Play in all its rich variety is one of the highest achievements of the human species.
- David Whitebread
Brick by brick, six-year-old Alice is building a magical kingdom. Imagining fairy-tale turrets and fire-breathing dragons, wicked sorcerers and gallant heroes, she’s creating an enchanting world. Although she isn’t aware of it, this fantasy will have important repercussions in her adult life: it is helping her take her first steps towards her capacity for abstract thought and creativity.
Minutes later, Alice has abandoned the kingdom in favour of wrestling with her brother – or, according to educational psychologists, developing her capacity for strong emotional attachments. When she bosses him around as ‘his teacher’, she’s practising how to regulate her emotions through pretence. When they settle down with a board game, she’s learning about rules and turn-taking.
“Play in all its rich variety is one of the highest achievements of the human species,” says Dr David Whitebread from Cambridge’s Faculty of Education. “It underpins how we develop as intellectual, problem-solving, emotional adults and is crucial to our success as a highly adaptable species.”
Recognising the importance of play is not new: over two millennia ago, Plato extolled its virtues as a means of developing skills for adult life, and ideas about play-based learning have been developing since the 19th century.
But we live in changing times, and Whitebread is mindful of a worldwide decline in play. “Over half the world’s population live in cities. Play is curtailed by perceptions of risk to do with traffic, crime, abduction and germs, and by the emphasis on ‘earlier is better’ in academic learning and competitive testing in schools.
“The opportunities for free play, which I experienced almost every day of my childhood, are becoming increasingly scarce. Today, play is often a scheduled and supervised activity.”
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Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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