Peter Gray

The kids were playing with dugout canoes, um, and so on and so forth.

They played at the games and music and art of the culture and not because anybody was requiring them to do so, but because it just seemed apparently natural for them to do that.

And, um,

What the anthropologists pointed out is they would play at these things and eventually they were actually doing these things.

The play would merge into adult-like activity.

So there was no real difference between what you're doing when you're playing and what you're doing when you are an adult actually doing this thing that you were playing at before.

So this was very interesting to me.

That's a very important observation that

These are all band cultures, so they're relatively small.

Even if you wanted to just hang out with kids your own age, there wouldn't be enough.

So you're always playing with kids who are both older and younger than yourself.

So a typical play group might be kids from age 4 to 12 or age 8 to 16, all playing together.

But when children are playing across age,

The younger children are always learning from the older children.

They're being boosted up to higher levels of activity.

And the older children are in very important ways learning from younger children.

They're learning how to be leaders.

They're learning how to be caretakers.

They're learning in some sense how to be teachers as they're explaining to the younger children how to do whatever it is that they're doing.

I could really run through all of the basic skills that children have to develop in any culture in order to succeed.