Three Rs plus playful

There has not been such a burst of interest in plans and programmes in South Africa’s education system for a long time. From preschool to university, practitioners, researchers and opinionistas are talking about the fourth industrial revolution (4IR). It makes sense that the place to start preparing for a life with artificial intelligence is the school.

What must happen before we can even think of primary schools doing that? The minister of basic education, Angie Motshekga, appeared to strike the right chord when she said to journalists at a recent meeting: “We must get the basics right first.”

And the basics are the three Rs. Imagine what adventures children can have with coding if they can read well and grasp maths in some depth. And just think of how helpful it could be for children if they had some sense of the nature of science when they start designing and making things on devices.

But what about the four Cs — critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and communication — that are crucial for life in the 4IR and which my colleague Sarah Gravett referred to in an article in the Mail & Guardian (“Industry 4.0 is being taken seriously”, January 18)? How does one educate for critical thinking and problem-solving, creativity and innovation, collaboration and teamwork, communication and information literacy?

In our research centre at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) Soweto campus, we have learned a few valuable lessons about the four Cs: children are creative and innovative, they can solve problems, they can think (very) critically and they are keen communicators.

By the time they enter school, they are already playfully engaging with the four Cs at their level of development. They have already created playthings and have made up their own games, collaborating with their peers and siblings. They have solved the problems they face in their play world and they have learned how to communicate — often in different languages.

So, what goes wrong when they go to school? Why does the future for the grade 1 class of 2019 look bleak?

The grade 1 class of 2019 are perfectly good citizens of our times, ready to design robots and to engage with machine learning. They have, by virtue of the evolution of our species, developed brain power that can, ultimately, live with algorithms; these little people have human intelligence.

What they don’t have is knowledge and skills that are very recent in human history — reading and mathematics. They have to learn to read and to make their world mathematical. Someone has to teach them. It does not happen naturally.

It is only recently that our brains have had to “recircuit” their visual powers to learn to read. And it is only recently that we started structuring the world mathematically.

Cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, of the Collège de France in Paris, has written two compelling books about this learning. He writes convincingly about the challenges of growing from being the playful toddler to the serious child student of the alphabet and of number.

Contemporary young humans learn because they are instructed in some structured way. Such learning does not happen spontaneously, as play does. It is organised and it is assessed regularly to find out how they are progressing.

There is not much time in school for spontaneous, imaginative play. This means there is less time to create, to design, to solve childlike problems, such as where to hide when playing hide-and-seek and how to manage peers in a world of joint fantasy. Children’s spontaneous play has all the characteristics of the four Cs.