How do you think about the relationships between play and education? What justifies relating these two notions? How could an activity once associated with frivolity, uselessness, be considered, today, as a possible way for some learning? This book, in rejecting the agreed observations on the evidence of the educational value of play, analyzes the different ways of thinking about this relationship and shows the origin of the rupture that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, founded the contemporary association between play and education. Although this analysis is based on contributions from different authors, pedagogues, philosophers, psychologists, it also reveals, through the example of the French kindergarten, how the latter produced an absolutely specific discourse on play. When education is approached through play, the way of thinking about play is profoundly transformed. ...read more
