The Trouble with Educational Toys

Published by Dominic Donaldson in Family, 5 months 4 weeks 1 day 21 hours 26 minutes 33 seconds ago

There is a growing enthusiasm for educational toys. They comes in all shapes and sizes and provide undeniably clever ways of tricking kids into learning through the process of play, but is this the kind of thing we should want for our children?

Various psychologists encourage various play activities as a rich source of learning. They can stimulate the mind, improve physical fitness and help kids to develop their own set of social skills. However, there is an argument for saying that this removes the fun out of play time. It is after all supposed to be a time of relaxation and enjoyment. If the children ever get wind of the fact that they are being educated by stealth imagine how much that will spoil their fun.

Looking back through the mists of time at my own childhood and it soon becomes clear that this is by no means a new phenomenon. Grownups have been trying this sneak tactic for decades.

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I grew up at a time when educational toys had to react to a host of emerging technologies. We were the first generation to truly embrace the joys of computer games. Every kid had a pocket game in his bag and if you were very lucky a few choice games loaded onto a BBC Micro at home. Rich kids were allowed something wonderful called a ZX Spectrum. However I was not so lucky. But that didn't matter because I could waste hours on space invaders, packman or indeed anything else I could find. My parents decided to take action and turned to a new generation of educational toys - the learning computer game. We were bought, and encouraged to play, something called Calculation Rally. This had all the exhilaration of rally racing combined with the joy of mathematics.

Unsurprisingly I was not a fan and the games cassette suffered a mysterious and unexplained accident. To this day it has never been explained, but the automatic distrust of educational toys has remained with me to this day.

The truth is parents can become overly worried about play time. In reality all play serves as a form of learning. That's not to say educational toys do not have their place. However, they must get their priorities right. In other words they should be about fun first and foremost with any learning benefit serving only as a by-product. Otherwise the so-called plaything will inevitably meet with a grizzly end.

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