Kappan authors on play and learning 

In May 1954, Walt Disney wrote in Kappan that “Fun and having fun is vital; it makes life with its inevitable burdens tolerable. Often I think it may provide the closest of all human bonds” (“Humor: An international sixth sense,” p. 328). Indeed, Kappan authors have generally agreed that having fun and playing in school are important. When play comes up in our pages, it’s usually depicted positively, as important to students’ mental health and as a means to promote student learning. Even so, articles dedicated to the topic of play are relatively rare.  

But it’s interesting to note that most of the articles that we have published on this topic appeared in the 1980s and later and tended to discuss the imperiled status of play in school. For example, in June 1982, Barbara Iverson bewailed the rigidity of contemporary classrooms: 

Play is important to the creative process, Iverson continued. When a person attempting to create something is stuck, they tend to abandon whatever logical process they had in place and freely play with ideas by daydreaming. In school, assignments that incorporate play are likely to hold students’ interest longer without being significantly less effective than direct teaching: