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At The Open School, kids learn primarily through play. But what is “play”? It’s more than just fun and games—play is practice, exploration, and experimentation. Play is when a young child tries, over and over, to bounce and catch a ball. It’s when a teenager likes the sound she made when she hit certain keys on the piano, and tries to figure out how to make other pleasant sounds. It’s when a child hunts for mushrooms in the lawn after a fresh rain. It’s when a group of kids set up a pretend restaurant and simulate cooking, service, and monetary transactions. It’s when a child breaks a rule just to see what the adults will do about it. It’s when a teenager tries using obscure formulas to solve a seemingly unsolvable math problem.
“Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But, for children, play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.”
In a recent clinical report, the nation’s leading pediatricians advised that doctors recommend a dose of play to improve the mental and physical health of children. But play is not only necessary for children’s health, say pediatricians—it’s also a vital part of education:
“Collaboration, negotiation, conflict resolution, self-advocacy, decision-making, a sense of agency, creativity, leadership, and increased physical activity are just some of the skills and benefits children gain through play.”
Albert Einstein is often quoted as saying “Play is the highest form of research.” Carl Jung said “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct.” Clearly, these great thinkers are not talking about playing games. They are referring to play with ideas—imagining new possibilities, experimenting, exploring uncharted territory. In the case of children, the play instinct leads not to scientific or philosophical breakthroughs, but to education.
Play is how the human brain is wired to learn. When we approach a problem driven by curiosity, our whole brain activates and soaks up experience like a sponge. When a problem we don’t care about is forced on us, our brain skirts around it, focusing instead on how to appease the teacher with minimum effort.
For humans, the most important and most difficult skill is getting along with other people. That is why children spend so much time playing together—talking, arguing over the rules of games, making up imaginary scenarios, building things together, and reaching compromises. It takes many, many years of daily practice to achieve basic competence at getting along with others—and even then, it is only the beginning of a lifelong project.
Today, the world is changing more rapidly than at any point in history.
Yuval Noah Harari, the New York Times bestselling author of Sapiens, explains:
“We might invest a lot of effort teaching kids how to write in C++ or how to speak Chinese, only to discover that by 2050 AI can code software far better than humans, and a new Google Translate app enables you to conduct a conversation in almost flawless Mandarin, Cantonese or Hakka, even though you only know how to say “Ni hao”. So what should we be teaching? Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching “the four Cs” — critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity.
More broadly, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasise general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products — you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.”
Critical thinking means not just doing what you’re told, but making a judgment for yourself
Companies rank communication skills in the top three most-sought after qualities by job recruiters
Communication and collaboration are hot traits in the eyes of modern employers
Creativity is the simplest thing for children, because all children are born creative.
Critical thinking means not just doing what you’re told, but making a judgment for yourself.
However, conventional school is all about doing what you’re told, unless you’re assigned a special “critical thinking” assignment — in which case, if you actually think critically and decide the assignment isn’t worth doing, you fail!
The Open School, on the other hand, is a democracy — decisions are made through debate and voting, which students can participate in. There is no “because I said so” here. Students are allowed to make their own judgments and vote accordingly.
Also, students don’t have to perform any work unless they think there is a good reason for doing so.
Communication and collaboration are hot traits in the eyes of modern employers. As a case in point, a recent survey of 260 companies ranks communication skills in the top three most-sought after qualities by job recruiters.
Students at The Open School are constantly working on their communication and collaboration skills. If you walk into our school at any time, you will see kids engaging in conversations, arguing about rules of games, negotiating, compromising, trading, and collaboratively building things such as forts, Legos, and Minecraft houses. Read more about how students learn to communicate and collaborate at The Open School.
Creativity is the simplest thing for children, because all children are born creative. As proof, consider this:
In 1968, NASA hired Dr. George Land and Beth Jarman to develop a test that could measure the creative potential of NASA’s scientists and engineers. They came up with a test for divergent thinking, which is the ability to look at a particular problem and propose multiple solutions. This test had no right answers, but required test-takers to come up with as many ideas as possible.
The test worked well for NASA’s purposes, but it left Land and Jarman with a bunch of new questions. They had spent a lot of time researching creativity in order to develop this test. They were now wondering — why are some people more creative than others? Where does creativity come from?
The researchers decided to give the same test to 1,600 children between the ages of 4 and 5. The results shocked them. A full 98 percent of those children fell into the genius category of imagination.
They then waited five years and gave the test again to those same children when they were ten years old. Now only 30 percent of them qualified as creative geniuses. By the time the kids were fifteen, the number had dropped to 12 percent.
Finally, Land and Jarman gave their test to 280,000 adults and found that a mere 2 percent of them qualify as creative geniuses. “What we have concluded,” wrote Land, “is that non-creative behavior is learned.”
All children are naturally creative. Our job is not to cultivate their creativity, but to refrain from crushing it.
At The Open School, we don’t tell kids that their interests aren’t worth pursuing. We don’t chastise them for coloring the grass blue. They are free to make up elaborate imaginary scenarios, invent their own games, and tinker with everything they see.
Conventional schools are a product of the bygone industrial era, when adulthood for most people meant a lifetime of rote work in a factory.
To create effective workers, schools had to supress people’s individuality and force them into a mold. Workers had to be standardized so they could be interchanged like machine parts. They could not be permitted to question authority.
Although many people today agree that the old assumptions are outdated, our schools have hardly changed at all in the last 100 years. We are trying to prepare children for a post-industrial world using an industrial education system.
We are now living in the twenty-first century, and we need a new paradigm of education. The Open School is that new paradigm.
The brain is plastic; it can learn anything at any time. Research has shown that there is no objective “right time” to learn anything.
“While there’s evidence for limited critical periods in brain development in limited domains (such as the strength of vision in the two eyes), no evidence supports a critical period for academic skills.”
What Does the Brain Have to Do With Learning? Worden, Hinton, and Fischer
The brain rapidly absorbs information that it deems meaningful and useful. Anything else is ignored or quickly forgotten.
Kids can learn important skills such as math, reading, writing, as well as more specialized skills, quickly when they are interested. It doesn’t take years and years, unless the brain is not ready.
The neurotransmitter dopamine is released when the brain engages in something it enjoys. When children choose what to learn based on their brainʼs unique pleasure response, their brains become conditioned to find learning pleasurable.
When the brain experiences stress, it releases the hormone cortisol, which interferes with learning and memory. Respecting children protects the brain and creates the conditions for learning.
Children are always learning, every moment of the day, unless they are stressed, bored, or angry.
To discover whether Sudbury schools are successful, The Circle School, a Sudbury model school in Harrisburg, PA, conducted a study of its graduates in 2015.
This kind of education is still unconventional, but it’s no longer an experiment. The experiment is over, and the results are in. The Sudbury model works.
The study found that graduates of the Circle School attend college more often than the average American. They are also more likely to earn degrees, including bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. This is not because Circle School families are wealthier — they occupy the same range of socioeconomic brackets as their surrounding community.
After college, Circle School graduates go on to the full range of careers. They are more likely to go into science and technology than any other field. They are also more likely than the average American to be self-employed. 60 percent of them are traditionally employed, while only 2 percent are unemployed.
Empowered Kids, Liberated Parents (Why Children Are Healthier, Happier, and Achieve More When in Control of Their Own Lives and Educations) by Cassi Clausen and Aaron Browder, foreword by Peter Gray
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A K-12 Self-Directed Democratic School Where Learning is Real, Meaningful, and Student-Led
