The Whole Point Is That There’s No Point

Proposition number one.

Play is being sneakily redefined.

Whenever an education concept attracts favorable attention, pretty soon its name is going to be invoked by people or by institutions, even when what they're really doing represents a diluted version of the original idea or even a distorted version of it.

A lot that has been billed as progressive or authentic, balanced, developmental, student-centered, hands-on, differentiated instruction.

What else? Discovery-based.

turns out to be pretty discouraging and discouragingly traditional when you see how people are using that language.

The same thing is true of play.

Quoting Ed Miller from the Alliance for Childhood, 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.

Around the same time that Miller said that, Elizabeth Grau, who's an early childhood professor at the University of Wisconsin, made a very similar observation.

She said, what counts as play in many classrooms are highly controlled centers that focus on particular content labeled as choice, but that are really directed at capturing a specific content-based learning experience, such as number bingo or retelling a story exactly as the teacher told it on a flannel board.

People may still talk about play, but it's really not play at all.

By the way, we've seen this in other areas of education, too.

When whole language was big, the idea of kids having more choice about authentic literacy-based instruction in reading and writing— A couple of big textbook companies decided, they put their finger to the wind and said, okay, we'll give you these big basals, these textbooks, and we'll call them whole language in a box.

This is what's happening with play now.

So just because people use the language of play or choice time with little kids doesn't mean that it's real play.