Deficit of Play
Few articles I read, only about one a year, get saved on my computer. These are articles describing an invaluable overarching idea, a critique of our modern world so potent that I want to reference it so I don’t forget it and can incorporate it into my own life planning. The following is one of those articles.
Peter Gray writes in Aeon Magazine Children are suffering a severe deficit of play. This is the best-supported, least fluffy piece on the deep value of play I have yet read:
The decline in opportunity to play has also been accompanied by a decline in empathy and a rise in narcissism, both of which have been assessed since the late 1970s with standard questionnaires given to normative samples of college students. Empathy refers to the ability and tendency to see from another person’s point of view and experience what that person experiences. Narcissism refers to inflated self-regard, coupled with a lack of concern for others and an inability to connect emotionally with others. A decline of empathy and a rise in narcissism are exactly what we would expect to see in children who have little opportunity to play socially. Children can’t learn these social skills and values in school, because school is an authoritarian, not a democratic setting. School fosters competition, not co-operation; and children there are not free to quit when others fail to respect their needs and wishes.
The article describes how, since about the 1960s, kids have been getting more schoolwork so that schools reach performance goals set by standardized tests. This takes away time where kids can learn empathy at play. As a result, you get less creative kids:
One line of evidence comes from the results of a battery of measures of creativity — called the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) — collected from normative samples of US schoolchildren in kindergarten through to 12th grade (age 17-18) over several decades. Kyung-Hee Kim, an educational psychologist at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, has analysed those scores and reported that they began to decline in 1984 or shortly after, and have continued to decline ever since. … Other research, by the psychologist Mark Runco and colleagues at the Torrance Creativity Center at the University of Georgia, shows that scores on the TTCT are the best childhood predictors we have of future real-world achievements. They are better predictors than IQ, high-school grades, or peer judgments of who will achieve the most.
From reading the article, I learned about “question tags”, where an assertion is given a clause that promotes discussion if the conversational partner disagrees. For example, I’ve noticed that patients are more relaxed when I say “Is it OK if I take a look?” (a question) rather than “I’ll take a look” (a pronouncement). We both know I am about to set their chair back, and the expectations of the whole interaction are that I will take a look, but giving the person the power to veto is a powerful psychological path to consensus. I could refine this further by fully combining statement and question tag with something like: “Let’s take a look, okay?” I tried “shall we” here, but it felt so different from how I talk, that I threw it away. The “okay” tag is even a little confrontational for me (I know, I know).
You think these details sound hopelessly minor, but such subtle changes are the entire difference between someone being comfortable and upset with you. I’m reminded of this bit about crafting jokes in a recent profile of Jerry Seinfeld for The New York Magazine:
Developing jokes as glacially as he does, Seinfeld says, allows for breakthroughs he wouldn’t reach otherwise. He gave me an example. “I had a joke: ‘Marriage is a bit of a chess game, except the board is made of flowing water and the pieces are made of smoke,’ ” he said. “This is a good joke, I love it, I’ve spent years on it. There’s a little hitch: ‘The board is made of flowing water.’ I’d always lose the audience there. Flowing water? What does he mean? And repeating ‘made of’ was hurting things. So how can I say ‘the board is made of flowing water’ without saying ‘made of’? A very small problem, but I could hear the confusion. A laugh to me is not a laugh. I see it, like at Caltech when they look at the tectonic plates. If I’m in the dark up there and I can just listen, I know exactly what’s going on. I know exactly when their attention has moved off me a little.
“So,” he continued, “I was obsessed with figuring that out. The way I figure it out is I try different things, night after night, and I’ll stumble into it at some point, or not. If I love the joke, I’ll wait. If it takes me three years, I’ll wait.” Finally, in late August, during a performance, the cricket cage snapped into place. “The breakthrough was doing this”— Seinfeld traced a square in the air with his fingers, drawing the board. “Now I can just say, ‘The board is flowing water,’ and do this, and they get it. A board that was made of flowing water was too much data. Here, I’m doing some of the work for you. So now I’m starting to get applause on it, after years of work. They don’t think about it. They just laugh.”
True communication, whether to a patient or to an audience member, hinges upon sweating those details. Everything in our friendships, marriages, even in business, revolves around talking with the ones around us, making ourselves understood, and making others feel that they are understood. Play teaches that, and as this article clearly shows, school can not.
Comments
Mykala
I wonder how the Montessori philosophy fits into all of this? It would seem that the issue with competitiveness would be addressed, as would the issue with having a sense of autonomy that more closely mimics organic play (at least in an ideal Montessori classroom). There isn’t a lot of cooperation or collaboration in a traditional classroom, except as concepts to be learned about theoretically or moralistically, but they seem to be at the heart of the Montessori model—integrated into every activity in a way that doesn’t need to be taught or lauded by teachers.
But perhaps my brain is being taken over by the Punished by Rewards theory of Alfie Kohn and others. It seems that around the same time play disappeared, rewarding kids extravagantly became the norm. And praising kids for “being cooperative” in the classroom or “thinking of others before themselves” on the playground has been shown to make them LESS likely to engage in those behaviors in the future. So it seems we’ve not only taken away kids’ opportunities to learn how to interact with others in unstructured, unsupervised arenas, but we’ve taken away the motivation to behave in kind, selfless ways in the remaining environments. Cool!
I think it truly is a complicated issue, and one that requires a challenging, counter-cultural solution.
Alexander Micek
I suppose the exception to the theoretical collaboration you mentioned is the dreaded “group work” pushed by modern education theorists (citation needed, but we can assume). I do not think group work scenarios fail because kids are unwilling to cooperate — I think they fail because kids have (1) no experience working in groups and (2) are immersed in an environment where competition, not cooperation, underpins everything. What are you going to do when you are competing with peers intra- or even inter-group? You will fend for yourself, mimicking poorly-conceived group-work in the workplace (the Peter Principle, etc.). In that way, I guess school is a good preparation for corporate work.
You can go in two directions with this, my brain tends to back it out to macroeconomics: our faux free-market, hypercompetitive, social safetynet-less, plutocratic, society with a hollowed-out middle class creates people who can only imagine competition as their way out. They drive the same values into the kids and encourage the same in their schools. I’ve always thought that U.S. society could be less competitive since you’ll always find some naturally hypercompetitive people on the bell curve distribution; it’s not like it’s a trait we are in short supply of. Then there’s Denmark where, awesomely, there’s social pressure against striving and being overly competitive. On its face, this seems anathema to my corn-fed Midwest brain, but upon reconsideration I honestly find that life is defined more by our cooperation with than our triumph over others.
Become the best helper and you are surrounded by champions, become the capital-b best and you are alone and vulnerable at the top of the mountain, while others seek to tear you from your podium.
The other direction you can go is the one you are looking at: at the interpersonal, psychological angle. I do think teachers have been hamstrung — they can’t be feared like before (in a lot of ways, a good thing); there are fewer tools in the toolbelt to get kids to cooperate. So, you get a complicated reward system that even Punished By Rewards admits WORKS, it is just that it simultaneously produces the behavior and kills the appreciation of the intrinsic value in it. But I’m essentially restating what you said, in a less-readable way. And you’re the one who is reading the book, too.
I like your choice of “counter-cultural”. That also is a shorthand for the way out of the economics I described, plus it addresses the United States’ allergy to social programs. Tough.