* Children should have plenty of opportunities to play. 

* Even young children have too few such opportunities these days, particularly in school settings.  

These two propositions -- both of them indisputable and important -- have been offered many times.[1]  The second one in particular reflects the “cult of rigor” at the center of corporate-style school reform.  Its devastating impact can be mapped horizontally (with test preparation displacing more valuable activities at every age level) as well as vertically (with pressures being pushed down to the youngest grades, resulting in developmentally inappropriate instruction).  The typical American kindergarten now resembles a really bad first-grade classroom.  Even preschool teachers are told to sacrifice opportunities for imaginative play in favor of drilling young children until they master a defined set of skills.

As with anything that needs to be said -- and isn’t being heard by the people in power -- there’s a temptation to keep saying it.  But because we’ve been reminded so often of those two basic contentions about play, I’d like to offer five other propositions on the subject that seem less obvious, or at least less frequently discussed. 

1.  “Play” is being sneakily redefined.  Whenever an educational concept begins to attract favorable attention, its name will soon be invoked by people (or institutions) even when what they’re doing represents a diluted, if not thoroughly distorted, version of the original idea.  Much that has been billed as “progressive,” “authentic,” “balanced,” “developmental,” “student-centered,” “hands on,” “differentiated,” or “discovery based” turns out to be discouragingly traditional.  So it is with play:  “Most of the activities set up in ‘choice time’ or ‘center time’ [in early-childhood classrooms] and described as play by some teachers, are in fact teacher-directed and involve little or no free play, imagination, or creativity,” as the Alliance for Childhood’s Ed Miller put it.[2]  Thus, the frequency with which people still talk about play shouldn’t lead us to conclude that all is well.

2. Younger and older children ought to have the chance to play together.  Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston College, points out that older kids are uniquely able to provide support -- often referred to as “scaffolding” -- for younger kids in mixed-age play.  The older children may perform this role even better than adults because they’re closer in age to the younger kids and also because they don’t “see themselves as responsible for the younger children’s long-term education [and therefore] typically don’t provide more information or boosts than the younger ones need. They don’t become boring or condescending.”[3] 

3.  Play isn’t just for children.  The idea of play is closely related to imagination, inventiveness, and that state of deep absorption that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi dubbed “flow.”  Read virtually any account of creativity, in the humanities or the sciences, and you’ll find mentions of the relevance of daydreaming, fooling around with possibilities, looking at one thing and seeing another, embracing the joy of pure discovery, asking “What if….?”  The argument here isn’t just that we need to let little kids play so they’ll be creative when they’re older, but that play, or something quite close to it, should be part of a teenager’s or adult’s life, too.[4]

4.  The point of play is that it has no point.  I didn’t know whether to laugh or shudder when I read this sentence in a national magazine:  “Kids need careful adult guidance and instruction before they are able to play in a productive way.”[5]  But I will admit that I, too, sometimes catch myself trying to justify play in terms of its usefulness.