What Happened to Play?

By Sheila G. Flaxman

School districts and their patrons nationwide are racing to raise standardized-test scores. Any program, new or old, is eagerly adopted if it can be billed as a panacea for falling scores. Trends come and go—and come again. As the old song says, "Everything old is new again."

Except, that is, in the way we treat young children as they try to learn.

The practitioners of "Educanto" (that rare language only educators speak and the lay public does not understand) have decreed that more is better. As a result, young children in many school districts spend most of their day involved in non-age-appropriate activities. They devote hours to abstract activities that seldom have any child-centered follow-up practice. Yet, as we have known for a very long time, young children learn from the concrete to the...