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Play is essential, but it takes work for children to succeed in the real world-Tom Bennett

It’s not a bad idea for Cambridge to have a professor of play, but learning is taxing and requires a teacher’s skills

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The announcement that the University of Cambridge has appointed the world’s first Lego professor of play gives new meaning to the phrase “red-brick university”. Professor Paul Ramchandani will lead a team “examining the importance of play in education”. And, presumably, building awesome spaceships that turn into Durham Cathedral.

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I have a one-year-old son who might agree; try as I might, I just cannot get him to recite Homer or parse a sonnet. I have, however, watched in childish joy as he tumbles through Duplo and teddy mountains, rolling in grass like an explorer on a new planet. It is a new planet – new to him. All he wants to do, it seems, is play.

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But is that all it is? Inside that head, inside that play, a world is being drawn like a map. He’s mopping up raw sensation and putting it into boxes and columns: “things that are good to eat”; “things I’m not allowed to touch”; “things I must have at all costs” (those last two being the same thing).

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He’s learning that random swirls of colour are faces, that running water sounds mean bath time, that things fall down (a lot, especially him), that effects seem to have causes and a million other things. In other words, he’s learning about the world. Not in a school, but in an outdoors classroom. Every parent knows how fascinating it is to watch this.

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Many people have theorised that this ability to learn is innate; that the joy we feel as children in play is something that should be nurtured and used to encourage not just infant self-education, but also all school learning. It’s an attractive sentiment. If all learning were as joyful as building cushion forts then we’d all be professors and classrooms would be a lot more comfortable.

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How many weeks of children’s lives have been wasted building a papier-mache volcano rather than learning about volcanos?

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Advocates of this approach – learning through play – have been around since the 19th century and you can see it clearly in the methods of schools such as Montessori and Steiner. It’s had a huge influence on early years education, for obvious reasons, but it’s often used in much later settings as a justification for things such as Minecraft lessons. In this hypothesis, much of what traditional schooling embodies is what is wrong with education itself. Play is self-directed; work is given to you. Play is enjoyable; work is often not. Play is spontaneous; work is planned and goal-oriented. Away with the tyranny of the expert teacher, the formal curriculum, the school rules! Learning through play will free the slaves of the classroom!

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But here’s the rub: it won’t. Play, it seems, is a very powerful vehicle for what we might call “folk” learning – the basic components of understanding reality. But it’s not so great once you want to do anything beyond that. Take catching a ball. In its first few comedic years, a child will learn to have a good idea of how far a ball can be thrown by hand and so on. Now underpinning all of that is Newtonian physics, ballistics and mathematics.

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But learning to catch won’t teach you anything concrete about those fields beyond the kind of things we can work out in our head. This may be an evolved trait. No matter how good a juggler or marksman you become you will never by yourself establish the laws of motion or the algorithm that maps the arc of a parabola. Or chemistry, English literature, geography or any other academic study that requires self-restraint and external teaching. Which is, basically, most of education past the age of four. No, it seems that teaching anything beyond folk learning takes instruction, usually in the form of a teacher, expert in their knowledge and expert in imparting it.

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And here’s another rub: play might be fun, but learning often isn’t. You just can’t avoid it: learning is often hard work. But aren’t most things worth doing? If we insist that learning must be pleasant, we’re a bit stuffed when it stops being fun or your mind wanders to boxed sets and social media.

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The £4m grant from Lego that created the professor’s chair also funds a research centre that aims to “ensure children are equipped with 21st-century skills like problem solving, team work and self-control”. Hang on. Those sound exactly like the kinds of skills people needed in… well, just about every century. The idea that the challenges of the future will require entirely new human qualities seems odd. For a start, how would we know? And given that we’re 17% into this new century, why is it we seem to be coping with the ones we already have? It’s almost as if the whole idea that there are such things as 21st-century skills is just naive, groovy brainstorming.

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This kind of research often sets out to prove what it has already decided is right. But learning through play is often a disastrous tactic with older children. How many weeks of children’s lives have been sacrificed on the altar of building a papier-mache volcano when they could have been just learning about volcanos? I remember being asked, as a student, to build a polystyrene mosque. Two weeks of witless melting to learn nothing but how to avoid burning myself on a hot wire cutter. Role plays about pirates that will somehow magically teach children about trade.

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All good fun, all learning lite. Learning through play becomes, without any effort, just play. When play becomes the vehicle of learning, the danger is you forget the wheels and focus on the fluffy dice. And when you try to teach children the same way infants learn, you suddenly find out why infants don’t write novels or fix engines.

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So I look forward to reading the no doubt completely impartial research that will emerge from the University of Lego, in much the same way I look forward to hearing from the Westlers hot dogs chair of vegetarianism. And if the chair isn’t built entirely from Lego bricks, then I’ll regard the whole enterprise as a missed opportunity.

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Tom Bennett has taught for 13 years and is the director of researchED

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