Adults often underestimate the value of play. They look at it as merely recreation, a break from the serious stuff, a way to de-stress from work. Take a look at how school is structured and you will see that very little time is devoted to play. 15 minutes of recess in the morning and then another in the afternoon. The rest is devoted to work.
Class activities that include games don’t count. Playing according to a teacher’s rules, without the option to not play, is not really play. It is still work. The child is not playing because they want to, but because an adult said so, and disobedience can have serious consequences.
Real play is about freedom — doing what one wants instead of what one has been told to do, and along with that is also the freedom to quit when one doesn’t want to play anymore, or to do something else. Playing, then is not just about the activity, but one’s state of mind in doing certain tasks.
When I write these articles, I am playing. It is something I want to do, and something I have immense fun in doing. That doesn’t mean I write gibberish and nonsense. I even induce pressure on myself by always writing in the early hours of the morning before the deadline. Does that contribute to my stress levels? Certainly not. I have fun beating the deadline this way and I’ve been doing it week after week for more than 6 years.
The benefits of play are enormous. A study published in 2002 by Howard-Jones, Taylor and Sutton on The Effect of Play on the Creativity of Young Children During Subsequent Activity found that children who were put in a playful mood 25 minutes before engaging them to create picture collages were assessed to have more creative outputs than those who were conditioned to do serious work (like copying text) before the actual task.
Other researchers have created similar studies, all showing that a playful mood results in creative, insightful and out-of-the-box problem solving.
Dr. Peter Gray writes, “Learning, creativity, and problem solving are facilitated by anything that promotes a playful state of mind, and they are inhibited by evaluation, expectation of rewards, or anything else that destroys a playful state of mind.”
So let’s go back to the title of this piece. What does all this have to do with how schools promote bullying?
By the act of forcing children into age-segregated classrooms; restricting their free play; coercing them to listen to lectures they may or may not be interested in, and then evaluating and judging them based on those; by hinging their self-worth on grades, promotion to the next level, commendations and medals; by imposing arbitrary rules on things like haircut, uniforms and the kind of shoes one ought to wear; by the explicit or implicit glorification of the sciences over the arts; by all these and more, the school system, and those who perpetuate it are the biggest bullies of all.
Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.