Let The Kids Play

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

I grew up in the fifties. In those days, children received education of two types: firstly, school, and secondly, as I say, hunting and gathering. Every day after school we went outside to play with the neighbour's children and usually came back after dark. We played all weekend and summer long. We had time to research something, get bored, find something to do on our own, get into stories and get out of them, hang out in the clouds, find new hobbies, and also read comics and other books that we wanted, and not just those that we were asked …

For more than 50 years, adults have been taking steps to deprive children of the opportunity to play. In his book Kids at Play: An American History, Howard Chudakoff described the first half of the 20th century as the golden age of children's play: by 1900, the urgent need for child labor had disappeared, and children had a lot of free time. But since the 1960s, adults have begun to curtail this freedom, gradually increasing the time children are forced to spend in school and, more importantly, allowing them less and less to play by themselves, even when they are not in school and are not doing. lessons. Sports activities began to take the place of yard games, and extracurricular circles led by adults took the place of hobbies. Fear makes parents less and less to let their children out on the street alone.

In time, the decline of children's games coincides with the beginning of an increase in the number of children's mental disorders. And this cannot be explained by the fact that we began to diagnose more diseases. For example, throughout this time, American schoolchildren are regularly given clinical questionnaires that detect anxiety and depression, and they do not change. From these questionnaires, it follows that the proportion of children suffering from what is now called anxiety disorder and major depression is 5-8 times higher today than in the 1950s. Over the same period, the percentage of suicides among young people aged 15 to 24 more than doubled, and among children under 15, it quadrupled. The normative questionnaires that have been distributed to college students since the late 1970s show that young people are becoming less empathic and more narcissistic.

The children of all mammals play. Why? Why do they waste energy, risk their lives and health, instead of gaining strength, hiding in some hole? For the first time from an evolutionary point of view, the German philosopher and naturalist Karl Groos tried to answer this question. In his 1898 book Animal Play, he suggested that play arose from natural selection - as a way to learn the skills needed to survive and reproduce.

Groos's theory of play explains why young animals play more than adults (they still have a lot to learn) and why the less an animal's survival depends on instincts and more on skill, the more often it plays. To a large extent, it is possible to predict what an animal will play in childhood, based on what skills it will need for survival and reproduction: lion cubs run after each other or sneak after a partner, in order to then unexpectedly pounce on him, and zebra foals learn to run away and to deceive the expectations of the enemy.

Groos's next book was The Game of Man (1901), in which his hypothesis was extended to humans. People play more than all other animals. Human babies, unlike babies of other species, must learn many things related to the culture in which they are to live. Therefore, thanks to natural selection, children play not only in what all people need to be able to do (say, walk on two legs or run), but also the skills necessary for representatives of their particular culture (for example, shoot, shoot arrows or graze cattle) …

Based on Groos's work, I interviewed ten anthropologists who have studied a total of seven different hunting-gatherer cultures on three continents. It turned out that hunters and gatherers have nothing like school - they believe that children learn by observing, exploring and playing. Answering my question "How much time in the society you studied do children spend playing?") and ending 15-19 years (when they voluntarily begin to take on some adult responsibilities).

Boys play tracking and hunting. Together with the girls, they play root-digging, tree-climbing, cooking, building huts, dugout canoes and other things of importance to their cultures. As they play, they argue and discuss issues - including those they have heard about from adults. They make and play musical instruments, dance traditional dances and sing traditional songs - and sometimes, starting from tradition, they come up with something of their own. Young children play with dangerous things, such as a knife or fire, because "how else can they learn to use them?" They do all this and much more not because some adult pushes them to it, they just have fun playing it.

In parallel, I was researching students from a very unusual Massachusetts school, the Sudbury Valley School. There, students, who can be from four to nineteen years old, do whatever they want all day long - it is forbidden only to break some school rules, which, however, have nothing to do with education, the task of these rules is exclusively to maintain peace and order.

To most people, this sounds crazy. But the school has existed for 45 years, and during this time several hundred people have graduated, and everything is in order. It turns out that in our culture, children, left to themselves, strive to learn exactly what is of value in our culture and subsequently gives them the opportunity to find a good job and enjoy life. Through play, this school's students learn to read, count and use computers - and they do so with the same passion that hunter-gatherer children learn to hunt and gather.

Sudbury Valley School shares with hunter-gatherer groups the (perfectly correct) belief that education should be the responsibility of children, not adults. In both cases, adults are caring and knowledgeable helpers, not judges, as in regular schools. They also provide age diversity for children because play in a mixed age group is better for education than peer play.

For more than twenty years, people who have been shaping the educational agenda in the West have urged us to follow the example of Asian schools - primarily Japanese, Chinese and South Korean. There, children spend more time studying and, as a result, get higher scores on standardized international tests. But in these countries themselves, more and more people are calling their educational systems a failure. In a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, renowned Chinese educator and methodologist Jiang Xueqin wrote: “The shortcomings of a cramming system are well known: lack of social and practical skills, lack of self-discipline and imagination, loss of curiosity and desire for education … We will understand that Chinese schools are changing for the better when grades start to drop.”

For several decades, American children of all ages - from kindergarten to the end of school - have been taking the so-called Torrance Creative Thinking Tests, a comprehensive measure of creativity. After analyzing the results of these studies, psychologist Kyunghee Kim concluded that from 1984 to 2008, the average test score for each class fell by more than the acceptable deviation. This means that more than 85% of children in 2008 performed worse than the average child in 1984. Another study by psychologist Mark Runko with his colleagues at the University of Georgia showed that Torrance tests predict children's future performance better than IQ tests, high school performance, classmate grades, and all the other methods known today.

We asked Sudbury Valley alumni what they played in school and what areas they worked in after graduation. In many cases, the answers to these questions turned out to be interrelated. Among the graduates were professional musicians who studied music a lot in childhood, and programmers who played computers most of the time. One woman, the captain of a cruise ship, spent all the time at school in the water - first with toy boats, then on real boats. And the demanded engineer and inventor, as it turned out, had been making and dismantling various objects throughout his childhood.

Playing is the best way to acquire social skills. The reason is in her voluntariness. Players can always leave the game - and they do so if they don't like to play. Therefore, the goal of everyone who wants to continue the game is to satisfy not only their own, but also other people's needs and desires. To enjoy social play, a person must be persistent, but not overly authoritarian. And I must say that this also applies to social life in general.

Observe any group of children playing. You will find that they are constantly negotiating and looking for compromises. Preschoolers who play "family" most of the time decide who will be a mother, who will be a child, who can take what and how the drama will be built. Or take a group of different ages playing baseball in the yard. The rules are set by the children, not by external authorities - coaches or referees. Players must break into teams themselves, decide what is fair and what is not, and interact with the opposing team. It's more important for everyone to keep playing and enjoy it than to win.

I don't want to over-idealize children. There are hooligans among them. But anthropologists say there is virtually no hooliganism or dominant behavior among hunter-gatherers. They have no leaders, no hierarchy of power. They are forced to share everything and constantly interact with each other, because it is necessary for their survival.

Scientists who play animals say that one of the main goals of the game is to learn how to emotionally and physically deal with dangers. Young mammals, while playing, put themselves again and again in moderately dangerous and not too scary situations. The cubs of some species jump awkwardly, making it difficult for themselves to land, the cubs of others run along the edge of the cliff, jump from branch to branch at a dangerous height or fight each other, in turn finding themselves in a vulnerable position.

Human children, on their own, do the same. They gradually, step by step, come to the worst fear they can withstand. A child can do this only himself, in no case should he be forced or incited - it is cruel to force a person to experience fear for which he is not ready. But this is exactly what physical education teachers do when they require all the children in the class to climb the rope to the ceiling or jump over the goat. With this goal setting, the only result may be panic or shame, which only diminish the ability to cope with fear.

In addition, children get angry when they play. It can be caused by an accidental or deliberate push, a tease, or your own inability to insist on your own. But children who want to continue playing know that anger can be controlled, that it should not be released, but used constructively to protect their interests. According to some reports, young animals of other species also learn to regulate anger and aggression through social play.

In school, adults are responsible for children, make decisions for them, and deal with their problems. In the game, children do it themselves. For a child, play is an experience of adulthood: this is how they learn to control their behavior and take responsibility for themselves. By depriving children of play, we form addicted and victimized people who live with the feeling that someone in power must tell them what to do.

In one experiment, rats and baby monkeys were allowed to participate in any social interaction other than play. As a result, they turned into emotionally crippled adults. Finding themselves in a not very dangerous, but unfamiliar environment, they froze in horror, unable to overcome fear in order to look around. When faced with an unfamiliar animal of their own kind, they either shrank in fear, or attacked, or did both - even if there was no practical point in doing so.

Unlike experimental monkeys and rats, modern children still play with each other, but less than people who grew up 60 years ago, and incomparably less than children in hunter-gatherer societies. I think we can already see the results. And they say that it is time to stop this experiment.