How children’s ‘play’ is being sneakily redefined

This was written by Alfie Kohn, the author of 12 books about education and human behavior, including “The Schools Our Children Deserve,” “The Homework Myth,” and the newly published“Feel-Bad Education . . . And Other Contrarian Essays on Children & Schooling.” He lives (actually) in the Boston area and (virtually) at www.alfiekohn.com. This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at the Coalition of Essential Schools Fall Forum in Providence, RI, on Nov. 12, 2011.

By Alfie Kohn

* Children should have plenty of opportunities to play.

* Even young children have too few such opportunities these days, particularly in school settings.

These two propositions — both of them indisputable and important — have been offered many times.[1]  The second one in particular reflects the “cult of rigor” at the center of corporate-style school reform.  Its devastating impact can be mapped horizontally (with test preparation displacing more valuable activities at every age level) as well as vertically (with pressures being pushed down to the youngest grades, resulting in developmentally inappropriate instruction).  The typical American kindergarten now resembles a really bad first-grade classroom.  Even preschool teachers are told to sacrifice opportunities for imaginative play in favor of drilling young children until they master a defined set of skills.

As with anything that needs to be said — and isn’t being heard by the people in power — there’s a temptation to keep saying it.  But because we’ve been reminded so often of those two basic contentions aboutplay, I’d like to offer five other propositions on the subject that seem less obvious, or at least less frequently discussed.

1.  “Play” is being sneakily redefined. Whenever an educational concept begins to attract favorable attention, its name will soon be invoked by people (or institutions) even when what they’re doing represents a diluted, if not thoroughly distorted, version of the original idea.  Much that has been billed as “progressive,” “authentic,” “balanced,” “developmental,” “student-centered,” “hands on,” “differentiated,” or “discovery based” turns out to be discouragingly traditional.  So it is with play:  “Most of the activities set up in ‘choice time’ or ‘center time’ [in early-childhood classrooms] and described as play by some teachers, are in fact teacher-directed and involve little or no free play, imagination, or creativity,” as the Alliance for Childhood’s Ed Miller put it.[2]  Thus, the frequency with which people still talk about play shouldn’t lead us to conclude that all is well.

 

2. Younger and older children ought to have the chance to play together. Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston College, points out that older kids are uniquely able to provide support — often referred to as “scaffolding” — for younger kids in mixed-age play.  The older children may perform this role even better than adults because they’re closer in age to the younger kids and also because they don’t “see themselves as responsible for the younger children’s long-term education [and therefore] typically don’t provide more information or boosts than the younger ones need. They don’t become boring or condescending.”[3]

 

3.  Play isn’t just for children. The idea of play is closely related to imagination, inventiveness, and that state of deep absorption that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi dubbed “flow.”  Read virtually any account of creativity, in the humanities or the sciences, and you’ll find mentions of the relevance of daydreaming, fooling around with possibilities, looking at one thing and seeing another, embracing the joy of pure discovery, asking “What if….?”  The argument here isn’t just that we need to let little kids play so they’ll be creative when they’re older, but that play, or something quite close to it, should be part of a teenager’s or adult’s life, too.[4]

 

4.  The point of play is that it has no point. I didn’t know whether to laugh or shudder when I read this sentence in a national magazine:  “Kids need careful adult guidance and instruction before they are able to play in a productive way.”[5]  But I will admit that I, too, sometimes catch myself trying to justify play in terms of its usefulness.

The problem is that to insist on its benefits risks violating the spirit, if not the very meaning, of play.  In his classic work on the subject, Homo Ludens, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga described play as “a free activity standing quite consciously outside ordinary life as being ‘not serious’ but at the same absorbing the player intensely and utterly.”  One plays because it’s fun to do so, not because of any instrumental advantage it may yield.  The point isn’t to perform well or to master a skill, even though those things might end up happening.  In G. K. Chesterton’s delightfully subversive aphorism, “If a thing is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing badly.”

Play, then, is about process, not product.  It has no goal other than itself.  And among the external goals that are inconsistent with play is a deliberate effort to do something better or faster than someone else.  If you’re keeping score -- in fact, if you’re competing at all -- then what you’re doing isn’t play.

Implicit in all of this is something that John Dewey pointed out:  “ ‘Play’ denotes the psychological attitude of the child, not … anything which the child externally does.”  As is so often the case, focusing on someone’s behavior, that which can be seen and measured, tells us very little.  It’s people’s goals (or, in this case, lack of goals), their perspectives and experiences of the situation that matter.  Thus, Dewey continues, “any given or prescribed system” or activities for promoting play should be viewed skeptically lest these be inconsistent with the whole idea.[6]

Such is the context for understanding well-meaning folks (like me) whose lamentations about diminishing opportunities for play tend to include a defensive list of its practical benefits.  Play is “children’s work!”  Play teaches academic skills, advances language development, promotes perspective taking, conflict resolution, the capacity for planning, and so on.  To drive the point home, Deborah Meier wryly suggested that we stop using the word play altogether and declare that children need time for “self-initiated cognitive activity.”

But what if we had reason to doubt some or all of these advantages?  What if, as a couple of researchers have indeed suggested, empirical claims about what children derive from play — at least in terms of academic benefits — turned out to be overstated?[7]  Would we then conclude that children shouldn’t be able to play, or should have less time to do so?  Or would we insist that play is intrinsically valuable, that it’s not only defined by the absence of external goals for those who do it but that it doesn’t need external benefits in order for children to have the opportunity to do it?  Anyone who endorses that position would want to be very careful about defending play based on its alleged payoffs, just as we’d back off from other bargains with the devil, such as arguing that teaching music to children improves their proficiency at math, or that a given progressive innovation raises test scores.

 

5.  Play isn’t the only alternative to “work.” I’ve never been comfortable using the word work to describe the process by which children make sense of ideas — which is to say, adopting a metaphor derived from what adults do in factories and offices to earn money.[8]  To express this concern, however, isn’t tantamount to saying that students should spend all day in school playing.  Work and play don’t exhaust the available options.  There’s also learning, whose primary purpose is neither play-like enjoyment (although it can be deeply satisfying) nor work-like completion of products (although it can involve intense effort and concentration).  It’s not necessary to work in order to experience challenge or excellence, and it’s not necessary to play in order to experience pleasure.

But there’s still a need for pure play.  And that need isn’t being met.

After yesterday's downpour, quite a few of the little creeks near our house became more like kid-sized rivers.

They hiked down to get a closer look.

The tiny one never gets left out.

"It's Japanese!"

Walking the plank.

Such simple play at a riverside. Much calmer and quiet too in conparison to puddle play. Almost sacred, this place.

They spoke in hushed tones, the loudest noise was a splash here and there...

Leaf race.

Pacing back and forth, careful not to fill their boots with water, trying to go faster than the other, deeper and deeper...

Then, home again.

We're lucky to have these trees that give us a shady spot for our picnics, such beauty year-round and most of all, hours of free entertainment.

Working together, they scooped piles of leaves and dumped them into the wagon.

Soon, it was full.

This is Satisfaction.

This is Joy.

This is Wonder.

This is Peace.

This is Fall.

This is FUN!

Happy Tuesday.

You heard that right! Way down south in North Carolina, we're on ice!

(OK, synthetic, but they are real skates...)

It's interesting what a simple detour through a shopping center will surprise you with. This particular a.m. I found a giant "skating rink" and after making a quick call, a few of us would meet in the afternoon and see how the kids liked it.

Liked it? I meant loved it. They were bound and determined...

...to stay on TWO feet.

After a couple of slips...

..and a couple more falls...

...they were zipping along like they'd been doing this for years!

We wrapped it up with some hot cocoa and cookies, a consolation prize for the littlest that just learned to walk...

...and drove home with the sun setting on our backs...

...with warm bellies, smiles plastered on our faces and the satisfaction of a Monday well played.