Let the Children Play

How More Play Will Save Our Schools and Help Children Thrive

By: Pasi Sahlberg, William Doyle

Narrated by: Randye Kaye

Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's Summary

Play is how children explore, discover, fail, succeed, socialize, and flourish. It is a fundamental element of the human condition. It's the key to giving schoolchildren skills they need to succeed - skills like creativity, innovation, teamwork, focus, resilience, expressiveness, empathy, concentration, and executive function. Expert organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Centers for Disease Control agree that play and physical activity are critical foundations of childhood, academics, and future skills - yet politicians are destroying play in childhood education and replacing it with standardization, stress, and forcible physical restraint, which are damaging to learning and corrosive to society.

But this is not the case for hundreds of thousands of lucky children who are enjoying the power of play in schools in China, Texas, Oklahoma, Long Island, Scotland, and in the entire nation of Finland. In Let the Children Play, Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish educator and scholar, and Fulbright Scholar William Doyle make the case for helping schools and children thrive by unleashing the power of play and giving more physical and intellectual play to all schoolchildren.

©2019 Pasi Sahlberg and William Doyle (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Painful.

I found this to be extremely repetitive... basically the title restated differently for hours and hours... I was paid by my job to listen to it and still found it a painful waste of time despite my strong agreement with the concept...

What a wonderful and helpful book for anyone involved in childhood.

An inspirational yet sobering look at how far we have fallen from allowing children to be children......and what we can do to restore a level of integrity back into the way we do school. Hugely interesting and written by people with a passion for children getting the best deal out of life in all levels. So much is based around the incredible and brave work that has gone on in places like Finland (where Pasi Sahlberg is from) but also countries and states in America where they have been brave enough to try a more child centred approach. An evidence-based (the size of the bibliography/reference section is impressive) and convincing argument to let the children play. You get used to the slightly robotic narration and actually appreciate the clarity in the end. Excellent.