[Public Voices]The Most Human Way to Learn for the Future: Play

Welcoming the Passage of the "Infant Private Education Ban" Bill

A Paradigm Shift in Early Childhood Education in the Age of AI

Expanding Learner Agency and Transformative Competencies

In the 2024 film "Makgeolli Will Tell You," the main character, 11-year-old elementary school student Dongchun, endures a grueling schedule of private education without understanding why he has to attend so many academies. What once seemed to be only a product of cinematic imagination has become a reality in 2025 with the so-called "4-year-old and 7-year-old tests," highlighting the shocking spread of excessive early learning even into infancy in our society. As the fever for private education shakes up children's daily lives and threatens their basic rights, which they should naturally enjoy, it was an appropriate decision for the National Assembly to pass a bill prohibiting private education for infants to ensure their healthy growth and developmental rights.

Behind the overheated private education lies parental anxiety. In our educational environment, where academic fervor is unusually high, survival in competition is essential, and the entrance exam system is highly hierarchical, it is difficult to say that parental anxiety itself is wrong. The real problem is that parents try to address their anxieties by pushing children into subject-based early learning in Korean, English, mathematics, and other areas starting in infancy. As a result, children first learn a sense of superiority and competitiveness under pressure to "learn faster" and "learn more." When they fail to meet parental expectations, children label themselves as "failures" or "dropouts," leading to a sense of defeat.

At this point, we need to consider why free "play" for young children is so valuable for learning. Italian educator Loris Malaguzzi said that children possess "a hundred languages." This means that children understand and express the world not only through speech and writing, but also through gestures, play, drawing, imagination, storytelling, and countless other ways. How many of these languages are we currently allowing young children to use? Private education that prepares children in advance only puts them on a predetermined path at a set pace, dictating what, how, and at what speed they should learn. Within this system, children learn only not to make mistakes, while opportunities for independent exploration and self-expression gradually disappear. To borrow Malaguzzi's words, most of children's "hundred languages" are quietly vanishing.

For young children, play is not a break from learning but life itself. At times, it may seem slow or even inefficient. Children repeat the same actions and sometimes go off in unexpected directions. Yet, it is precisely through these processes that they find their own ways and generate new ideas. Through play, they learn to communicate with others, regulate their emotions, and cope with unforeseen situations. The true value of play lies not in getting the right answers, but in the process of discovering "how did I come to understand this on my own?"

Especially for future generations who must coexist with artificial intelligence (AI), the value of play becomes even more essential. In an era where discovering new meanings and reconstructing relationships is more important than simply arriving at correct answers, "play-based education" is not just a change in method but a fundamental paradigm shift in education. This aligns with the "learner agency" and "transformative competencies" emphasized by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Ultimately, children's play must be restored to the heart of education as the most human way of learning. I hope that our society will fully understand and support the value of play so that our children can develop the strength to communicate with the world and shape their own lives through play.

O Chae-sun, Professor at Korea National University of Education (Former President of the Korean Association for Early Childhood Education Curriculum)

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.