We are continuing on with our look at Thomas Poplawski’s “Completing the Circle”, available for free at the Waldorf On-Line Library. Today’s chapter is about the power of play, especially free play. In a world full of enrichment classes and a myriad of scheduled activities for the youngest children, free play is consistently undervalued. The author writes:
“In school and even at home, there has been the unending effort made to give
the child every possible advantage by pushing early academic learning and the
early development of specific skills, this in spite of the fact that educational research
has found no evidence that such early “enrichment” programming provides any
long-term advantage for most children. Only disabled children and those from
deprived circumstance, like those served in the Head Start program, clearly benefit
from them.”
The author cites that the American school system bias against play may be historically influenced by Maria Montessori’s methods, Puritanism and Freud. Yet, we all know that imaginative play is a huge correlate to verbal fluency, mathematical thinking, and genera thinking. But perhaps most importantly,
“Russ concluded, however, that imaginative play is the tool that every child uses to learn to cope with stress in life and that to interfere with the child’s learning how to play in a healthy manner imperils the later development of emotional regulation and coping skills…..
Brown was asked to investigate the background of a young man who some
years ago shot and killed nineteen people from a tower at The University of Texas
in Austin. He found that Continue reading
