The Value of Age-Mixed Play
Capitalizing on Children's 'Natural Ways of Learning'
I was sitting in the playroom at the Sudbury Valley School, in Framingham, Mass., pretending to read a book but surreptitiously observing a remarkable scene. A 13-year-old boy and two 7-year-old boys were creating, purely for their own amusement, a fantastic story involving heroic characters, monsters, and battles. The 7-year-olds gleefully shouted out ideas about what would happen next, while the 13-year-old, an excellent artist, translated the ideas into a coherent story and sketched the scenes on the blackboard almost as fast as the younger children could describe them. The game continued for at least half an hour, which was the length of time I permitted myself to watch before moving on. I felt privileged to enjoy an artistic creation that, I know, could not have been produced by 7-year-olds alone and almost certainly would not have been produced by 13-year-olds alone. The unbounded enthusiasm and creative imagery of the 7-year-olds I watched, combined with the advanced narrative and artistic abilities of the 13-year-old they played with, provided just the right chemical mix for this creative explosion to occur.
I am a research psychologist, interested in play. My work has convinced me that age-mixed play is qualitatively different from play among children who are all similar in age. It is more nurturing, less competitive, often more creative, and it offers unique opportunities for learning. Throughout most of human history, age-mixed play was the norm. Only with the advent of age-graded schooling and, even more recently, of age-graded, adult-supervised activities outside of school, have children and adolescents been deprived of opportunities to play with others across the whole spectrum of ages. In the course of human evolution, play came to serve its educational functions in age-mixed settings; I contend that it still serves those functions best in such settings.
Most of my observations of age-mixed play have been at the Sudbury Valley School, which is one of the few settings in our culture today where such play predominates. This school, now celebrating its 40th year of operation, has approximately 180 students at any given time, who range in age from 4 to about 18. The students are not assigned to grades, classrooms, or other spaces, and their education is entirely self-directed. They are free to go wherever they wish in the school buildings and campus, and to interact with whom they please. (For more about the school and its graduates, see www.sudval.org .) Daniel Greenberg, one of the school’s founders and the leading exponent of its philosophy, has long contended that the key to the school’s educational...
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