My co-author Bill Doyle and I have written a book for parents, teachers, scholars and decision-makers about play titled “Let the Children Play: Why more play will save our schools and help children thrive”. It is published by Oxford University Press and available in mid-2019. Here is what it is all about.
Play is how children explore, discover, fail, succeed, socialize, and flourish. It is a fundamental element of the human condition. It’s the key to giving schoolchildren skills they need to succeed–skills like creativity, innovation, teamwork, focus, resilience, expressiveness, empathy, concentration, and executive function. Expert organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Centers for Disease Control agree that play and physical activity are critical foundations of childhood, academics, and future skills–yet politicians are destroying play in childhood education and replacing it with standardization, stress, and forcible physical restraint, which are damaging to learning and corrosive to society.
But this is not the case for hundreds of thousands of lucky children who are enjoying the power of play in schools in China, Texas, Oklahoma, Long Island, Scotland, and in the entire nation of Finland. In Let the Children Play, we make the case for helping schools and children thrive by unleashing the power of play and giving more physical and intellectual play to all schoolchildren.
In the course of writing this book, we traveled worldwide visiting schools and playgrounds, reviewed over 700 research studies, and conducted interviews with over 50 of the world’s leading authorities on education. Most intriguingly, Let the Children Play provides a glimpse into the play-based experiments ongoing now all over the world, from rural China, Singapore, Finland and Scotland to North Texas and Oklahoma, as well as the promising results of these bold new approaches. We promise that readers will find the book to be both a call for change and a guide for making that change happen in their own communities.
Book will be available through Amazon and major bookstores in the U.S. and the rest of the world. Link to our publisher’s web site is here.