Are we educating or still indoctrinating?

The argument for more play-based learning

What if children (or anyone else) only truly learn when they are ready?
What if we, in our arrogance and belief that teachers are the only way learners can access the skills for reading, writing and mathematics, have been unwittingly complicit in creating a system that robs children of creativity, agency and the ability to learn in authentic and appropriate ways?

Call it unschooling or play-based learning, yesterday these very questions challenged my practice in ways that were uncomfortable but so very real.

First a recap of what makes the above possible but highly uncomfortable:
- The current 'learning at school' has only been around for about 150 years and was devised for an age whose skills-base are becoming largely redundant. (This blog post is a good analysis of the many systems that have formed as part of education in schools).
- We know human beings learn best in a context that allows for schema to develop based on the known schema. This is different for each individual, age group and setting, because true student agency is learning when we are ready. (If you haven't seen it, this links to Sal Kahn's TED talk on this very issue)

For a while a nagging fact has been in the back of my mind: The trouble with school is that a group of learners are forced to build schema at the same time and at the same rate and human brains don't learn that way with ease. This creates the need for endless repetition of learning tasks to FORCE new schema to be built (what we call 'practice'). The side effects of this are that other necessary schema gets left by the wayside due to lack of time and develop much more slowly: social schema, physical schema, emotional schema and creative schema.

The social, physical, emotional, and creative human schema were not valued nor needed in the industrial age model. You do not need to be emotionally mature nor have high levels of collaborative skills when you balanced books by hand in an office with twenty others or added assembly parts in an assembly plant. You do not need to be intuitive and creative when you stand in front of a lecture hall imparting all the facts you've memorised over a long period of time.

For 150 years the schooling system paid no attention to the innate human schema needed to develop in our young, that were able to be grown before they were sat in rows for hours at a time. More troubling,  the race to fill the minds of our young with more 'stuff' has meant stretched timetables, endless 'fun' bribing systems to increase engagement and more and more pressure on students and educators to find the holy grail of the most efficient system for learning. Read this comment and see how it applies to any learner that you know well:

Disengagement? Disruptive behaviour? Bullying? Anxiety? This can lend itself to self-harm (substance abuse) and mental health issues over time. But what if the system through which children learn, not their behaviour, creates this very pathway? Here is the research of Dr Peter Gray on the subject:

What I learned from my PD on play-based learning was that it is possible to cover the curriculum and increase the amount of play-based learning. Teachers are doing it and schools are doing it, and not just in Finland where the whole country is doing it just fine (They are always doing education better and probably have their own word for it!).

As we look to our future-focused Education 3.0 there are two questions that I am pondering and would appreciate your feedback on:

1. Are we still viewing learning from a purely input-output based system that only values industrial age productivity? (i.e. what an individual can perform based on what has been presented instead of what they can create with what they know and understand).
2. As educators, are our systems continuing to ignore basic emotional, physical, sociological and psychological human needs in our learners in the race to achieve high levels of productivity? And if so, at what cost?

When kids come home and parents ask "What did you learn about today?" and they reply "Nothing," are they possibly telling the truth?

                          

(PS- Thank you to Sarah Aiono and Linda Cheer for a great day of learning www.longwortheducation.co.nz)

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More interesting links on Play-Based Learning and the benefits for academic achievement (and is PBL simply a version for older children?)

• Children should learn mainly through play until age of eight, says Lego
• Play-based Learning in Finland: Why it Matters
• 11 Ways Finland’s Education System Shows Us that “Less is More”.

Postscript 19.4.17 New book out now (@timdwalk is in the clip above!)