lifelong learners.” These do not foster creative breakthroughs that have been the hallmark of American industry and science.

If we want our children to make their mark in the 21st Century, we must not downgrade the importance of unstructured creative playtime. This is shortsighted, discourages learning and fails to promote children’s development. Play is serious business.

Photo by Kathy F. Atkinson

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