Let the Children Play: How More Play Will Save Our Schools and Help Children Thrive

Play is the key to giving children the knowledge and skills they need to succeed: creativity, innovation, teamwork, focus, resilience, expressiveness, empathy, concentration, and executive function. Yet in violation of the recommendations of pediatricians and child health authorities, politicians are eliminating play in our schools and replacing it with standardization, stress, and forced physical restraint, doing untold damage to millions of schoolchildren. 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, which is considered to have one of the best education systems in the world. In Let the Children Play, Pasi Sahlberg and William Doyle make the research-informed case for helping schools and children thrive by giving more physical and intellectual play to all schoolchildren. Providing a vivid glimpse into the play-based experiments ongoing now all over the world, readers will find the book to be both a call for change and a guide for making that change happen in their own communities.