Message from the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (PaCET) for Sunday Meeting 6th April 2025

Dear Friends,

Advices and Queries 19 says ‘Rejoice in the presence of children and young people in your meeting and recognise the gifts they bring………Are you ready to learn from them?…….’

I’ve been reading Free to Learn, a well researched book about education and play by US academic Peter Gray. Apparently children learn most efficiently what they need for life in their particular culture, when they are left to play in mixed age groups with no adult intervention.

To illustrate this, he explains that about 25 years ago, a businessman in India experimented by installing and switching on a computer on the outside wall of the building where he worked, facing one of the poorest slums in New Delhi, where most children were unschooled and illiterate and had never seen a computer. He observed and recorded the results.

Children, mostly aged between 7 and 13, quickly began to investigate it, discovering by playing with it that they could  make changes. To cut a long story short, they shared their experiences with other local children, and within days (with no adult input) were playing music and drawing with Microsoft Paint. With internet connection they learned to search the web. Through their interactions with the machine and the internet some began to learn to read in their own languages. They created and used email accounts – still with no adult input. The guy who had set it up repeated the venture in other places, and reckoned that for each machine, within three months of set-up, 300 children had become computer literate simply by playing. From scratch. All with no adult input.

Research has shown that a playful approach, free from goals and assessments, to what we call ‘work’, produces more efficient learning, and better outcomes  both for children and for adults. Goals, assessments, expectations of failure/success, all inhibit us from achieving our potential.

Perhaps in addition to ‘scratching at the surface’ of today’s huge and scary problems, we could initiate a playful revolution in the way we live. Who knows what we might learn and achieve simply by having fun together?

Pat Price-Tomes

Quakers value diversity. We share this Friend’s message in the hope that it will speak to others.
PaCET: Patricia Cockrell, David Hitchin, Sharon Krummel, Tim Pitt-Payne, Caroline Pybus, Theresa Samms