The Need For Play

Boston College professor and bestselling author Peter Gray highlights the importance of play in children’s lives.

By Jayden Crain

Ever since I learned how to read I formed an opinion about school and the ways we learn as children. To put 25 energetic 8-year-olds in a classroom for seven hours a day, while a teacher drones on about Marco Polo, doesn’t seem like the best way to teach kids. My own experience in education, being a student for 13 years, has cemented in my brain another opinion: school is boring. Boring in the ways that it teaches us, boring in the ways of standardized tests, and boring in the way that it fails many of us.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Author of Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life and Boston College professor Peter Gray has spent much of his career researching the importance of children’s play. His work argues that children should be educated in a natural way and that schools should give children more time to play outside instead of giving them homework. Professor Gray also feels the flaws he sees in today’s schooling, like homework and tests, are grounds for change in the United States.

Play, in its original (free) form, first began to decline in the 1950’s when children played outside much more. Gray says, “we’ve gradually removed play from children’s lives, and now put them in situations where they are always more or less in school. It didn’t happen all at once, it was gradually changing over time... If it happened all at once people would freak out.”

Back in the mid to late 20th century, children were always outside playing and exploring. Nowadays, children are almost never outside, and when they are they participate in adult-led activities like sports and supervised play. Whenever an adult is involved in children’s play it is not play. Play must be initiated by children and evolve around them as well.

Throughout the last eight decades schools have slowly removed play from children’s lives and replaced it with schoolwork. Instead of going home after school and playing with friends, children have to do homework and study for the next quiz or test. Kids naturally want to explore and play, but we’ve stripped them of this and replaced it with more school.

“Because it didn’t happen all at once they’ve managed to gradually change the amount of hours and days and weeks of children’s school, not to mention the amount of homework,” says Gray. “They’ve changed recess, and the lunch hour is no longer an hour. And because it’s gradual, people barely noticed it from one generation to the next, one decade to the next. So it’s been a creaking change.”

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Throughout my education I’ve realized what types of things helped me to learn the most. Things like woodshop, metals, and autoshop have all helped me understand the physical world better. It doesn’t have to be career and technical education, though. Science labs are a great example of hands-on learning because they are an almost perfect blend of classroom education and a physical learning experience. Schools should start children off young with something they can see and feel to better understand.

I know that school can be improved because I’ve had numerous hands-on science projects as a student. In fifth grade, I had the time of my life learning about energy and motion with the famous egg drop project in Mr. Smith’s science class. He climbed up a 16-foot ladder and dropped all of our projects onto the pavement. I learned what types of projects survived and which ones failed, and most importantly why they failed. From that day on I realized the value in this approach.

Gray has studied the idea of play for decades and has come to realize just how important it is for children growing up in America. He has also studied what is harmful to children and why we should replace those things with better learning tools. Gray highlighted that the education system produces people who can remember things and statistics instead of people who can think for themselves and imagine freely.

“We’ve developed this obsession with tests and test scores,” says Gray. “We have this obsession with these multiple choice tests and all we’re doing is testing your ability to give particular feedback and give particular answers of what you’ve been taught in a memorized way, usually. And this is not what our world looks like. This is not what the world needs today. We need people who are creative, who are critical thinkers, and you really can’t test for those things.”

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If this last year has taught students anything, it’s that going outside and learning about the world is a lot more interesting than sitting inside all day and learning about the past. Classrooms have experienced, firsthand, what it’s like to lack social interaction completely and have the teacher be the sole presenter. It’s been rough on both teachers and students because it’s an extreme version of what’s been going on in schools for years. This push might help us all realize that school can be better, for students and educators alike.

Gray says, “I think the primary thing we can do is to go in the opposite direction that we have gone in before. All the time children are spending at school and doing homework, let’s start decreasing that to give them more free time to play and let them do what they naturally want to do. You can’t teach creativity, but you can kill it. What we’re doing right now is killing it.”

In his Aeon magazine article “The Play Deficit,” Gray states that anxiety and depression have increased as children started spending more time in school. “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,” he writes.

Today’s students mainly just know how to do school and rarely get the time to play freely with other kids, and it isn’t a surprise that creativity and morale are low. Students are judged because of a letter grade or a test score, which leads some down the path of not wanting to try anymore, leaving many with low academic self-esteem. Play is how children build communication skills and creativity, but if school takes up a child’s life then it’s much harder for them to grow intellectually.

“Play is always creative, you’re always creating your activities through play,” says Gray. “You’re always creating situations, and you’re living in that situation in your play world, and while you’re playing there’s a creative aspect to it. So it should be no surprise that as we deprive children of their play their creative ability declines.”

Play is necessary for young children because it builds foundational skills and helps children adjust to social situations with friends and at school. Play isn’t something that we can control, only something that we can support. We can support play by letting children go outside to help them build skills without responsibility and anxiety. We can teach them hands-on education to help them better understand the world.

For the past year, we have all been trapped in the world of COVID-19. This has been devastating for young children, as now more than ever they should socialize with friends and play freely. Online school has failed them, stripping away all social interaction with peers, preventing them from forming meaningful memories. During this rebuilding stage, we can shape our school system to support creativity and give children the play time they need.

The Miller Integrated Nature Experience (MINE) at Springfield High School has had to battle to keep moving in these virtual times. For the longest time we’ve been restricted to online school only, but that hasn’t stopped us from building our magazine and telling stories. Niamh Houston brings awareness to climate change through her story about a beautiful art form called Gyotaku, Sarah Karr reflects on the education system by looking at it from the outside, and Gavin Branch talks about the lack of racial diversity in the sport of skiing. No matter the circumstances, MINE remains dedicated to publishing a magazine that represents all of our hard work, while maintaining some sense of creative freedom, and we haven’t let COVID-19 stop us so far.