Playing in Pedagogy students’ discourses: suspended certainties

Abstract This article analyzes a series of speeches about playing, produced by Pedagogy students at a university in southern Brazil. Whereas the National Curriculum Guidelines for Early Childhood Education (2009) sets playing as one of the axes of the curriculum for this stage of basic education, the question proposed to students was: what is the purpose of play? The analysis, inspired by the perspectives of Philosophy and Sociology of Childhood, found the recurrence of the following ideas: children today do not play anymore; children are born already playing; playing allows knowing children better; a child who does not play does not learn; you cannot play only for the sake of it; playing is the best medicine. This research recommends the need to discuss these views, opening the perspective for the production of other positions about playing, deriving from, perhaps, what children themselves would say about it.