Play and Intellectual Development

Abstract

For several decades there has been general acceptance among educators that play in early childhood has important educative functions. But there is by no means general agreement concerning the precise nature of the role of play in intellectual development, and differences can be found in educational practices and prescriptions which reflect sometimes lack of clarity and sometimes controversy. Some nursery school teachers adopt comparatively bland and passive role, intervening in children's play activities only to resolve social conflict, to offer comfort when things go wrong, and to provide materials children need. In contrast, other teachers adopt highly active role in which they see play as richly exploitable for mathematics and language teaching. They intervene frequently and consistently in children's play activities requiring them, for example, to count the cups and saucers in their dramatic, familial play, or to measure the constructions they have built from blocks. Paradoxically both kinds of teacher may underestimate the role of play in cognition. Among teachers of the first kind are many who have been influenced, directly or indirectly, by the psychoanalytic tradition. As Almy (1966, p. 6) points out, a symptom of (their) preoccupation with the emotional is apparent lack of involvement in the intellectual life of the These teachers may pay lip-service to notion that play is related to inteflectual development, but an inability to explicate the relationship in precise terms is indicated by their practices: they seem to show lack of awareness of the diagnostic information concerning child's level of cognition revealed by his play, they do not provoke problems in the context of play by judicious questioning of children; and they are unlikely to pay sufficient attention to the sorts of potential that particular materials may have for problem-solving activities and conceptual development. Teachers of the second kind undervalue the role of play in intellectual development in different way. Unlike teachers of the first kind they provoke problems in the context of children's play activities, but the way that they do so involves prejudgment. They may ignore the problems with which child is concerned in his play, so that the problems they provoke may well be extrinsic rather than intrinsic to child's preoccupations. They are likely to value highly structured play materials which embody specific problem or are meant to teach particular concept more than less structured materials which can be used in variety of ways. The former kind of teacher, by contrast, is likely to favour materials which lend themselves to diversity of play activities. Parallel with these differences among teachers are differences among theoreticians in their conceptions of the role of play in cognition. According to Biber (1959)3, for example, teacher should not structure child's play. Reality and logic, she believes, are only secondary to play whose main function she conceives of as an outlet for emotional concerns. By contrast, Olson