When was the last time you played? Did it involve giggling spontaneously, hiding in cupboards and running in places designed for walking? And when was the last time your child came home from school and told you about a game they had played rather than something they had learnt? I ask the same question even if your child is a teenager.
One of the students at Sands, who has subsequently become a teacher herself, told me that adults didn’t stop playing as they got old, rather they got old when they stopped playing. She was still playing ‘hide and seek’ on Dartmoor with us when she was seventeen and made sure that the staff always joined in. I can remember the excitement I would feel when crawling through the undergrowth to get back to base. I was probably 40 years old then. I’m 52 now and still take children to the ‘Moor’ because we all want to play games. The first snow fall signals a mass exodus for snow ball fights and when the river is barely warm enough the afternoons are spent leaping into the Dart.
Our day runs from 9.15 in the morning to 4.30 in the afternoon. We do not begin classes until 9.45, allowing children time to get a late breakfast or catch up with tutors, but we find that lots of the children grab their friends and run into the garden to play games. Most break-times someone will be heard trying to drum up support for a game of 20:20 or ‘flags’.
In the summer term, we all eat lunch out on the patio and lawn. On one occasion, we were visited by a teacher from the local State School. She was looking down the lawn and drew my attention to an older girl creeping up on a younger child. Her initial reaction was concern. Student A then leapt out and onto Student B in a fit of giggles. Student A was sixteen years old. Student B only twelve. Student B was now very clearly ‘on’ and had to take her turn catching the rest of the players. When pudding was served most of the players abandoned ship. Apple crumble can undermine the best game and the best lesson.
”Play is the most democratic of activities for it is the only one in which you are free to quit.”
I have to admit, I too was relieved because Student A was one of our most difficult students. She had faced a number of School Meetings and had been regularly sanctioned for her wild behaviour throughout her school career. She had never been given lines as Mr Gove would have recommended and the only cleaning she ever did was as part of the cleaning we all do at the end of the school day. We do not employ cleaners believing that we should all take responsibility for the mess we make. And we would hope cleaning was seen as part of everyday life and not a punishment for poor behaviour.
But on that day she was running around the school garden like a kid again. Uninhibited and care free.
In another incident, we accepted a young man who had been written off by the education system, relegated to a special school where children were regularly violent and restrained. Student X was very, very bright, chaotic and affectionate and never violent although he kept a journal that was filled with deeply visceral and angry images. His mother decided to take a risk and pull him out of the education unit and place him with us.
We fell in love with him. He came and spent the first three weeks playing. Not ‘hide and seek’, not ‘murder in the dark’. But in a sand pit that our caretaker’s wife had built for her daughter. Make of that what you will, but he left Sands an emotionally literate and talented young man who is now much sought after for his film making skills. Play was his antidote to the system.
At Sands, we don’t have a philosophy or policy about play. We just don’t interfere and when you stop interfering play happens. If you give people the space and time. If they feel relaxed, then the next thing that often happens looks very much like play.
You would be wrong if you thought that children at Sands do not take their studies seriously despite this informal atmosphere. Last year, we spent dozens of hours in meetings with students asking them their priorities for learning. They told us that they would like us to spend more of our budget on Teaching Assistants with specialisms in particular academic subjects and in sport to support both those with learning needs and the gifted. We also introduced, what the children have termed, ‘master classes’ in which we offer advanced study in mathematics, sciences, music and art. Open to all ages and abilities, they are designed to challenge even the most gifted and extend our curriculum in creative ways that are much more than ‘chalk and talk’.
Perhaps I should qualify my statement about play. As a teacher and parent, I have been taught by children that play can take many forms. Using play dough, train sets and Frisbees, but it can also happen in the classroom when discussion goes free range and creative, when the clay under one’s fingers comes to life and when the pen produces beautiful phrases. Creativity is a form of exceptional play and we are liberated into that state of mind in environments that are respectful of us. External pressure, endless demands to perform and stressful environments rarely engender creativity. They certainly do not lead to happy children.
I write this in response to the news that our Education Secretary has announced his intention to increase the length of the school day to ten hours ostensibly to emulate the performance of schools in Asia. Paradoxically, just months before Gove’s initiative to bring us in line with schools in Singapore, Japan and China, the Chinese government had issued a report-entitled, ”Ten Regulations to Lessen Academic Burden on Children in Primary Schools” -calling for shorter days, less homework and reliance on test scores as a means of evaluation. The actual details are available at Yong Zhao Blog. ”China enters ”testing free” zone. The New Ten Commandments of Education Reform.” e.g. there will be no written homework for primary age children, strictly no extra classes after school hours and no fast tracking of children.
Educators in Asian schools have begun to express anxieties that excessive demands put upon children in the school system are effecting their health. Suicide rates are frighteningly high amongst secondary age children and from the outside it appears that childhood has been abolished. Parents at home emulate the pressures put upon their children at school. ‘Tiger Parenting ‘ is a term describing this approach. But one father, himself a highly successful businessman, who had been through this intense education system himself recognised how little it had prepared him for life, ”Then you go into the world and not only are you socially inept but you find yourself attracted to people who replicate those same dysfunctional dynamics.” When asked what the last game he had played with his daughter was, he realised that he could not remember ever playing a game with her. He is now campaigning to free his own daughter from the rigours of similar schooling. Ten hour days, Saturday morning study clubs, extra homework and constant pressure to perform on both children and teachers. Sound familiar?
”Because children spend nearly all their time studying they have little time to be creative, discover or pursue their own passions or develop physical or social skills. As a result Chinese school children suffer from extraordinarily levels of anxiety, depression and psychosomatic stress, which appears to be linked to academic pressure and lack of play.”
[Peter Gray, The Independent]
The message from these studies is clear. Life for children has been ”schoolified” to such an extent that it has become the predominant activity in their day. In a world in which they are encouraged to grow up too fast we need to protect those precious times when they have the opportunity to be relaxed and creative. We can probably all remember day dreaming in class. I watch children do it all the time. I’m either a really boring teacher or it is a natural state we all enter into at times. Irritating isn’t it, but now that mobile phones, media, Facebook and TV fill all our children’s spare time, I wonder when they do find time to day dream? To be lost in their own thoughts and not reliant on input from the outside?
We have been visited twice in the last three years by journalists from South Korea; a film crew and representatives from Seoul’s major newspaper. Both had heard of Sands through our international partner schools and wanted to find out if there were things they could learn from us that could be incorporated into South Korean schools that would improve the quality of children’s lives trapped in a never ending cycle of work and pressure. The female reporter from ‘The Kukmin Daily’ cried when she was shown around the school by students.
”This is what childhood should be like,” she said. In South Korea, parents who are brave enough to challenge the orthodox view that education is all important are shunned by their communities. She had wanted to be an artist, but had to endure ten hour days studying subjects that meant nothing to her; she had endless homework and Saturday ‘study clubs’ with her form tutor who was obliged to give up his free time to prove his commitment to his student’s academic success. She left Korea at eighteen and became a journalist and part-time artist in this country. Had she stayed she believes she would have
been broken by the system. Her parents still refuse to talk to her.
These journalists have returned to South Korea hoping that they can say something that will encourage schools to return to the students some of qualities of childhood and the freedoms essential for healthy growth.
Most worrying for our children is that this research proposes, if denied the space to daydream, play and be creative and instead are constantly directed and put under increasing pressure to perform, then their mental health is at risk. Narcissism, depression, lack of empathy and anxiety related disorders are on the increase. Five to eight times more prevalent than in the 1950’s. As with Student X, maybe play is the antidote?
But, I wonder if school destroys our interest in play? Is it that we are told so often to stop playing and get on with our work that we fail to realise that the best play is often the best work. Maybe the reason we stop playing at about the same time we leave school is not because this is the natural time to stop but rather that it has taken this long to finally drive any sense of play out of us. ”I’m never doing Shakespeare again..You will not catch me running again..I can’t do number games..etc ”. I have met lots of adults who cannot play any form of competitive game, be it cards or ‘Monopoly’ because they cannot escape the feeling that they may fail or humiliate themselves. It is often their school experiences that have created those deep insecurities. When our learning feels more like play then I wonder if failure is not only easier to accept but only encourages us to start again?
All people are creative and revel in this thing we call play. We see it in our younger children all the time. We seem to trust that for them play leads inexorably to competence. It is an amazing resource. And yet as they grow a little older, we lose our faith that play is implicit in growth and maturation. The two seem polar opposites and yet some of our greatest innovators and thinkers used play to develop their theories and inventions.
”In their play and self-directed exploration they create their own mental models of the world around them. Adults whom we call geniuses are those who somehow retain and build upon those child like qualities.” argues Peter Gray in ”The Independent ” [www.independent.give childhood back.]
Albert Einstein said that his schooling almost destroyed his interest in mathematics and physics. He referred to his innovative work as ‘combinatorial play’. Committing thousands of hours to study, he still achieved the speed of light in his imagination chasing sunbeams. He daydreamed his way to new theories.
I think we would be wise to give children more chance for their own daydreaming and make-believe in school. I am also advocating ‘play’ in its broadest sense. My daughter told her Drama teacher that she felt that all they had been doing in the course was having fun. She has still spent hours learning lines, designing props, costumes and inventing characters, improvising and being creative, coming back late from the theatre and yet she believes she has been having fun. I am not arguing that children should only be climbing trees, only that we should not orientate all their day towards testing, directed activity and the acquisition of knowledge.
These ten hours days that Gove is proposing are to be filled with only directed activities. Children will get home at 6 o’clock or later. It will be dark for much of the time. When asked to comment on the research that suggests he is fundamentally wrong, that his initiatives will harm children and work teachers to breaking point, he replied that, even if he were the Angel Gabriel someone would still criticise him for being too shiny. I’m glad that he hasn’t himself lost the ability to fantasise and daydream but I can’t imagine he remembers how to play, if he was ever allowed to. And as such why would he be able to see the value of undirected activities, shorter days and leisure time for children in school. I’m sure he just wants them to grow up as quickly as possible into working adults.
But adults don’t really want to grow up, to escape the world of fantasy and make believe. If we did would we still go to the cinema and read books about other worlds and the impossible? Would we still play Charades and make sand castles on the beach? How many of us know someone who is ageless because they are still having fun and have enthusiasm for life? Don’t we watch young children, lost in their imaginary worlds and feel a little jealous that we can’t go with them? As Immalee said, ‘We grow old because we forget how to play.’ It would be really sad if we looked at our own children and realised they too had forgotten.