The Play Deficit

      Both Rosin and Gray believe that freedom is key to child growth and development. Both believe that freedom will make children grow up without needing to rely on adults. They both believe that adults play too much of a role in the lives of kids these days, with Gray citing how “pickup games” have transferred into leagues run by adults with adults coaching and officiating the games. The main theme of these two articles is that kids are losing their independence, and the authors are looking at attempts of trying to bring back a time where kids learned ways of being independent. Gray rose points during his article about how the education establishment really only focuses on getting test scores up. People don’t learn life skills in their classes, they learn about their classes specifically to score well on the tests to prove they understand the material that was given to them. Many students lose out on skills because they never got to have certain experiences as children. Something interesting about Gray’s article was that he talked about the Sudbury Village School, which is actually in my hometown. It isn’t that well known in my town, I had never heard of it before, and most of my friends hadn’t heard of it either. One of the most powerful quotes from Grays article for myself was “You can’t teach creativity.” It really shows that kids need to be able to experience life in order to think outside of the box, instead of becoming another cog in the machine of administrational education.