It’s interesting how education as I see it has really lost it’s ability to allow children to play. I began my teaching life as a preschool teacher in a day care centre. I followed a play based program and it added a huge amount of educational value to the lives of the children that I taught there. Then I moved into a primary (elementary) school based preschool. Again it was a play based program and again the children that were educated by me in this way gained a huge amount of educational and personal development through this.

Then some genius in the government (hint of sarcasm here) thought that they knew how to do preschool better (they didn’t) and introduced prep. What a disaster. They also seemed to think that play was a complete waste of time and it should be scrapped. It replacement has been sight words, home readers and now ipads.

Now what we have is preschool aged children who don’t know how to play. Who are lacking the basic social skills like sharing and turn taking and who can’t sit still for more than 30 seconds. Some children are even struggling with basic conversation skills based on the fact that they don’t engage in this activity enough. And how do I know this? Because I see it everyday in my current job as a Health and Wellbeing teacher. And the powers that be have got a really good solution for this. And that is to take away more precious teacher aide time and overload the teachers with a ridiculous amount of child assessment (most of which is completely irrelevant for this age group).

The strangest thing is that even a lot of adults dismiss children’s play as a complete waste of time also. Yet they grow up to be adults who love to “play” with their hair. Or “play” with different outfits to see which one looks best. Or “play” with some new recipes in the kitchen. Or “play” with a new décor in the living room. Or “play” with their new off road vehicle. Or “play” with their speedboat. Or “play” with their motorcycle.

Will the next generation get to be play based children again? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.