Play - non-structured, free activity, the spontaneous activity of
children has value beyond entertaining the children who indulge in it.
Children playing use their imagination to create a reality in their
play. Children playing display intuition - understanding without
apparent effort, quick and ready insight seemingly independent of
previous experiences or empirical - the key words here are 'seemingly
independent of previous experience - children know things that we don't -
they may be made up things, but they are 'made up' by their
imagination.
The fact that children are much more willing to experiment means that what began as playing one thing can end up playing something completely different.
Through collaborative play activities, children create fantasy-type enactments by using abstract transformations and verbal meta-communications.
Adults are normally far too inhibited to indulge in such behavior - we grow out of it - we don't play - actually we do, but we call it other things - We amuse oneself, be the life of party, caper, carouse, carry on, cavort, clown, cut capers, dally, dance, fool around, go on a spree, horse around, joke, let go, let loose, let one's hair down, make merry, mess around, revel, romp, show off, skip, sport, toy, trifle - one thing you will notice about all those terms for play is that they involve being silly, in some way, or showing off, being extrovert, or inebriated or foolish in some way.
Children's play is not like that - watch your own kids play - sometimes they are deadly serious - acting out learned or improvised scripts that are real to the play and the players.
It is in transforming one situation into another that children create, and although it may not make much sense to adult onlookers - parents, it will do for the participants.
We had a place that we called 'Rustlers' Den' when we were kids, and once in that place - an old quarry - we entered in to the world of Cowboys and Indians - even speaking in imitation of the cowboys we had seen in Westerns on TV, and using vocabulary from the same origin - we addressed each other as "pardner" and used terms like 'dry-gulching' for ambushing. We lay in wait for the train that sped past us on its way north, imagining ourselves taking bags of money from it - we made it all up as we went along - we all joined in a sort of tacit agreement that we were in another world - as other people - we gave ourselves names and used them until we had to go home for tea at 5.
When our parents asked us where we'd been and what we'd been up to, we told lies to cover it up - not because we were afraid, but because we knew they wouldn't understand, or because we thought they would laugh at us or ridicule us.
This deceit was most probably an early indication that we were growing up - growing out of playing. Children learn to use sense as reason for doing things, and as that sense predominates, we play less and less, until finally, we find it childish and stop doing it altogether.
One of the biggest influences that made reason drive away play is and was schooling - at school, you played games - play with rules and parameters - taking away spontaneity - if you pick up the ball and run with it on a football field, you aren't being spontaneous, you're playing another gamed - and so you are breaking the rules.
Playing games is not the same thing as playing - the use of imagination is curtailed, and spontaneity is bounded by rules that prohibit or allow.
And this is the way we are schooled out of our creative talents - schooled into being grown-up - logical - sensible.
As the lyrics to Supertramp's 'The Logical Song' put it -
"When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful, A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical. And all the birds in the trees, well they'd be singing so happily, joyfully, playfully watching me. But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible, Logical, responsible, practical. And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable, Clinical, intellectual, cynical."
We need people to be sensible, logical, responsible, practical, intellectual, but do those other qualities - being creative, imaginative, playful, intuitive necessarily have to be denied and destroyed?
And yet research now shows us that we are using the highest levels of our intelligence when we fully engage our imagination, and that imagination itself is the result of integrating information from all our senses and stems from the simultaneous use of every part of our brains.
Now, since learning and play are linked closely and are the basis of human expression, it does indeed seem wise to encourage play in learning.
Similarly, many companies are striving to improve the creativity of their employees by encouraging them to use their minds without being afraid to be wrong.
However, many enterprises discourage making mistakes, punish those making them, and stigmatize them too.
In modern education too, mistakes have become the worst pupils can do. One thing vital to being creative, according to noted educationalist Sir Ken Robinson PhD, is being prepared to be wrong, and although he agrees that being wrong is not necessarily the same thing as being creative, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. Minds need to be stretched, not confined and inhibited, for, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, 'A mind stretched by a new idea can never go back to its original dimensions.'
The fact that children are much more willing to experiment means that what began as playing one thing can end up playing something completely different.
Through collaborative play activities, children create fantasy-type enactments by using abstract transformations and verbal meta-communications.
Adults are normally far too inhibited to indulge in such behavior - we grow out of it - we don't play - actually we do, but we call it other things - We amuse oneself, be the life of party, caper, carouse, carry on, cavort, clown, cut capers, dally, dance, fool around, go on a spree, horse around, joke, let go, let loose, let one's hair down, make merry, mess around, revel, romp, show off, skip, sport, toy, trifle - one thing you will notice about all those terms for play is that they involve being silly, in some way, or showing off, being extrovert, or inebriated or foolish in some way.
Children's play is not like that - watch your own kids play - sometimes they are deadly serious - acting out learned or improvised scripts that are real to the play and the players.
It is in transforming one situation into another that children create, and although it may not make much sense to adult onlookers - parents, it will do for the participants.
We had a place that we called 'Rustlers' Den' when we were kids, and once in that place - an old quarry - we entered in to the world of Cowboys and Indians - even speaking in imitation of the cowboys we had seen in Westerns on TV, and using vocabulary from the same origin - we addressed each other as "pardner" and used terms like 'dry-gulching' for ambushing. We lay in wait for the train that sped past us on its way north, imagining ourselves taking bags of money from it - we made it all up as we went along - we all joined in a sort of tacit agreement that we were in another world - as other people - we gave ourselves names and used them until we had to go home for tea at 5.
When our parents asked us where we'd been and what we'd been up to, we told lies to cover it up - not because we were afraid, but because we knew they wouldn't understand, or because we thought they would laugh at us or ridicule us.
This deceit was most probably an early indication that we were growing up - growing out of playing. Children learn to use sense as reason for doing things, and as that sense predominates, we play less and less, until finally, we find it childish and stop doing it altogether.
One of the biggest influences that made reason drive away play is and was schooling - at school, you played games - play with rules and parameters - taking away spontaneity - if you pick up the ball and run with it on a football field, you aren't being spontaneous, you're playing another gamed - and so you are breaking the rules.
Playing games is not the same thing as playing - the use of imagination is curtailed, and spontaneity is bounded by rules that prohibit or allow.
And this is the way we are schooled out of our creative talents - schooled into being grown-up - logical - sensible.
As the lyrics to Supertramp's 'The Logical Song' put it -
"When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful, A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical. And all the birds in the trees, well they'd be singing so happily, joyfully, playfully watching me. But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible, Logical, responsible, practical. And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable, Clinical, intellectual, cynical."
We need people to be sensible, logical, responsible, practical, intellectual, but do those other qualities - being creative, imaginative, playful, intuitive necessarily have to be denied and destroyed?
And yet research now shows us that we are using the highest levels of our intelligence when we fully engage our imagination, and that imagination itself is the result of integrating information from all our senses and stems from the simultaneous use of every part of our brains.
Now, since learning and play are linked closely and are the basis of human expression, it does indeed seem wise to encourage play in learning.
Similarly, many companies are striving to improve the creativity of their employees by encouraging them to use their minds without being afraid to be wrong.
However, many enterprises discourage making mistakes, punish those making them, and stigmatize them too.
In modern education too, mistakes have become the worst pupils can do. One thing vital to being creative, according to noted educationalist Sir Ken Robinson PhD, is being prepared to be wrong, and although he agrees that being wrong is not necessarily the same thing as being creative, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. Minds need to be stretched, not confined and inhibited, for, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, 'A mind stretched by a new idea can never go back to its original dimensions.'
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