Wednesday, November 13, 2024

Comments

2 Responses to “FREEDOM TO LEARN: The roles of play and curiosity as foundations for learning”
  1. Dina says:

    Hi,

    Interesting piece. Thanks for sharing.

    While the title of the article is misleading and implies a conclusion not supported by the evidence, the data is compelling; particularly with regard to the timeframe referenced.

    1984-2008.

    Since public school has been a constant throughout that period, there must be other factors at play and I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that the expansion of television programming is producing the disturbing results the author of the study noted.

    Indeed, check out this brief discussion of the history of cable television. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080512044014AAY4VoZ

    The push to make cable television (and its 100’s of channels of passive “entertainment”) available to more people began, coincidentally, or perhaps not so coincidentally, in the 1980’s. When I was a kid (and, boy, am I dating myself), we only had basic television. Four or five channels and if there was nothing of interest, we had to find something else to do. These days, kids can dedicate hours to just channel surfing, flipping from one mindless sequence of nonsense to another. And way too many do.

    So, let us diagnose the problem correctly. There is no doubt children are more “free” (however you define that) today than they were in the 1980’s, in terms of the atrocious lack of parenting that is epidemic these days. But what is new is the increasing amount of time that children spend indoors having thoughts passively planted into their brains. It is no wonder they are then unable to conjure up thoughts of their own.

  2. Linda says:

    Yes I am sure that television and other close-ended entertainment has a profound affect as well.

    Thank you for contributing!

    Hope you and your family are well.

    x

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