Why should school be fun? How can schools be more enjoyable for children?
School isn’t the most fun place for kids to spend their time, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Adam Grant argues that more schools should take the Finnish approach of playing more games and going on field trips.
Discover why school and learning should be fun for children of all ages.
Learning Should Make Practicing Enjoyable
According to Grant, to maximize your potential, you need to cultivate the passion and playfulness required to have fun while building your skills. Learning should be fun because becoming a master at anything requires you to devote countless hours of your life to practice. If you don’t enjoy yourself while practicing, at some point you’ll get burnt out and lose the energy and motivation to continue toward your goals.
Grant offers two ways to make your practice more fun. First, find a way to add variety to your routine. It’ll be much harder for you to get bored or become demotivated if you free yourself to switch between several kinds of practice in a given session. Frequently varying your practice also increases your ability to retain what you learn.
Second, find a way to track your performance and compare it to what you’ve done in the past. Invent rules for tracking your “points” and constantly seek to beat your high score. The pressure to “win” motivates you to focus and try your best during practice, accelerating your learning.
Grant explains that to add enough variety and exciting performance-tracking to your practice, you’ll typically need to completely reimagine your practice routine. For example, say you’re trying to get better at delivering presentations at work. Instead of repeatedly practicing in the mirror, you might decide to alternate between three kinds of practice:
- To improve your speaking skills, you read the scripts of TED Talks aloud and make as few mistakes as possible.
- To get better at organizing persuasive arguments, you start a competitive debate club with your friends and see how many debates you can win.
- To boost your confidence, you go out to bars or events and see how many strangers you can talk to in one night.
| Deconstructing Fun Grant’s advice to add variety and gamify your practice aligns with the basics of game design that Raph Koster outlines in A Theory of Fun for Game Design. According to Koster, humans are neurologically hardwired to enjoy learning new things because this trait enhanced our ancestors’ ability to survive and adapt. Therefore, fun activities always involve fitting new information into patterns you can understand and adapt to. By varying your practice routine, you constantly expose your brain to novel stimuli, which gives you bursts of dopamine (a feel-good brain chemical) as you learn and adapt to these stimuli in the short term. This keeps you from getting bored and helps prevent burnout. Over the long term, keeping score and trying to beat your personal bests also taps into the innate human drive for learning by serving as signs of progressive mastery. When you beat your high score, it shows you that you’re successfully adapting to this activity’s patterns across practice sessions—which provides more neurochemical rewards that keep you engaged. |
We Should Teach Students to Have Fun
Grant argues that learning should be fun on a systemic level: He asserts that if schools focused on showing students how to have fun while learning, more students would live up to their full potential.
One country taking this approach is Finland, where students in early education enjoy a wide range of playful activities instead of attending formal classes. By playing games, making crafts, and going on field trips, Finnish children come to love learning rather than see it as an obligation. Grant contends that this approach is one of the reasons that Finland boasts some of the highest standardized test scores in the world. As these children grow into young adults, their love of learning helps them pick up practical skills more easily.
Grant adds that schools should focus more on making reading enjoyable for children. Since reading is the gateway skill required to learn anything, teaching students that reading is fun helps motivate them to learn how to do anything they want to do. To help students like reading as much as possible, we should encourage them to enjoy whatever books they’re interested in rather than forcing them to read monotonous classics.
| How Play and Reading Enhance Learning Arguably, the Finnish style of education doesn’t just show children that learning is fun—children at play end up learning more, too. (This might further explain why Finnish students do consistently well on standardized tests.) In The Gardener and the Carpenter, Alison Gopnik argues that play is one of the primary ways that children naturally learn how to operate in the world. Activities like playing games, making crafts, and exploring new places on field trips all help children learn by giving them opportunities to steer their own growth. In contrast, educational methods that involve forcing children to learn in a specific way work against their natural learning styles, making these strategies less effective. Furthermore, Gopnik concurs with Grant that getting children interested in reading will pay off as they grow. She explains that reading fiction helps children develop the skill of counterfactual thinking: the ability to consider possibilities other than what’s real. This skill is necessary to challenge your thinking and deepen your understanding of the world. Reading also teaches children how to shift perspectives and empathize with other people. All these skills help children grow into more capable adults. Based on this rationale, it makes sense that we can help children learn these skills by encouraging them to read any book, not just the classics: Almost all books involve seeing the world through someone else’s eyes, which is direct training in counterfactual thinking and empathy. |
