Playing and Learning in the Streets

Play has always been under-rated when it comes to learning, especially in this country.

In the U.S., it seems like our children are either playing or learning. Surely, they can’t be doing both!

The reality is that, as many countries around the world already realize, children learn deeply during play.

The problem today is that many places for play have disappeared. One, most notably, is the neighborhood street. This past summer, The Atlantic published an article titled “What Adults Lost When Kids Stopped Playing in the Street.” Excerpts of the article follow:

“In the summer of 2009, Amy Rose and Alice Ferguson, two mothers living on Greville Road in Bristol, a midsize city in southwest England, found themselves in a strange predicament: They saw entirely too much of their kids. ‘We were going, like, Why are they here.?’ Rose told me. ‘Why aren’t they outside?’ The friends decided to run an experiment. They applied to shut their quarter-mile road to traffic for two hours after school on a June afternoon – not for a party or an event but just to let the children who lived there play. Intentionally, they didn’t prepare games or activities, Rose told me, as it would have defeated the purpose of the inquiry: ‘With time, space, and permission, what happens?’”

“The results were breathtaking. The dozens of kids who showed up had no problems finding things to do. One little girl cycled up and down the street ‘3,000 times,’ Rose recalled. ‘She was totally blissed out.’ Suddenly, the modern approach to children’s play, in which parents shuttle their kids to playgrounds or other structured activities, seemed both needlessly extravagant and wholly insufficient. Kids didn’t need special equipment or lessons; they just needed to be less reliant on their time-strapped parents to get outside.”

“The experiment also produced some unexpected results. As children poured into the street, some ran into classmates, only just then realizing that they were neighbors. Soon it became clear to everyone present that far more children were living on Greville Road than anyone had known. That session, and many more it prompted, also became the means by which adult residents got to know one another, which led to another revelation for Ferguson and Rose: In numerous ways, a world built for cars has made life so much harder for adults.”

“The dominance of cars has turned children’s play into work for parents, who are left coordinating and supervising kids into playgrounds and play dates. But it has also deprived adults of something more profound. Over the years, as Rose and Ferguson have expanded their experiment to other parts of the United Kingdom, neighborhoods across the country have discovered that allowing kids to play out in the open has helped residents reclaim something they didn’t know they were missing: the ability to connect with the people living closest to them.”

…

“Rose and Ferguson’s project on Greville Road is of course not the first or only effort to reclaim the streets for children. In the U.K., play streets emerged roughly a century ago as a sort of compromise in the process of booting kids off the street. But after peaking in the 1960s, they largely dwindled out, to be revived only in the late 2000s. New York has had a play-streets program since 1914, and Philadelphia for more than half a century – and recently, the idea has been taken up in other U.S. cities. Chicago launched a play-streets program in 2012, followed by Los Angeles in 2015; and initiative in Portland, Oregon, hosted its first events in 2023.”

“In the U.K., Rose, Ferguson, and their friend Ingrid Skeels expanded their experiment in 2011 by founding Playing Out, an organization that has helped residents on more than 1,000 streets in dozens of cities across the country set up their own play sessions. These typically last for two hours and occur weekly, biweekly, or monthly. And yes, as with any other sort of play these days, the process takes work: Residents who’d like to set up a play street must get buy-in from neighbors, agree on dates, book road closures well in advance, and recruit stewards to stand guard at either end of the block. Organizers are also working against the headwinds of a society unaccustomed to children playing in the street. Even when blocks are officially closed to traffic, stewards often have to address drivers frustrated that they can’t get through. Some residents ask why the kids can’t just go to the park, and they worry about the noise or what will happen to their cars. When Jo Chesterman, a Bristol-based mother of two, first broached the idea of a play session on her street several years ago, some neighbors, she gold me, seemed to worry ‘it was maybe going to be like Lord of the Flies.’”

“But the street outside a child’s home is very different from a playground or a private yard. It’s a space that connects one home to another and is used by all residents, regardless of age or whether they have kids. On the street, Chesterman told me, kids learn how to find the homes of other children within walking distance. They also encounter children outside their own age group and a broader variety of adults. Roses’ daughter, Kaya, who just graduated from university but was 8 at the time of the inaugural play street, told me that mixing with younger kids afforded her opportunities to win the trust of their parents, which she otherwise wouldn’t have had, and that ‘feeling like the adults trusted us to look after their kids…made us trust those adults as well,’ For the adults, Chesterman said, play street make it ‘easier to get to know everyone, rather than wait to bump into each other when your doing the recycling.’”

It’s silly to think that kids – our young learners – can’t become smarter and stronger anywhere they are in the world. The thought that kids must be in places called school to learn is preposterous.

As long as a young learner has a personalized plan, one that specifies what they want to learn, when they want to learn it, and how they will know if they did learn it, it really doesn’t matter where they are when the learning takes place – school, street, or otherwise.

Til tomorrow. SVB