PLAY
Games are the most elevated form of investigation. – Albert Einstein
Play will be to the 21st century what work was to the last 300 years of industrial society – our dominant way of knowing, doing and creating value.Pat Kane, The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living. Macmillan UK, 2005
The ability to play and integrate play into work and education is key to creativity. Games and human joyfulness play a role in productivity. Creative children tend to be more playful than their less creative peers. Finding pleasure in playing with ideas is often a characteristic of creative adults as well. There is a great deal of whimsy and play, for example, in much of the thinking that scientists do, such as imagining oneself riding on a photon at the head of a beam of light. Play has a central role in the creative process. The enjoyment factor involving games has potential to greatly enhance motivation and interest among students, thereby opening doors for flow and creativity.Karlyn Adams, The Sources of Innovation and Creativity. National Center on Education and the Economy, 2005
Research increasingly confirms the fundamental contributions play makes to every aspect of a child's growth. Jean Piaget defined play as "actions that are an end in themselves and do not form part of any series of actions imposed by someone else or from outside. The kind of learning from which true knowledge follows isn't a matter of passively absorbing and storing skills and information. Rather it is an active construction process, the building blocks of which are the kinds of discoveries that emerge from real play, whether it be with objects, ideas, or other people.” Real play, in other words, is its own reward. It involves imagination, improvisation, and quite often the natural world. It's when kids engage in making-believe, horsing around, and inventing their own games. It's when they paint, or draw, or sing, or dance, or write a poem or story, not in order to fulfill an English or art assignment, but to answer the call of the Muse.The latest research in biology, cognitive and developmental psychology, and neuroscience supports Piaget's intuition about the vital role of play. According to psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, infants are born with an innate drive to understand and master their worlds. Fueling that drive is the biological and unquenchable desire to investigate the novel aspects of their environment, and to be persistent in their attempts to make them familiar. And novelty, of course, is the basic ingredient of play.
The brain is by design a novelty-seeking system. Novelty, it turns out, is one of the brain's primary criteria for deciding which input to attend to and which to ignore as it attempts to sort through the constant flood of stimuli from the outside world. When we encounter novelty our brains release large quantities of the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin that modulate the functioning of the nervous system. At the neural level, dopamine and serotonin activate the brain's attentional networks and energize all of the cognitive areas of the brain that cooperate to make learning happen. Likewise, pleasure, real play, and rewarding interactions with others also encourage the flow of dopamine and serotonin.
Neuroscientist Allan Schore points out that when an infant is born, the emotional centers in the brain are fully operational, while the cognitive centers begin as a vast sea of largely undifferentiated and unconnected neurons. The young child's "thinking brain" is waiting for social and emotional experience to shape the neural networks that will support the unfolding of intelligence.
Neuroscientific findings such as these have led psychologist Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence, to conclude that the joy and delight that accompany play, discovery, and friendship are the developmental fuel of childhood. To me as an educator the findings represent hard scientific evidence that an approach to education grounded in the three 'P's – pleasure, play, and personal relationships – isn't so crazy after all. Indeed, when a school enables its students to build a solid foundation on the three 'P's, mastering the three 'R's isn't hard work at all.
Chris Mercogliano, In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness. Beacon, 2007
A new theory about early human adaptation suggests that our ancestors capitalized on their capacities for play to enable the development of a highly cooperative way of life. The use of play helped early humans to overcome the innate tendencies toward aggression and dominance, which would have made a cooperative society impossible. Play and humor were not just means of adding fun to their lives. They were means of maintaining the band's existence – means of promoting actively the egalitarian attitude, intense sharing, and relative peacefulness for which hunter-gatherers are famous and upon which they depended for survival.Interest in play is very much on the upswing among psychologists, educators, and the general public. People are beginning to realize that we have gone too far in the direction of teaching children to compete. We have been depriving children of the normal, noncompetitive forms of social play that are essential for developing a sense of equality, connectedness, and concern for others. The kind of play that helped hunter-gatherer children develop into cooperative adults is similar to the sort of play that at one time characterized American children's summers and after-school hours. This play is freely chosen, age-mixed, and, because it is not adult-organized, non-competitive. This “free play" is distinct from leisure pursuits such as video games, watching TV, or structured extracurricular activities and sports. Even when children are playing nominally competitive games, there is usually relatively little concern for winning. Striving to do well, as individuals or teams, and helping others do well, is all part of the fun. It is the presence of adult supervisors and observers that pushes play in a competitive direction – and if it gets pushed too far in that direction it is no longer truly play.
The most important skill for social life is how to please other people while still fulfilling one's own needs and desires. In self-organized play, children learn to get along with diverse others, to compromise, and to anticipate and meet others' needs. To play well and keep others interested in continuing to play with you, you must be able to see the world from the other players' points of view.
Peter Gray. Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence. American Journal of Play, Spring 2009
