I love self-directed play. It’s my favorite kind of learning. But public school isn’t built for it.

Here’s Jacob Collier (“Gen Z Mozart” and the most creative person I’ve seen) talking about the value of play, and what life might look like if school promoted it:

The goal of self-directed play is to explore whatever is most meaningful or valuable to you, personally. Public school, by contrast, intends to provide the same knowledge to everybody. Since everybody needs to learn the same skills and information, we teach to a learning goal. This is teacher-directed learning rather than student-directed.

Like every profession, education goes through trends. Right now, there’s a pendulum swing in the direction of self-directed play called “discovery learning”. People are excited about this, and for good reason. But to be pragmatic, we should understand the full spectrum of learning possibilities, all the way from “teaching to a learning goal” to “self-directed play”.

Pros and cons of self-directed play

Pros (One source)	Cons
Following your interests is a great way to select what is most important for you. Different knowledge is valuable to different people. If you are interested in cars, there is a lot of value in learning more about them, because you might be happy working on cars in the future. People know very well what they are interested in and what bores them, and often following your interests can be a great guide.	You can’t control what the student learns. If you need them to reach a particular target, self-directed play is very unlikely to get them there.
It allows for self-paced learning. Students can choose an activity that is appropriate for them, which keeps them in their zone of proximal development. (They won’t always choose this, but they can.)	Sometimes you need to learn something that is, frankly, boring. Following your interests isn’t always best. As adults, we’ve all experienced our fair share of work that we have to force ourselves to do because if we don’t, something bad will happen. That’s just life, and self-directed learning doesn’t always point us in the direction of what we need until it’s too late.
It stimulates creativity and imagination. Learning how to perform a skill is not the same as learning to be creative. To be creative is to do your own thing, making decisions that others would not make for you.

Pros and cons of teaching to a learning goal

Pros	Cons
Equity. People starting from a disadvantage can be most quickly caught up to their peers when they are taught the most important information the most efficient way. Teaching towards a learning goal means everybody is provided a common base of shared knowledge to start from.	It can be boring! We sometimes teach students things they don’t care about. Occasionally this is a good thing; they might not care, but they need to know it anyway. Other times the student’s intuition is correct; this knowledge or skill really won’t benefit them, but we’re forcing them to learn it anyway. A lot of secondary angst happens here.
Efficiency. If there is certain knowledge that you know people will need, you can guide them toward the most valuable questions and the most successful answers extremely quickly.	Learning goals make it easy to emphasize the destination, when it’s often the journey that matters most. Particularly under a time crunch, teaching towards a learning target sometimes means we skip to the punchline without letting students discover the knowledge on their own. When they miss out on the journey, students often miss out on understanding why something matters and why one particular solution is better than other.
Uniformity. Sometimes society has conventions or knowledge where it’s useful to get everybody on the same page. Providing everyone with the same knowledge helps with social cohesion and communication.	Uniformity. There is value in diversity and in people having many different ideas. When we teach everybody the exact same thing, we lose out on other perspectives. There’s a mild brainwashing thing that can happen here. (Ask any student about “the mitochondria” and watch them wake up like a sleeper agent.)

Can we get the best of both worlds?

Self-directed play is the exact opposite of teaching to a learning goal. Discovery learning is our profession’s current best attempt at combining these two opposites.

In discovery-based learning, students are provided an environment or question that intends to lead them toward discovering a particular solution. The idea is that if you create the right environment, students will mostly all self-direct toward the goal you have for them. This sort of works, and in some cases it’s the best possible tool.

Use the right tool for the job

Hardcore proponents of discovery learning argue that it is always better than alternative methods, and should be used at all times. I don’t agree.

If I hold one radical idea about education, it’s that teachers should be pragmatic, judicious users of a wide variety of tools–not evangelists of just one. Different students and different topics require different treatment, and it’s wise to use many strategies appropriately.

However, I do believe that discovery learning provides benefits that traditional teaching doesn’t, and I approve of the pendulum swinging. But if you’re going to let students direct their own learning, you should go all the way.

In addition to teaching to a learning goal, public school should provide time and space for self-directed play. This means that some time should be set aside for students to do creative work that is not directed toward a particular goal. And other school time should remain goal-based and be taught using a variety of methods.

Radical discovery learning aims to get the best of both worlds at all times: self-directed learning that nevertheless always meets the teacher’s targets. This doesn’t work, and attempting to implement it results in constant tension and conflict. Instead, schools should implement both goal-based learning and self-directed play, applying different strategies at different times.