Following a Treasure Map

One of the children, probably inspired by a movie, used a stick to draw a "treasure map" in the sand pit. Other children gathered around as he told the story of what "treasure" is, what a "map" is, and the adventure upon which they were going to embark.

The treasure, he explained, was a chest full of gold and jewels. Some of the kids wanted to know what a chest was. Others wondered, knowing it was all pretend, why the treasure couldn't be ice cream or Pretty Ponies. The concept of the map was difficult. It wasn't even clear to me that the boy drawing the map really understood what he was trying to describe. Although he assured the crew that treasure was buried (at least one child needed that word defined as well) somewhere on the playground, the map included a coconut tree and giant boulders, features that I expect were drawn from the movie landscape. 

"Let's pick some coconuts when we get there," enthused one pirate. "Pirate," in this case, had been defined as "guys who go around and find treasure."

These kinds of scenarios are the gold standard of play-based learning. I'm sure there are many preschool educators who would have felt compelled, in the name of learning, to step in with corrections and clarifications, or worse. In similar play scenarios, I've watched well-meaning adults engage in what they think of as "scaffolding," by offering impromptu lessons about, say, maps or pirate lore or ship rigging, in the hopes of "deepening" or "extending" the learning. The problem is that even if the kids are willingly diverted, even if the educator is engaging, we've now had the children's play taken over by an adult. In a moment, we seen the children turn away from one another, away from their own questions, explorations, speculations, and ad hoc conclusions based on dialog and agreement. They are now relying on the adult for questions and answers, rather than continuing to engage in the highest pursuit of human intellectual endeavor.

There are those who would argue that this game is, at best, a waste of time, that these children playing their fantastical games of imagination, getting the facts wrong, playing with wrong ideas, and even spreading them amongst themselves, may be learning, but that it's false knowledge that will somehow have to be undone. But that, I think, is a misunderstanding of what play is all about, and, for that matter, what learning is all about.

"When we talk about the big bang or the fabric of space time, what we are doing is not a continuation of the free and fantastic stories that humans have told nightly around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years," writes physicist Carlo Rovelli in his book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. "It is the continuation of something else: of the gaze of those same men in the first light of day looking at tracks left by antelope in the dust of the savannah — scrutinizing and deducting from the details of reality in order to pursue something that we can’t see directly but can follow the traces of. In the awareness that we can always be wrong, and therefore ready at any moment to change direction if a new track appears; but knowing also that if we are good enough we will get it right and will find what we are seeking. This is the nature of science."

The birth of the universe and the nature of space and time are every bit as much mysteries to physicists as treasure maps and pirates are to these preschoolers. What drives scientists is the same thing that drives playing children: they are motivated by the mystery, by their own questions, and by the freedom to seek answers. Too often, educators, in our commitment to facts and truth and teaching, take over the learning by providing shortcuts to answers, stripping away the mystery that has driven humans since the beginning of time. We forget that getting it wrong is every bit as important to this process as being right.

The job in life is not to know stuff, but rather to figure stuff out so that we will then know. And we get there through play.

The pirates decided that one of the playground cedars was, for their purposes, a coconut tree. A stack of shipping pallets were the boulders. And off they went on their treasure hunt, following mysterious tracks like their ancestors did.

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