How Children Learn Through Play
GWS Focus: The Uses of Fantasy Play
Books and articles about the deep value of play for children
American Journal of Play, Spring 2011. A special edition devoted to children's free play and edited by Peter Gray.
Child's Work: Taking Children's Choices Seriously by Nancy Wallace
Free at Last by Dan Greenberg and Mimsy Sadofsky. The work and philosophy behind the Sudbury Valley School.
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). An amazing presentation of hunter-gatherer cultures and how people are adapting many of these ideas for modern use in school and home.
Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World, by Ben Hewitt. A beautifully written book about homesteading in VT, raising boys whose passion is exploring nature and trapping animals, and how this family used unschooling to make it all work.
How Children Learn (revised edition) by John Holt. Has great chapters on games, play, and fantasy, and how children use play to get into the world, not out of it.
Peter Gray's Freeedom to Learn blog for Psychology Today magazine.
The Self-Respecting Child by Alison Stallibrass. Foreword by John Holt.
Learning All the Time
"Anytime that, without being invited, without being asked, we try to teach somebody else something, anytime we do that, we convey to that person, whether we know it or not, a double message. The first part of the message is: I am teaching you something important, but you’re not smart enough to see how important it is. Unless I teach it to you, you’d probably never bother to find out. The second message that uninvited teaching conveys to the other person is: What I am teaching you is so difficult that, if I didn’t teach it to you, you couldn’t learn it.
This double message of distrust and contempt is very clearly understood by children, because they are extremely good at receiving emotional messages. It makes the furious. And why shouldn’t it? All uninvited teaching contains this message of distrust and contempt. Once I realized this, I found that I had to catch myself all the time. I have to catch the words right on the tip of my tongue. The problem is that we human beings like teaching. We’re a teaching animal, as well as a learning animal. We have to restrain that impulse, that habit, that need to explain things to everybody ... unless we are asked.""
