Henry Caldwell Cook (1886–1939) was a British educator known for his book The Play Way, which contended that doing was a better learning method than reading and listening, and that youth study through play.

Early life and career

Henry Caldwell Cook was born in Liverpool in 1886.^[1] He attended a St. John's Wood prep school, Highgate School in London, and Lincoln College in Oxford.^[1] He received second class honours from the school of English language and literature in 1909 and an Oxford Diploma in Education with distinction in 1911.^[1]

Caldwell Cook served as the English master at the Perse School in Cambridge from 1911 to 1915 and 1919–1933, and served his country with the Artists Rifles division in France.^[1] During this time, he wrote Littleman's Book of Courtesy (1914) and The Play Way, an Essay in Educational Method (1917), his magnum opus.^[1] Caldwell Cook saw the current schooling system to impede "true education".^[1] He used drama to teach English,^[2] building a room, called 'the Mummery', in his school based on an Elizabethan theatre, and students improvised plays based on dramatic literature.^[3] This idea had been used and publicised by Harriet Finlay-Johnson.^[4] He called this method the "play-way".^[2] The Play Way, the book, argued that learning came from experience doing instead of from listening and reading: "The natural means of study in youth is play."^[1] The claim was debated for a generation.^[1] The book began as articles for The New Age in 1914 destined for the "Papers for the Present" series, but became a book reflecting on his experience at Perse.^[5] A 1922 unpublished Board of Education report made the recommendation to not support grants for his program or its imitators.^[2]

In 1939, he died a bachelor "in comparative obscurity".^[1]