✒️:. Manzoor Ahmad Nadaf
In today’s educational discourse, one sentence is repeated with great ease:
“Education is a form of coercion, and today’s student is not ready to accept it; the modern child wants entertainment, therefore teaching should be done through play.”
This statement appears modern and progressive on the surface, but in reality it often serves as a comforting illusion and a superficial suggestion, because a practical and implementable curriculum rarely accompanies it.
Education has never been mere entertainment, nor has it ever been pure coercion. Education is, in essence, a process of self-discipline, continuity, and mental effort. The real problem is not that children want to play; the problem is that we have begun to treat play as a substitute for education. Even when play is included in the curriculum, it should remain a means, not the goal. It is easy to say “teach through play,” but to take even a single purely academic skill and design a complete, gradual, and applicable curriculum around it requires serious intellectual effort—an effort that is often conveniently ignored.
For example, if we take a basic academic skill like addition in mathematics, simply showing colorful blocks or cards does not qualify as meaningful play-based learning. What is required is a structured educational plan. In the first stage, the child should develop the habit of counting objects. In the second stage, the child should learn to combine objects within a limited range. In the third stage, the same activity should gradually be transferred into symbolic language (numbers and signs). Finally, the child should be brought to the stage of solving problems on paper. If play does not guide the child to this final stage, it remains mere amusement, not education.
Similarly, in language learning, if “word formation” is reduced to pictorial games alone, and the child is not guided toward sentence construction, correct spelling, and written expression, then we abandon the real objective and turn the path itself into the destination. Play is beneficial only when it leads the child, almost unnoticed, toward serious learning—rather than making the child permanently dependent on entertainment.
The real question, therefore, is not whether play should be included or not. The real questions are:
Does the activity have a clear academic objective?
Is the skill measurable?
Does it enable progression within the curriculum?
If these questions are left unanswered, “teaching through play” remains nothing more than an attractive slogan. The natural demand of education is that it may begin gently, but it must ultimately teach the learner effort, focus, and responsibility. Thus, the issue is not the child’s lack of interest, but our own intellectual complacency, which hides the weight of serious education behind colorful words.
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