What is Child-Centered Education? Exploring Our Unique Approach 

Principle 1 - Play and Curiosity

Last week as the Nursery and Kindergarten children were playing on the tire swing side of our playground, I watched intently as one of the youngest Nursery students (aged 2.5) stood alone on the tire swing as it spun rapidly. She was using all her grip strength to hold on to the tire swing chains. I watched as she leaned forward, backwards, and side to side. She bent her knees and stood back up straight, all the while, anchoring on to the chains with her small but mighty hands. She didn’t notice me watching - in fact, she didn’t notice anything going on around her. She was in a deep flow state of learning. The only things that existed for her in that moment were her motion through space and the effect her motion had on that of the tire swing. Her behavior was broadcasting her inner curiosity. She was asking the simple question “what happens to the swing when I move this way, and that?”

Every day in a small reading group of six and seven year-olds, the children play a word game by arranging letter cards to create short words for each other to read. Some of them enjoy arranging the letters randomly to create nonsense words. This strategy usually gets a good laugh out of the group when the words are extra silly!  Some of the children prefer to take time to quietly sound out the word they want their friends to try reading, and then spell it carefully with the letter cards. They are building their reading skills through play! 

Play-based learning is nothing new to our little school in Yellow Springs, Ohio - but recent publications such as  A Pedagogy Of Play: Supporting playful learning in classrooms and schools

indicate that the culture is catching up with how we’ve been teaching children for over a hundred years! 

https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable-knowledge/23/05/embracing-learning-through-play

Play and curiosity are the primary principles of our child-centered approach. Learning through play is what we do at the Antioch School every day! In a way, being playful and being curious are “default settings” for children. It is in our nature to seek experiences that are fulfilling and bring us joy. It’s also in our nature to seek answers to our questions! There is no finer motivation to learn than our own innate wonder at the world and everything in it. 

As generations of Antioch School teachers have phrased this principle so succinctly: 

“The Antioch School is a place where play is seen to be the finest natural way of learning. Play is the center from which children learn how to get along with one another, to know themselves, and learn about the world around them. Learning through play and being curious about the world are seen as essential parts of being human. They are to be nurtured for their own sake, and as the foundation upon which a child's continued learning will be built.”