Children are learning every moment of every day. We can’t stop them. They learn the best when they are playing with each other, mostly free of adult interference. This is the overall message of a book I have recently read called Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, by Peter Gray (2013). His claims are well-researched and, better yet for me, just make sense from my experience as a parent and teacher.

One of the most important things I learned from the book was the importance of multi-age group play. Like most things in the book, Dr. Gray explains the value of multi-age groups in a way that made me think, “Well, of course, that makes perfect sense.” There are many advantages of multi-age group play. The younger kids: “… can engage in and learn from activities that would be too complex, difficult, or dangerous for them to do on their own or only with others their own age. They can also learn simply from watching the more sophisticated activities of older children and overhearing their conversations. And they can receive emotional support and care beyond what age-mates could provide” (p. 185).

The older children can “… practice leadership and nurturance, and they gain the experience of being the mature one in relationships… Older children also gain deeper understanding of concepts by teaching younger ones, which forces them to think about what they do or do not know. And just as older children inspire younger ones to engage in more complex or sophisticated activities than they otherwise would, younger children inspire older one to engage in more creative activities than they otherwise would” (p. 197). Older children strengthen their skills when they practice them, for instance in reading out loud to younger children, so everyone’s learning benefits from the exchange.

As Dr. Gray points out, multi-age playing used to happen for many children in their everyday life because they had several siblings (I was one of seven) and because kids played outside in neighborhoods, in open spaces and in front and back yards, mostly unsupervised by adults. Today, many parents, concerned about safety, are less likely to allow their children free run of their neighborhood or town, programming their kids waking hours with adult-supervised activities or requiring that they stay indoors. We need to work on building capacity in communities for safe multi-age group play, and, in the meantime, we could increase free play time in schools.

My understanding is that one of the most devastating costs of the well-intentioned No Child Left Behind legislation has been the severe decrease in school time devoted to the arts and physical education and, generally, to play. Teachers and school leaders, in response to punitive consequences for lower-than-acceptable standardized test scores, have emphasized reading and math and other academic subjects at the sacrifice of recess and similar activity times where children across several grade levels can engage together in physical, imaginative, and group interaction in free, unstructured play.

I know there are many places across the US where school systems, lead by teachers, parents, and school leaders, are de-emphasizing standardized testing and trying to bring whole learning - and joy? - back to school. There needn’t be a conflict between more play time and academic learning. Well-structured and completely unstructured play environments - including perfectly-structured nature - have been and can again be settings for the best kind of learning. The kind that kids do on their own and that lasts a lifetime.

Go kids! And thanks to all the teachers, school leaders, and support staff who take care of and love our children everyday!