Freedom to Learn

Ten years ago, on January 29, 1999, Sugata Mitra, in India, initiated a remarkable set of observations of children's self-directed learning. On that day, he turned on a computer that he had installed in an outside wall of the building where he worked, a wall that faced one of the poorest slums in New Delhi, a community where most children do not go to school, are illiterate, and had never previously seen a computer. He simply turned the computer on, left it there, told the crowd of children that they could play with it, and used a video camera to monitor activity around it. The results were astounding, at least astounding to people in the educational world who are oblivious to the remarkable powers of children for self-education. Read More

Play is nature's way of assuring that young mammals, including young humans, will practice and become good at the skills they need to develop in order to survive and thrive in their environments. The German philosopher and naturalist Karl Groos developed this idea more than 100 years ago and expanded on it in two books--The Play of Animals (1898) and The Play of Man (1901). ... In this essay I explain how the "triviality" of play suits it for its serious educative purpose. Read More

All cats bark. Muffins is a cat. Does muffins bark?

Piaget believed that children under about 11 years old could not solve problems like this because they lack the capacity for counterfactual reasoning. But an experiment conducted in England showed that even 4-year-olds could easily solve such problems in the context of play. How does play improve children's and adults' reasoning? Read More

The three-year-old squeals with almost unbearable joy as she flees from the terrible monster, in the form of her father or big brother, who threatens to catch her and eat her for breakfast. The 22-year-old quarterback experiences a similar thrill as he twists, turns, and dashes around one monstrous defender after another on his way to the goal line. . .. In nightmares and in real life, nothing is more terrifying than being chased by a predator or monster. But in play, nothing is more delightful. Why is that? Read More