Lockdown learning highlights how schools fail to build on children’s natural ways of learning; through their independent curiosity and learning approaches.

Many parents are recognising a disturbing truth revealed by the COVID-19 crisis: school is often regimented and boring, and it doesn’t fit the way that their children learn naturally. Peering through the window of home education, parents see that schools’ approaches often provide poor ways for their children to learn.

Moms and dads are spending their days encouraging their children to do activities that schools require to be completed at home: filling in dull worksheets and completing internet-based tasks, as computers replace teachers in ordering, providing, and grading children’s activities. Many families dislike this tedious regime, but neither parents nor children have much idea of what they might do instead. Families have gotten used to a certain way of learning, and they may struggle to take a different approach.

Some just give up. As one frustrated parent announced on Twitter: “This is my Kindergartener’s home school curriculum. And nearly everything requires a printer, which we don’t have. We quit.” Are such parental reactions a harbinger of a more general revolt that we might expect against conventional educational approaches that have been embedded in school systems for nearly two centuries, and from which a big change is long overdue?

Some children thrive during lockdown learning

On the plus-side, COVID-19 is also highlighting how education might change for the better. Lockdown learning has proved more fruitful for some households than others. Some children are more accustomed to independent study that engages with what is around them: they are better able to thrive while in lockdown. For example, children have walked around their neighbourhoods to spot and count the colours of people’s front doors and then made bar graphs. Others have surveyed signs of spring, noticing dirt softening, birds singing, and buds emerging, and they’ve compiled the information into reports. Others went looking for symmetrical and asymmetrical shapes in their homes and neighbourhoods and reported back. They are not staring at computer screens or filling in worksheets all day.

“We don’t set up a blackboard and tell children at 12 months that it’s time to walk.”

This difference in experience is highlighting to parents a gulf between how many children are taught in schools and how learning might change if education were based more on what we know about child development. Alternative approaches recognise that children build understanding through active interaction more than by listening; by ‘constructing’ what they learn rather than being told.

In this “constructivist approach”—found, for example, in Montessori education—student questions drive the learning, interactive teachers create an environment fitting children’s developmental level, and lessons are built on student understanding with continuous assessment and collaborative student work. Such methods can fail when delivered without structure. But with sufficient structure, children thrive.

Teacher-text-centered model of education

Conventional schooling relies much more on a teacher-text-centered model of education. For over 150 years, much of the world has used this model, which depends primarily on teachers (helped by textbooks and computers) telling children what others think they need to know. This approach has been widely adopted because it makes sense to adults, who seem to learn in a linear fashion from what they are told or read. Teachers are also quite knowledgeable, so it stands to reason that they should tell children what they need to know. Children are often framed as ‘blank slates’, which fits with a model of teachers transforming children by giving them information and making them learn it. Many parents, with school direction, are now trying to follow this model at home.

Children learn by self-direction

But this conventional approach is fundamentally flawed. We can see how children naturally develop. No one instructs babies on how to form syllables. Six-month-olds start to get ready to speak by closely watching other people’s mouths as they talk, and thereby gleaning the information they need to form phonemes. We also know from research, such as Celeste Kidd’s, that children focus their attention during play on what they believe to be achievable levels of learning. They know what is within their grasp, and they can often work out the next stage of learning themselves, particularly in a supportive, well-equipped environment.

Photo: Nenad Stojkovic. Creative Commons.

Outside of school, young children actively teach themselves. We don’t set up a blackboard and tell children at 12 months that it’s time to walk. They pull themselves up, mastering the task through repetition and with a clear goal in their minds.

Student teachers know all of this. They study how children develop and are trained to deliver child-centered education. However, once they reach the school environment, they typically find few supports for this approach and have little option but to conform to more traditional methods.

Teacher-text-centered learning has survived its own inadequacies thanks to the introduction of incremental changes that prevent its collapse. These include grading and examinations to stimulate the flagging interest that children have in this unnatural type of learning. More recently, high stakes testing of whole schools has further pushed teachers to conform to the model.

However, outcomes have not improved. The worst hit are the lower-income schools which, under the demands of stricter testing regimes, double down on didactic instruction. Research shows that this has resulted in less time spent on non-tested (but often enriching) material, increased stress in children, higher dropout rates and education reduced to filling out bubble sheets. Taking these effects together, the school achievement gap, which testing was meant to address, has actually increased.

Use COVID-19 to change how your child learns

COVID-19 and the meagre gruel often served up as lockdown learning at home has highlighted the problem to parents. It has also removed the incentives that usually maintain the system – grading and standardised exams have been dropped this year for many children. Mom and dad are really stumped for ways to persuade children to stay focussed. Having been educated conventionally themselves, they may find it just as difficult as their children do to develop more self-directed ways of learning at home.

“In this relatively short lockdown period, make a start at organising children’s environments so they can learn more independently.”

My advice to parents in this lockdown is to make a start at organising children’s environments so they can learn more independently. Is your child old enough to plan meals or prepare portions of a meal, with some adult support? If so, then build that into every day, and set up the kitchen to enable it. Think of useful activities your children can do on their own. These can be as simple as making their beds or washing some dishes. Play a counting game, and then send the children off to do some counting on their own. Try to set them up with independent activities, be it with paints and brushes or building blocks. Expect them to put things back and tidy up afterwards. It can take a while for them to work like this, so you’ll need love, compassion and patience, taking one step at a time. New York Times columnist Michaeleen Doucleff described coming to this realization with her four-year-old at home. Given the opportunity, children love being involved in real life activities.

You’ll find resources for parents at the Association Montessori Internationale and distance learning resources at Aid to Life. We have a brief opportunity within the lockdown to change the way our children learn so that it fits what comes naturally to them. If enough of us do it, conventional education may also begin to think again. The new normal doesn’t have to be the old normal.

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Trying out what grown-ups do wins out with preschoolers over pretend play with toys – and it’s likely better for child development.

Child-raising and early education would do well to shift towards play, books, and visual media that are more rooted in real life. Young children—particularly those aged over three years—often prefer these things to pretend play that involves fictional characters, cartoons, and fantasy. Play that’s based on what adults do can enhance early child development.

This advice challenges Western beliefs that fictional, pretend play is central to early child development and the growth of individual creativity. No strong evidence supports the idea that pretend play based on fiction or fantasy has a unique, causal role in creativity. And some evidence suggests that it can disrupt children’s thinking.

West emphasises fictional, pretend play

Although children around the world engage in pretend play, the Western faith in play based on fiction and fantasy is unique. In traditional societies, fictional, pretend play is less valued, and many parents do not believe that it helps development. They do not encourage it, and children typically engage in it less often in these cultures.

Instead, millions of children play by imitating the real-life practices of their parents and communities. They rehearse adult activities and become increasingly proficient at them. This is one reason that many young children in other cultures are allowed to brandish large, sharp knives years before their Western contemporaries would be trusted to handle a blade. Fantasy content in this playing is rare, if it occurs at all, and children develop normally and successfully without it.

In recent decades, industrialised countries have rightly promoted play as better for young children’s development and learning than teacher-centered, instructional approaches. We should avoid the counterproductive use of didactic methods where young children sit at desks and teachers lecture them.

“Trying out real-life adult activities is a universal form of play. It’s what young children  typically choose to do in their free time and what drives their interest, and it usually includes working with other children.”

The essence of children’s play is free choice and self-motivation, and it often involves social interaction with others, particularly peers. Fiction is not the key ingredient. Trying out real-life adult activities is a universal form of play. It is what young children typically choose to do in their free time and what drives their interest, and it usually includes working with other children.

In short, pretend play is an activity that occurs naturally across cultures. All over the world, young children, particularly between the ages of 18 to 24 months, imagine, for example, that a stick is an airplane or a horse. Such imaginative play should be honored. But we should not assume that this is all children want to or should do. We can also help children to do real things, to give them a sense that they can contribute meaningfully to their families and communities.

This is an issue that carries on through adolescence in many Western countries. We do not give teenagers many useful things to do. We make them go to school every day, spending eight hours listening and doing things that are not ‘real’. Then we test them, promising that if they do well, they’ll be able to do what they want. As Joe and Claudia Allen asked in their book Escaping the Endless Adolescence, is it any wonder that many teens are attracted to delinquent behaviors? Notably, adolescents thrive when they undertake internships, where they learn to do real things.

Photo: Vanessa Pike-Russell. Creative Commons.

Young children prefer play based on real life

We have explored children’s activity preferences by questioning preschoolers, aged between three and six years, in the United States—most of them white, middle class, and well-versed in movies, toys, and video games that focus on superheroes and fantasy. When asked whether they would rather do pretend play or real activities, a firm majority preferred the real activities to their pretend alternatives.

In one study, each child was shown nine pairs of photographs depicting activities such as feeding a baby, cutting vegetables, washing dishes, talking on the phone, riding a tractor, and baking cookies. In one photo, the action was real, and in the other, it was a pretend version. Children said they would rather do the real activity almost two-thirds of the time. The preference for reality over fiction increased with age; three-year-olds were equally interested in pretend play and real activities, but by age four, children strongly preferred the real activities.

In a follow-up study, a separate group of three- to six-year-olds was given the chance to play with eight real objects (such as a microscope) or to engage in pretend play with toy versions. On average, the children played about twice as long with the real objects. Further, children’s actual behavior during this free play aligned with their expressed preferences when later shown a set of photographs as in the first study; in other words, children who played longer with real objects also preferred more real activities in photographs.

Unreal media can negatively affect self control

Pretend play is one form of fictional engagement. Our research has also explored another: the impact of watching TV shows that depict unreal, imaginary scenes, typical of much children’s viewing (such as SpongeBob SquarePants). We found that children’s executive functions—their capacities to plan, think, and remember—were lower after they had watched an unreal show than when they watched TV based on real life.

In another study from the University of Cincinnati, children were placed in an MRI scanner while watching either a typical animated cartoon where lots of unrealistic things happened or a realistic e-book read at a normal pace. When the children watched the animated cartoon, the scan showed that isolated brain areas went into overdrive, but the electrical connections between parts of their brains diminished. Such findings call into question whether it is healthy to expose children to unrealistic shows and suggest that parents should choose TV content carefully for their children.

“The human brain has evolved for the real world, and when we give children cartoons and images about worlds that don’t exist, we are not developing sensory capacities that are geared to processing the real world around them.”

Meanwhile, other studies have found that children prefer to end stories in a realistic rather than a fantasy way. Children also learn new words less well from cartoon drawings than from photographs. Thus, all the fantasy to which we expose children might not actually be good for them. It is worth remembering that the human brain has evolved for the real world, and when we give children cartoons and images about worlds that don’t exist, we are not developing sensory capacities that are geared to processing the real world around them.

The argument in favour of less pretend play and more play around real things is supported by two approaches that differ from conventional Western practice: Montessori education and childrearing in more traditional societies, be they hunter-gatherer or small-scale farming/herding communities.

Montessori child development practice favours ‘real’ play over pretend play 

Montessori education frames play as ‘work’, a mark both of its importance and its links to the adult world. A classic definition of play is that it has no goal. But in a Montessori environment, play is goal-orientated. For example, children might engage with differently-sized cylinders, with the goal of figuring out which cylinder goes into which appropriately-sized hole on a board, or they might prepare food and set a table to eat.

These activities are self-educating. With the cylinders, although the exercise is ungraded, children will discover their mistake if they put a cylinder in the wrong hole because a later cylinder won’t fit. This is considered ‘play’ because children choose the activity voluntarily and become engrossed. It’s very playful—they have fun, sometimes laughing as they work. And usually, particularly with age, they choose to do more work with their peers, which is another feature of play.

Another play-like feature of Montessori work is repetition. Children will work with the cylinders over and over to put them in the right place. They are doing something real and true, but they are also free to use their imaginations to puzzle out the world. However, Montessori work has a goal, unlike pretend play.

Thus, in Montessori schools, the real world and imaginative play are not so at odds with each other. Young children really mop floors, bake biscuits, do four-digit division and multiplication, and learn to read and write. They gain a sense of accomplishment, not in order to please others, but from achieving mastery, like when they learn to walk and talk and climb trees.

Help young children play with real things 

The message to Western parents, educators and policy makers is that young children want to be functional in society and do real things more than pretend play. If we can help children play for real, then why not let them? We should be careful about taking away the sense of accomplishment that comes from learning to do what the adults do. That smile of mastery, exemplified when children learn to walk and talk, could be a much bigger feature of Western homes, schools, and learning.

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