How education starts with child’s play

Initiatives launched this past month to broaden pre-schoolers’ education — namely, KidsSTOP and the National Arts Council’s Artist-in-School Scheme for pre-schools — are laudable. Broadening young children’s exposure to the sciences and arts is good, and encouraging them to learn through play-based activities is undeniably beneficial.

However, can we do more than just providing paid learning spaces and experiences for children?

When adults overly structure children’s time and tasks, children are less likely to take the initiative, explore, dream and experiment. There is therefore a need to balance adult-structured activities with child-initiated and child-led ones.

One easy way to do so is to provide children with the time, space and opportunity to generate and sustain their own ideas for free play. Such self-initiated play is usually pretend play.

But this is no kiddy stuff. As a teacher and researcher, I spend much time watching young children play and interact. The main lesson I have learnt: Children’s pretend play and self-initiated talk are necessary for their learning and helping them make sense of the world.

PRETEND PLAY MIMICS REALITY

A four-year-old has very limited experience of the world and so is constantly trying to figure out how adults around her/him behave and make decisions on a daily basis. Even if they do not tell us what they are thinking (for they may not always know how to articulate what is in their minds), we can be sure that they are constantly interpreting the world.

Thus, when groups of young children get the chance to gather to talk, think, share, pretend and fight, they are actively processing the constellation of sounds and actions that they see and hear. They do not merely imitate the world around them; they juxtapose incredible ideas and situations to create something entirely their own.

Lev Vygotsky, who studied human development as a sociocultural process, was a strong advocate of pretend play in the early years of a child’s growth because he believed that such play provided a rare opportunity for a young child to be bigger than herself/himself, to stand taller and be stronger. Pretend play allows a child to be a doctor, a Formula 1 driver, a chef, a fairy, a villain or a heroine.

Young children’s play actions reflect a lot of our adult society — the good, bad, and ugly of how we function and relate to one another. If we ever needed a mirror to look at ourselves, take a peek in a pre-school classroom’s free play space or hang around your child’s play date.

If we observe children’s play and make that the starting point for how we educate our young, schooling would look very different from its existing proliferation of mere academic hothousing.

EDUCATION IS MORE THAN SCHOOLING

John Dewey, Dr Howard Gardner and countless other scholars have repeatedly talked about this over the past century, that education is more than just schooling — the former is about creating active citizens to live and participate in a world; the latter is unfortunately often about fact-learning and honing a narrow set of academic skills to satisfy short-term test requirements.

In our impatience, though, we feel better with a finite checklist of tasks that can be accomplished within a finite time frame (number of worksheets, books, classes). It is just too arduous for us to journey with young children to see them develop character traits and habits of mind that are to last a lifetime. And yet, character might just be the single most important factor in building success.

Mr Paul Tough’s latest book concludes: Young children’s secret to success is the ability to deal with failure, develop self-control and build character while managing adversity. Adults, then, play the crucial role of facilitator, encourager and guide (not molly-coddlers). This is tough since most of us want to protect and shield our children from difficulties. And the more resources we have, the more we tend to want to over-protect our children from having to face the real world.

What does this mean for teachers and parents working with young ones? It means we need to live with them. Let them show us what they know, so we can provide them with opportunities to act upon what they see and think. Be there when they are interpreting the world, figuring out what to think, feel, or say. It means no less than focusing on a child’s ability to calm himself or herself, to get over disappointments, to keep trying even though a task is frustrating, to generate alternative possibilities, to be curious and motivated to try new tasks even if they seem difficult or strange.

Character traits are not likely to be learnt through an enrichment class, but developed through daily interactions with peers, parents and other adults.

If we see our children as creators of a better tomorrow, we can help them learn as early as possible to navigate an unpredictable world. They don’t need to know how to spell the word “intelligence” while sharpening their own, nor the words “irresponsibility” and “discrimination” to know that such behaviours are not okay in this world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr Sirene Lim is a senior lecturer at SIM University.