Unstructured play is vital for children, the American Academy of Pediatrics recently reported.
Aaron Swartz may have uncovered why play is important:
There’s an interesting little experiment you can do. If you have a classroom of kids and you give them a bunch of tasks they can work on of varying difficulty, the kids will pick the tasks that are just outside their level, that stretch them to do a little bit more. (This is, of course, if they aren’t getting graded on this. If they’re getting graded, they’ll always pick the easy ones.)
When I first heard about this experiment, I just assumed it was because they were good kids. But now I think there’s a different explanation. It’s because doing this is fun.
Children are built to grow — they want to stretch and learn. Is it possible that our current relentless focus on testing is exactly the wrong prescription for real education?
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