Jane Goodall - Great Ideas in Education

14 ENCOUNTER: Education for Meaning and Social Justice
grams. The children learning figure skating were
able to choreograph their own programs, the ice
hockey team became more playful, and the summer
camp became less “rules-based” and more spontaneous
with play. Children loved it and the parents appreciated
their children’s enthusiasm.
One of my favorite stories came from the head of
the afterschool program. She described how parents
came after work looking tired and stressed and usually
picked up their children quickly and hurried
home. Once creative play became a regular part of
her program, she found that the parents would
watch the children play through a large window and
she could see them visibly relax. In our stressful
times, play is needed at all ages.
Playwork is beginning to catch on in the United
States in parks, children’s museums, and other venues.
In a few years, we hope there will be enough interest
to warrant full training for playworkers.
The Crisis in Preschools and Kindergartens
For thirty years, creative play has been driven
slowly out of kindergartens and now it is vanishing
from preschools as well. In most kindergartens,
open-ended, child-initiated play has been replaced
with adult-initiated group instruction. Yet a recent
international study found that children showed
much greater gains in cognitive ability and in language
development at age seven if their preschools
encouraged child-initiated learning rather than instruction
by a teacher (High Scope 2006).
In California and other states, a growing number
of kindergartens are resorting to scripted teaching
for instructing young children in literacy and numeracy.
Within a full-day kindergarten scripted lessons
are given for two to three hours each day, and
teachers are expected to follow the script exactly. Inspectors
enter the room to check on them and they
are marked down if they are not following the
scripted text. Some programs even tell the teachers
which questions to expect for each lesson and how
to answer them. During the time for scripted lessons
nothing is left to the spontaneous or creative interaction
between child and teacher. This approach is
now gaining ground in preschools (Alliance for
Childhood 2009).
From a developmental perspective, a tragic disconnect
exists between such methods and the inherent
ways that children learn through play and imitation.
One educator recently said to me, “People don’t
believe in child development anymore.”
The disconnect between children’s development
and current practices is so great that the Alliance for
Childhood issued a “Call to Action on the Education
of Young Children” (2005). It is signed by over 150
leading educators and health professionals. The Call
to Action states:
We are deeply concerned that current trends in
early education, fueled by political pressure, are
leading to an emphasis on unproven methods of
academic instruction and unreliable standardized
testing that can undermine learning and
damage young children’s healthy development.
For thirty years, we have watched a steady rise in
academic pressure on young children and a steady
decline in children’s health and well-being. I think
the two are closely related. Changing the patterns of
early education in this country will not be easy, nor
will restoring play throughout childhood, but I am
encouraged by renewed interest in play and by the
report of the American Academy of Pediatrics (2007)
encouraging parents to let their children play.
The pathway toward meaningful change is usually
uphill and rocky, often with steep abysses on either
side. But growing numbers of parents, educators,
health professionals, policy makers, and others
recognize the problem and want to restore play to
childhood. If we work together creatively, we should
be able to find our way up that rocky path and reopen
the doors to play.
References
Alliance for Childhood. 2005. A call to action on the education of
young children. .
Alliance for Childhood. 2009. Crisis in the kindergarten.
.
American Academy of Pediatrics. 2007, January. The Importance
of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development
and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds. Pediatrics 119
(1), 182-191. Available online at .
High Scope. 2006. Preschool experience in 10 countries: Cognitive
and language performance at age 7. Early Childhood
Research Quarterly 21 (3): 313-331.