Going beyond Groos, I would add that children are drawn to play not just at the skills that are most prominent and valued among adults around them, but also, even more intensely, at skills that are new and expanding. Because of this, children typically learn to use new technology faster than do their parents. From an evolutionary perspective, that is no accident. At a deep genetic level, children recognize that the most crucial skills for them to learn are those that will be of increasing importance in the future--the skills of their own generation, which may be different from the skills of their parents' generation. The value of this attraction to the new is especially apparent in modern times, in which technology and the skills required to master it change so rapidly.
Play's nature suits it well to its skill-building purpose.
Play, by definition, is activity that is psychologically removed from the real world. It is activity for its own sake, not activity aimed at some serious goal outside of the play itself such as food, money, gold stars, praise, or an addition to one's résumé (see posting on the definition of play). When we offer such rewards to children who are playing, we turn their play into something that is no longer play. Because play is activity done for its own sake rather than for some conscious end outside of itself, people often see play as frivolous, or trivial. But here is the deliciously paradoxical point: Play's educational power lies in its triviality.
Play serves the serious purpose of education, but the player is not deliberately educating himself or herself. The player is playing just for the fun of playing, not for anything else; education is a byproduct. If the player were playing for a serious purpose, much of play's educative power would be lost.
Because the child at play is not worrying about his or her future, and because the child at play suffers no real-world consequence for failing--that is, because of play's triviality--the child at play does not fear failing. Because the child at play is not seeking approval or praise or gold stars or anything else from adult judges, the child at play is unhampered by evaluation concerns. Fear and concerns about evaluation tend to freeze the mind and body into rigid frames, frames that are suited for carrying out well-learned habitual activities but not for learning new actions or thinking about new ideas. In the absence of concern about failure and others' judgments, children at play can devote all their attention to the skills at which they are playing. They strive to perform well, because performing well is an intrinsic goal of play, but they know that if they fail there will be no serious, real-world consequences, so they feel free to experiment, to take risks in ways that are crucial to learning. They do not have to devote part of their mental resources to the task of trying to figure out what some external judge is looking for. They can direct their activities in ways that they are ready for, rather than in ways that some judge has chosen for them.
Another aspect of play, besides its triviality, which suits play so well for its purpose of skill building is its repetitiveness. Have you ever noticed that most forms of play involve lots of repetition? A cat playfully stalking a mouse keeps releasing the mouse in order to stalk it again. A baby playfully babbling keeps repeating the same syllables or the same sets of syllables, sometimes altering the sequence slightly, as if deliberately practicing their pronunciation. A toddler playing at walking may keep walking back and forth, over the same route. A young child playfully reading may read the same (memorized) little book, over and over again. All sorts of structured games, such as tag or baseball or twenty questions, involve repetition of the same actions or processes over and over. But the repetition is never rote.
Because the repetitive action derives from the player's own will, each repetitive act is a creative act. If the act is exactly the same as the previous act, that is because the player wished to make it the same and was striving to make it the same. Often, though, each "repeated" act is different in some systematic way from the previous one; the player is deliberately varying the act in some way to fit the game or to experiment with new ways of doing the same thing. A side effect of such repetition is the perfection and consolidation of the newly developing skill.
The same skills that children learn so naturally in play become difficult in the typical school environment. Reading is an excellent example. Many years ago I watched my youngest brother learn to read, through his own play, before he started school, and later I watched my son do the same thing. At the Sudbury Valley School, the democratic non-school school that I have described in a previous essay, countless children have learned to read through play, at a wide range of ages, sometimes completely unaware of their learning. In this age-mixed community, where there are no formal reading lessons, children learn to read because reading is a valued part of their social environment. They see other children reading and hear them talking about what they have read, so they want to read. They play games that involve the written word. They are read to by adults and teenagers, who enjoy reading to them. They want to hear the same books over and over again until they have memorized them, and then they playfully "read" the books they have memorized until their pretend reading turns into real reading.
Contrast this to learning to read in standard schools, which for many children is painful and scars them for life about reading. Imagine what it is like for the child who, for whatever reason, is a little slower at learning to read than others in the class. Reading becomes a measure of self-worth and a source of anxiety and shame, and those emotions make learning to read not only painful but hard. When children are allowed to learn to read on their own, at their own pace, through their self-directed play, reading becomes and remains one of life's great pleasures. The same is true of other skills as well. Even throwing a ball can be difficult and shame-inducing when it is taught in school rather than learned in play.
Play is nature's way of teaching us the skills we need for life. But our educational system has stupidly turned play into something called "recess," truly trivializing it and marginalizing it, and has turned learning into something called "work," making it, by definition, something that children don't want to do.
