Opinion | A Block Is Never Just a Block: What Nursery Children Teach Us About Learning Through Play

Planned learning should remain open to the questions, interests and experiences children bring into it

If early childhood education is reduced to worksheets, early literacy and visible outcomes, we risk mistaking what is easy to measure for what is important to learn.

There is a peculiar question that follows children into school almost as soon as they are old enough to speak: What are they learning? We ask it of parents, teachers and, increasingly, of the children themselves. Are they recognising letters? Can they count? Can they write their names? Can they identify colours and shapes? Are they “school ready"? These questions are not unreasonable. But when asked too early, and too narrowly, they can obscure a more fundamental question: What does learning actually look like in the early years?

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For a three-year-old, learning is rarely a neat progression from instruction to answer. It is more likely to appear as an elaborate pretend game, a child watching another child before joining in, a block being transformed into a building, or a conversation that begins with Spider-Man and somehow arrives at ideas about good and evil. The difficulty is that much of this learning is difficult to display on a worksheet. And perhaps that is precisely why we underestimate it.

Early childhood education has historically occupied an uncomfortable position within formal schooling. We recognise childhood as a period of rapid development, yet we repeatedly attempt to organise it through the logic of later schooling. The pressure begins early: children are expected to demonstrate literacy, numeracy, writing and other recognisable academic competencies, at the cost of the less visible capacities that make later learning possible. The irony is that developmental research and educational thought have repeatedly told us that young children learn through experience, interaction, exploration, play and language. Yet educational practice can still treat these as preliminary activities, something children do before the “real learning" begins.

The foundational years demand a broader conception of learning precisely because children at this stage are constructing the foundations upon which later academic learning will depend. Their capacity to communicate, collaborate, regulate emotions, represent ideas in different forms such as through plasticine or drawings, ask questions and make connections is not separate from academic development. It is part of the ecology in which academic development becomes possible.

John Dewey’s understanding of education as rooted in experience reminds us that learning is not simply the transmission of information from teacher to child. Experience becomes educational when it contributes to growth and opens possibilities for further experience. For young children, this makes play particularly significant. Play is not merely an interval between lessons; in fact, it is one of the principal ways in which children encounter, test and reinterpret their surroundings. A child building something, pretending, sorting, experimenting or negotiating is actively making sense of experience.

Lev Vygotsky’s work takes this argument further by placing social interaction at the centre of cognitive development. Children do not develop their capacities in isolation. Their thinking is mediated through language, relationships, cultural tools and interactions with others. A child’s negotiation over a toy, therefore, can be a significant learning moment, not just a simple pause in what they are doing. It can become an encounter with turn-taking, perspective, language, social rules and cooperation. When children attempt to resolve a disagreement, they are not simply learning how to behave; they are learning how to live with other people.

The question, then, is not whether such encounters constitute learning. The more important question is whether our educational systems are prepared to recognise them as learning.

Indian educational ideas remind us that early childhood should not be treated as a miniature version of formal schooling. Gijubhai Badheka’s work challenged rigid and authoritarian approaches to children’s education and placed importance on freedom, affection, stories, play and the child’s experience. Tarabai Modak’s experiments in early childhood education similarly demonstrated the value of developing pedagogical practices that emerged from children’s surroundings and lived realities rather than simply imposing formal school structures upon them. Their work invites us to consider what early education might look like if the child were treated not as an incomplete student waiting to become school-ready but as an........

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