Play is an essential part of learning. The young of many species play in order to test their physical limits, form bonds with others, explore the environment, practice hunting behaviours and generally mimic their elders. Human children are no different in this respect: we play in order to learn about ourselves and our environment. It’s probably true to say that the instinct to play is ‘hardwired’ into us and, short of locking children in a box, there’s no way to prevent them from playing. Social learning is the basis for the transmission of human culture and play is an unavoidable component of social learning.
There’s an irony that things human being find easy to learn are fiendishly difficult to teach machines. This is Moravec’s paradox: contrary to the initial expectations of artificial intelligence researchers, robots and computers are excellent at learning how to do many of the things we’re bad at, but – thus far – have struggled to learn those things we find easy. The instinct to play is a fantastically useful adaptation which accelerates our ability to learn the knowledge we need to survive and thrive in a hostile environment.
But, whilst play is great way to learn some things, it’s an ineffective way to learn others. The basic rule of thumb is that if a behaviour or skill is a universal constant possessed, as far as we can be sure, by all human cultures since homo-sapiens first emerged, then it will probably develop in children through immersion, emulation and modest amounts of coaching and modelling. But, if a way of acting or understanding the world is culturally specific – i.e. it has emerged since the dawn of recorded history – then it probably requires an element of formal instruction in order to learn. Most people will pick up how to speak, manipulate simple tools and predict the behaviour of animals and other humans without much direction; play may well be enough.
However, most people will need a fair bit of guidance and support to learn to read, solve algebraic equations, and operate complex tools. The more complex and culturally specific something is, the greater the requirement for formal instruction. No one is going to work out to physics formulas or how to make a Gâteau St-Honoré without a lot of fairly formal instruction from a relative expert.
This is why schools have emerged. As Steven Pinker says in The Blank Slate, “Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at.” Children don’t need to go to school to learn how to walk, talk, recognise objects or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these things are much harder than reading, adding or remembering dates in history. The culturally specific knowledge taught in schools is unlikely to be acquired without formal instruction. Schools – institutions for providing formal instruction – have only existed in literate cultures where cultural knowledge has out- stripped universal folk knowledge. If we look at ancient Sumer where cuneiform, the earliest known writing system developed, we also find the first archaeological evidence of schools, which were set up to induct budding clerks into the mystery of scribing. These edubas (scribe schools) were probably fairly informal, usually taking place in private homes, but some sites, where particularly large numbers of school tablets have been unearthed, are considered by archaeologists to be ‘school houses’.
Where schools are not imposed, they emerge. In the poorest slums and most remote villages of India, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and China, low-cost private schools have sprouted up spontaneously. In The Beautiful Tree, James Tooley first recorded this phenomenon in the Indian city of Hyderabad which contains over 500 private schools catering to the children of day labourers and rickshaw pullers. People everywhere seem to recognise that where these sorts of institutions don’t exist (or where they are so corrupt they may as well not) adults can gather children in rooms and teach them culturally accumulated wisdom. Obviously, these schools are unlikely to conform to our expectations of what schools in developed nations should look like, but the way in which they operate is essentially the same as the Sumerian eduba. The school – with classrooms, teachers, and formal instruction – has emerged as the simplest, most effective way to handle the business of education.
So what about those who want instruction to be more ‘play based’ and seek to make the environment in schools more similar to the ‘natural’ environments’ where children learn the basics? Schools may need to make sure that children’s environments are conducive to acquiring the folk knowledge we all take for granted. Just because we have an evolved predisposition to attend to and rapidly learn this stuff, it doesn’t follow that we will automatically do so. Luckily, we’re highly motivated to learn these things and, just so long as we encounter them in our environment, we almost certainly will. This might provide an argument in favour of coaching and modelling approaches in the early years of education to ensure all children are immersed in the kind of environment in which they pick up speech, group cooperation and a sense of self. But if we’re tempted to teach these kinds of things explicitly later on, then we will almost certainly be wasting our time and that of our students.
Beyond that, one authority advocates of play-based instruction cite in support of their preference is the late Dr Karyn Purvis.
Her claim that “Scientists have recently discovered that it takes approximately 400 repetitions to create a new synapse in the brain – unless it is done with play, in which case, it takes between 10-20 repetitions” is extraordinary. If true this provides much needed evidence to support the whole-scale introduction of play-based instruction into school systems. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be true. Jen Taylor, an advocate for play-based instruction tried to trace the source of the quote and wrote about her efforts here. When approached for clarification, the Karen Purvis Institute of Child Development offered this response:
This was indeed said by Dr. Purvis. Sadly, before she gave us the reference she became terribly ill and passed away. We have not been able to locate this, so the source went to the grave with Dr. Purvis.
So who are the ‘scientists’ who made this incredible discovery? No one seems to know. We’re asked to accept that they chose only to tell Dr Purvis about their findings before her untimely death and then, for some reason, decided not to publish their work. If any neuroscientists out there are looking for a claim to test, it should be easy enough to design an experiment that establishes beyond doubt whether play is an up-to-40-times quicker way to acquire knowledge.
As outlined above, there are excellent reasons for acknowledging the crucial role of play in our development and reasonable evidence to allocate a part of the early years of schooling to structured play. Claims beyond that are not well-supported and benefits no one to repeat spurious ‘evidence’ in our pursuit of ideology. We all want the best for children, but good intentions are not enough. As the economist and social theorist, Thomas Sowell has said, “It is so easy to be wrong – and to persist in being wrong – when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.”
This post is adapted from Chapter 2 ‘Built by Culture’ of Making Kids Cleverer.
Speaking specifically to the experience of teaching kindergarten in a large, majority low-income urban school district in the United States, I can say we are far from a situation – in policy or practice – where it would be productive to be concerned about an over-generalization of the benefits of play-based learning. Our children get at best 12-15 minutes of active play a day outside (except in the months of December-February, where it is virtually none during the school day) and an hour long gym period once a week.
When teachers here advocate for developmentally-appropriate practice and play-based learning, several concerns are being addressed. We do recognize the value of structured (and unstructured) play environments in the early years, and I would be interested in the attention these environments will be given in research around child mental health and well-being that is certainly gaining traction in the US. Additionally, advocating for more opportunities to play does not minimize the attention given to explicit instruction and the work of ‘formal schooling’. In so many of our districts here in the US, the experience of formal schooling has become so dismissal to children and adults alike that a call for more play and developmentally-appropriate practice is at its core a call for our institutions to be more human.
Policy wise, there are plenty of issues to be addressed to improve the work and experience of formal schooling. Few people doubt the importance of schools as an institution, but a turn towards more play in our schools is not a concern I would spend my time arguing against.
My point was that children will be playing regardless of what goes on in schools. 12-15 minutes a day sounds an absurdly short time to allow children outside for recess a day – I’m not sure what the justification for that could be – but they still spend the majority of every day somewhere other than at school. Trying to stop children playing is like trying to hold back the tide by force of will.
Maybe…
But the human brain cannot have evolved significantly since the dawn of recorded history (only 5000 years ago – nothing in evolutionary terms).
So don’t let anyone tell you that ‘the brain’ – or any element of it – is ‘designed’ for classroom instruction!!!
The brain is not ‘designed’ for anything; itt ends to be just good enough for us to survive and reproduce. But you’re correct to say the brain cannot have evolved in 5,000 years, but human culture most certainly has. The brain is not specifically adapted for anything in the modern world, and yet we do all sorts of ‘unnatural’ things. The fact that education isn’t natural is preceisely why we need schools: https://learningspy.co.uk/psychology/can-learn-evolutionary-psychology/
Maybe…
But there are a lot of people out there right now who are claiming that various parts of the brain or mind are designed to be formally instructed. And that there are various skills and knowledge items which the brain can ‘only’ learn through formal instruction, since these things are culturally specific.
This is surely barking! Classrooms have only been around for 5000 years at most – nowhere near long enough for the brain to have evolved to ‘need’ to be taught in this way…
This is a misunderstanding. The brain can only be adapted to learn things which have been around in excess of around 40,000 years or so. The point of formal instruction is that it is required to learn things the brain is NOT adapted to learn easily. As explained in the post, classrooms emerged around the same time, and in the same place, as writing. We only need schools to teach what children are unlikely to pick up from their environments.
I thought a bit about play in
Mason, J. (2019). Pre-parative and Post-parative Play as Key Components of
Mathematical Problem Solving. In P. Felmer, P. Liljedahl & B. Koichu (Eds.) Proiblem Solving in Mathematics Instruction and Teacher professional Development. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.
It is a vital component of all mathematical thinking, in my view.
Do you have a pdf of your article available? Or, failing that, can you briefly explain why it’s a vital component of mathematical thinking?
Sorry! I think I conflated formal instruction with schooling, which was a mistake.
When taken to mean ‘not learning through play’, formal instruction does not require schools – in our society it happens all the time in many other contexts – workplaces perhaps especially – and even the home. I’d argue it was probably going on for thousands of years before anyone invented schools. Likewise, ‘play’ has probably been going on in schools for as long as they have existed – who’s to say those Sumerian scribes didn’t get exposed to some inquiring based learning??
But it seems to me tat play itself is a fraught term. Little that is learnt through play is actually effortless, as is sometimes implied by both sides of this debate. One of the go-to examples of this is supposedly first language acquisition. But being 2 years old is actually pretty demanding, and part of that is the frustration of acquiring speech – it’s hard, and leads to lots of tears. Neither is speech, properly understood, a cultural universal. Speech is in fact highly cultured – we don’t just learn to speak language, we learn to speak A language and, crucially, we learn to speak a language in a certain way. Given that significant language variation at 5 seems so closely correlated with future academic success, it seems that in considering academic success we’d better take pretty seriously whatever is going on in homes before school – which is mostly play (unless, I suppose, we think that this language variation is down only to genetics).
My point about the brain was that, however it does learn
‘post-schooling’ content, it can’t be in ways different from those which existed in the pre-schooling past. I can’t see how that’s a misunderstanding. Maybe it’s true that in teaching literacy and high level maths, say, we can’t take advantage of some particular adaptations for long-standing capacities (maybe ‘play’), but whatever mental architecture instruction – of any kind – does take advantage of simply MUST be architecture that was in place long before schools were invented. That must be right, no??
And whatever architecture we do take advantage of must have had a purpose. But what was that purpose, given everything our ancestors needed was apparently handed to them on a plate through play??
Perhaps they were being formally instructed in stuff, after all? Or perhaps it was architecture evolved to deal with black-swan events that play just couldn’t cut it for?
Ok. Let’s try to break this down.
1) “formal instruction does not require schools” – No, of course it doesn’t. But without schools cultural knowledge becomes the preserve of the elite. This was the case until the development of the printing press led to increasing pressure for universal literacy. Only then did widespread schooling begin to be funded by the state.
2) “Little that is learnt through play is actually effortless” – Agreed. “Effortless” is wrong and I apologise if I implied that. The point is that we have a motivational bias towards learning ‘folk knowledge’. Children rarely need to be urged to speak, experiment with objects, or show and interest in the living world and so even though these things certainly require effort they are more likely to be experienced as ‘effortless’ when compared with the tough job of mastering abstract concepts and processes.
3) “the brain was that, however it does learn ‘post-schooling’ content, it can’t be in ways different from those which existed in the pre-schooling past” No, of course not. It might be better to say that we have an instinct for learning, and learning some things might be more instinctive than learning others. As far back as 1896, James Mark Baldwin struggled with the conundrum of why some things are preprogrammed while others have to be learned. Instincts are hugely time-saving; anything we have to learn for ourselves makes it more difficult for us to survive and reproduce. Baldwin saw that there was a clear limit to the returns of innate abilities and that being able to acquire new knowledge provided more flexible advantages. He concluded that the reason why humans developed intelligence was to enable children “to learn things which natural heredity fails to transmit”. We appear to have an evolved instinct for readily acquiring folk knowledge, but anything more complex – as you rightly point out – is probably too recent to make use of this instinct. Nature has also made use of the brain’s natural plasticity to enable us to learn any cultural innovations which may prove useful to us. This ability to learn is the ultimate ‘good trick’. The trouble is, although we can ‘rewire’ our brains to learn all sorts of new and useful culturally generated knowledge, simple observations of reality make it clear that it doesn’t come nearly as easily as learning what is biologically primary. We tend not to pick up biologically secondary knowledge from the environment, instead requiring some sort of apprenticeship or instruction. This architecture – to learn things the hard way – has been present for as long as we’ve been homo sapiens and schooling and formal instruction are technological innovations to harness this capacity more readily.
4. “Perhaps they were being formally instructed in stuff, after all?” Of course. As soon as culturally specific knowledge began to diverge from its folk knowledge base, it would have required some sort of instruction (although not ‘formal’) to pass on. Apprenticeships were a well established means for passing on highly specialised knowledge for millennia. The further knowledge diverges, the greater the formality required to pass it on. It’s only in the last few hundred years that knowledge has diverged far enough to require mass education.
Does that help?
[…] The importance of play (and why it’s better to avoid bullsh#t) (David Didau’s Learning Spy) Play is an essential part of learning. The young of many species play in order to test their physical limits, form bonds with others, explore the environment, practice hunting behaviours and generally mimic their elders. Human children are no different in this respect: we play in order to learn about ourselves and our environment. It’s probably true to say that the instinct to play is ‘hardwired’ into us and, short of locking children in a box, there’s no way to prevent them from playing. Social learning is the basis for the transmission of human culture and play is an unavoidable component of social learning. […]
Thanks so much for taking the time to address my comments with such detail.
I’m still not convinced that the biologically primary-secondary distinction is sustainable, though.
See below for a quote from Sweller, which is what led me to feel that, like it or not, he is committed to an evolved capacity for learning biologically secondary content:
“This biologically primary/secondary distinction came from David Geary. Once you have realized the distinction between biologically primary and secondary, you then need to look at the cognitive architecture associated with biologically secondary material because that’s the material that’s taught in class. You know, when you were teaching, you’re teaching biologically secondary stuff. And there’s a cognitive architecture associated with that…And that cognitive architecture, those cognitive processes, are different from the processes that are used when acquiring biologically primary material.”
http://www.ollielovell.com/pedagogy/johnsweller4/
My question is, where does this cognitive architecture come from?? If it’s hard-wired, it must have evolved, and if it’s evolved, it must have developed before biologically secondary content came on the scene. So what evolutionary pressures led to its development? The off-chance that in several hundred thousand years someone might invent writing??
You say of Baldwin “He concluded that the reason why humans developed intelligence was to enable children “to learn things which natural heredity fails to transmit”…..Nature has also made use of the brain’s natural plasticity to enable us to learn any cultural innovations which may prove useful to us.” Another way of putting my question is, why would nature have done this, given that the theory suggests that all our biologically primary needs were already being taken care of?? Your response implies a more graded view, where content becomes increasingly less instinctive and, I suppose, primary, over time. That seems more reasonable to me, but doesn’t seem to fit with the idea that there is a clear, hard-wired distinction between, say, speech acquisition and essay-writing acquisition which simply demands radically distinct approaches to helping them happen. Might not essay-writing involve a huge chunk of stuff that is learnt by instinct?
Sweller says of speech acquisition, ‘You want to learn English. This is what you do with your tongue. This is what you do with your lips. This is what you do with your breath. This is what you do with your voice. This is how you speak in English’ (Laughs). Well, you know, that’s just silly. But that’s exactly what we do with writing. You’ll say: ‘Okay, want to write the letter a? First you write a circle then you write a line on the right-hand side.’ That’s exactly what you do. We don’t do that for speaking.” (same source as previous quote).
But this example is very far from what Englsh teachers mean by ‘writing’. It is a description of how we teach calligraphy – orthography at best. “Writing’ for a secondary English teacher is far more about vocabulary, syntax, and discourse structures. But these are the fundamental grammatical features of spoken language, which Sweller/Geary attribute to biologically primary modes of acquisition. I believe Geary even explicitly puts ‘language’ on one side of the divide and ‘writing’ on the other – I can’t believe this division can really be sustained.
What is more, we know for a fact that some students at least do acquire high levels of literacy through informal exposure ( or ‘play’??). I know that this is a somewhat tired argument, but doesn’t it at least raise in new form the specter of learning styles, which I thought was now considered infra dig?? The primary/secondary theory plus CLT seems to make a pretty universal claim about human cognitive machinery and development, but there are numerous examples of people whose experience falsifies it as a universal theory of the necessary conditions of cultural knowledge acquisition.
Whether you believe the primary/secondary distinction is sustainable doesn’t really matter, but as to ‘where it came from’ is rather straightforward to explain. It makes complete sense in evolutionary terms that the ability to learn new, culturally specific information would be an adaptation that would very quickly be selected for. *Only* possessing the ability to acquire biologically primary knowledge would put an individual at a considerable survival and reproductive disadvantage.
You say my response “implies a more graded view, where content becomes increasingly less instinctive and, I suppose, primary, over time. That seems more reasonable to me, but doesn’t seem to fit with the idea that there is a clear, hard-wired distinction between, say, speech acquisition and essay-writing acquisition which simply demands radically distinct approaches to helping them happen.” What is this “clear, hard-wired distinction”? It certainly is not a distinction made in Geary’s work. The idea that some people are striving mightily to establish such a distinction says most about their need to erect a straw man to tear down.
And finally, you say, “What is more, we know for a fact that some students at least do acquire high levels of literacy through informal exposure ( or ‘play’??).” Do we? Can you provide *any* documented examples of human beings learning to read and write without instruction? If there are , in fact, “numerous examples of people whose experience falsifies” the predictions made by CLT I would be interested in sifting through them. But all of this is to miss the point of the claims made for CLT: the theory predicts what is *probable* not what is always the case. It says that on average, this is how novices and experts acquire new knowledge. If you were to find some isolated examples where a few rare individuals did something different, this is no way falsifies the general prediction of what will be the lived experience for most people.