The idea that children learn through play is far from new. Plato said that “the most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.” Much later, in the 1700s, Swiss-born Renaissance philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau championed the idea that all education of children should be based on play in his groundbreaking treatise Émile, or On Education. “Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it,” he famously wrote,
