When should the playing stop?
I've heard plenty of sound bites like "the work of children is play" and such, emphasizing that science agrees that young children learn best through play. Luckily, no government program is required to orchestrate this critically important activity--by some incredible miracle of nature, kids play without institutional intervention. It is through play that they learn the incredibly difficult skills of walking, talking, and fine motor. Any observant parent can tell you how hard infants and toddlers work to get these skills-- all without schedule, standardized tests, externally imposed drill or curriculum guidelines. Yes, it's "play", but it's also work. It's work that we call play in order to put all those crazy ideas back in their places--after all, we know that play is what we choose to do and work is what external forces require us to do. So even though a child may spend as much as a quarter of an hour (remember, this kid is 18 months old--that's like three hours in grown-up minutes) in intense and often frustrating "drill", removing and replacing the lid of a pen, we call it play, because no one is making the child do it.
Now, as I understand it, "playing" is "the right thing" for these kids to do, and this is widely accepted as true until the age of four or five. So I'm wondering: what is it that happens in the first September after the child turns six that suddenly makes a rigid schedule and externally mandated curriculum "the right thing" for all children? How is it that "play" is now only "the right thing" during officially sanctioned recess and physical education times? What has happened to these little brains that suddenly makes it better for us to start deciding for them when to "play" and when to "work"?
Isn't it possible that what we're doing is a colossal mistake? That replacing play time with work time is just as disastrous at six as it would be at three? I mean, maybe instead of spending billions of dollars developing and implementing "curricula", we should focus on figuring out how to make more "toys" that allow "play" to accomplish all that we are trying to make happen through "work", right?