In a recent post for his blog, “Play in Mind,” historian and essayist Scott Eberle defends play as a key opportunity for learning, not just for kids but for people of every age. Play, he maintains, is how we free up our own creativity. That means confronting ideas and issues — sometimes of the most serious sorts — with an open-minded, proactive, and provisional spirit.

Motivated, playful thinking may be rambunctious, even non-logical. It veers in uncharted directions. It solicits contributions from everyone. It promotes the belief that people can make sense of the worlds they live in and, just as determinedly, unmake those understandings.

The real enemies of play — and of sense-making — are not irreverence, awkwardness, and exuberance. They are pessimism, dogmatism, and fear. In the academy, and elsewhere, we should keep conversations open.

Eberle’s writing encourages me to offer some general comments about the ways play helps us learn.

As a long-time member of the Association for the Study of Play, I am aware of the centrality of the play-learning connection for that group, many of whom are education scholars and advocates for children’s well-being. They support both free play, what kids do on their own, and play-based classroom strategies directed by teachers. They do so in an academic climate characterized increasingly by administrative regulation of instruction, end-of-year exams, and curtailments of “recess.”

Notably, those advocates don’t claim that play is the only way to teach and learn. Instead, they see it as a helpful companion and support in the learning process, one way to energize people and make them manage their own life trajectories. Sharing that viewpoint, I develop below some of the general contributions of play to human development.

What Is Play?

It’s much easier to list playful activities than it is to define play or enumerate its characteristics. Think of flying kites, building and demolishing sandcastles, and pushing toy cars around the floor. Some play is an attempt to control one’s body—running, jumping, dancing, and the like. Play encompasses a vast range of sports and games. Count also the playing of musical instruments and theatrical entertainment. People play when they make jokes, do silly impersonations, and gently tease one another. Many forms of play are physical (How long can you hold your breath?). Others are mental (Can you pronounce people’s names backward?). Scientists, philosophers, and poets may play as they consider their options. Indeed, most things people do can be turned into play if they frame those activities in a certain way and subject them to the spell of their own imaginations. What is that spell?

As I’ve detailed in other writing, play is behavior that is transformative and consummatory. That is, when people play, they transform circumstances to suit their own visions, but they do this in events with carefully restricted formats and consequences. Commonly, play develops as a contest between opposing forces or wills. Partly for that reason, the outcome is never entirely predictable. Most play events are episodic, with repeatable segments like moves, rounds, and innings. Critically, play prizes self-regulation. That is, players typically supervise the action, determining its aims, rules, boundaries, membership criteria, and endings. Psychic satisfaction, understood as fun, is a key motivation. Players feel themselves under their own recognizance. They move in and out of control. Why is an activity of this sort beneficial, to learning and to life?

How Play Supports Learning

More than four decades of teaching have taught me that there are many ways to learn, and many kinds of knowledge. Learning information is different from learning skills, which again is different from learning values and norms. Some people are proficient at acquiring and manipulating abstract symbols; others flourish with image-based thinking and strategies that combine activity and knowledge. Commonly, learners need to be “ready for” certain kinds of information. Ideally, they take ownership of those understandings at some point. How long they hold those ideas, abilities, and images is yet another matter. All of us have crammed material for a Monday morning test, only to have it evaporate by week’s end.

Nevertheless, we know learning occurs. And it begins when we commit ourselves to scrutinizing something. Somehow, we determine that the thing we’ve noticed is interesting and pertinent to us. Then, we start to think about why it exists as it does and what its consequences may be. Again, as Eberle insists, the real enemy of learning is the unwillingness to become engaged, to shut down inquiry prematurely.

Play is helpful because it encourages people to connect to the world around them, to poke and prod that world to learn its secrets, and to assess what they can do with it. Players start by confronting external occurrences; they end up learning about themselves.

Play frames events as problems or challenges. There are people who can learn by “absorbing” information in a relatively passive way. But most of us do better by setting up the matter as a problem to be addressed. Play does that. When we play, we identify and confront occurrences. We see what we can do with them, twisting and turning their features. Often, we seek specific outcomes or answers, whether those be a single correct response or an array of solutions. Players find pleasure in their puzzling, sometimes shouting answers out or sharing them with others. The inquiry becomes a game.

Play invites full-bodied involvement. Again, who hasn’t learned by quietly reading something, perhaps taking notes or highlighting certain passages? However, we can also make learning a wider form of personal expression. Instead of silently memorizing that poem we can shout its lines aloud or enact it dramatically. We can reconstitute that math problem by sorting equivalently sized units, like little blocks or beans from a jar. Engineering and art problems invite model-making. Even debates may profit from having discussants stand in different sections of the room, perhaps moving from one spot to another as they hear others speak.

Again, there is an important place for abstract symbolizing and quiet musing. But play commonly converts thinking into acting. It lets us “see and hear” what we are doing. Frequently enough, it opens our thought processes to others. We remember their feedback and, more generally, our shifting social position in the development of ideas.

Play emphasizes self-directed activity. Everyone can profit from expert guidance, from listening, watching, and imitating. Still, we don’t fully learn something until we make it our own. That means assimilating the information in our own terms, connecting it to other things we know, and applying it to our life circumstances.

Famously, players want to do rather than listen or watch. Bicycles, computers, and cell phones are just elegant contraptions until we get our hands on them. Then we can assess their operations and implications, especially what they can do for us. I won’t deny that this self-centered approach has its limitations. But it does mean that we will keep fiddling at the matter before us, at least as long as it gives us satisfaction to do so.

Play boundaries create a space for exploration. Most things we do have repercussions, sometimes quite serious ones. Our conduct at work can get us fired, or promoted. Insulting behavior is remembered. Poor performance on a test endangers our passing the course. Typically, play events are different in that the meanings of the behaviors are contained, or left on the field. To be sure, we recall what goes on there, but play tends to have recognized beginnings and ends. Usually, there’s a chance for everyone to start afresh.

More than that, pre-existing relationships and concerns are to be set aside with the advent of play. Players willingly accept strange regulations, put on fanciful costumes, employ curious equipment and language, and occupy exotic spaces. All of this promotes a sense of separation. It also gives participants permission to try out novel strategies. Failure, and success, are fleeting affairs.

Play honors inter-subjectivity and builds relationships. Because players provoke reactions from the world and calibrate their responses accordingly, they build relationships in ways that transcend mute observation. Climbing a mountain helps us know it. Completing a difficult crossword acquaints with the logic of that construction, and with its maker.

Add to this that many forms of play involve other people. We compete against them; we form alliances. Sometimes, the whole point of the play is to see what we can do collectively. In every case, we learn about ourselves — and especially about our own character and abilities — by comparing ourselves to those people.

Some of them offer worthy models for our own development. Others show us what not to do. At best, they make clear that accomplishment and knowledge-making is a collaborative enterprise.

It may be that what one really learns from play is less any specific idea or content than a way of managing inquiry. So be it. Play’s open-minded, proactive spirit is essential to making sense of a changing world.