http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news_events/ed/2007/spring/features/einstein.html
Einstein May Never Have Used Flashcards, but He Probably Built Forts Why
one alum is part of a growing movement to bring play back into the lives of
children by Lory Hough
In some ways, this headline is almost funny, the idea of a young Einstein,
wild hair flying, throwing his mothers quilt over a couple of chairs and
crawling underneath.
But to Elizabeth Goodenough, M.A.T.71, a headline like this is not a
joke. Were a busy-by-design society thats become so concerned with turning
kids into baby Einsteins that something critical to childhood, something that
Goodenough holds sacred, is fast becoming extinct: free play.
She says that all you have to do is drive around American cities and
towns to see for yourself; there are very few kids outside.
This is why Goodenough raised money to start a project called Where Do
the Children Play? which includes a PBS documentary that will air in the fall,
as well as a companion book and website. In addition, with a coalition of
national childrens organizations, she hopes to start a national dialogue about
the issue. The project, which grew out of her earlier book called Secret Spaces
of Childhood, is aimed at raising public awareness about the critical
importance of play. Beyond the obvious play helps kids stay in shape it
also promotes creativity and teaches skills such as negotiating and how to be
around others.
Play takes many forms. It may be best defined from within as a
spontaneous human expression that relies on imagination and a sense of
freedom, Goodenough says. Players invent alternative contexts for
conversation, visualization, movement, and interaction with real objects. They
discover release and engagement, stimulation, and peace. Although play can
arise anywhere, even in a cement cell, children are naturally beckoned by the
living world to enjoy perception and the sensations of being alive.
And Goodenough, a lecturer in comparative literature at the University
of Michigan, isnt alone in understanding the importance of this. The headlines
calling for more play and less structure are endless. There are also a small
but growing number of child development experts, medical researchers, space
planners, and other educators focusing on this issue in an attempt to keep play
from slipping even further from the lives of children.
How We Got Here Its probably not a surprise to anyone that one of
the biggest factors in the loss of free play has to do with parents being
programmed by the ever-expanding baby educating industry into thinking that
in order to survive in todays global economy, kids need to be better,
brighter, and busier than ever before.
Its a competitive foot race from the womb, this sense that youll miss
out, Goodenough says. Adults have picked up the pace so quickly. Whats next?
Whats next? Whats next?
In an age where we clearly know more about how brains operate and how
humans function, parents take parenting seriously. As a 2001 article in The
Atlantic Monthly stated, Your child is the most important extra-credit arts
project you will ever undertake. As a result, by the time these baby wonders
reach college, theyve become goal-oriented, resume-building organization
kids who work their laptops to the bone.
What adults need to understand, writes Michael Meyerhoff, Ed.M.75,
Ed.D.84, in his booklet The Power of Play, is that free play isnt a waste of
time it actually helps children learn.
It is clear that young children who explore, investigate, and
experiment through play build strong foundations in every important area of
development, including intelligence, language, social competence and emotional
security, he writes.
As Professor Paul Harris recently told the French publication
LInfobourg, The childs capacity to pretend and imagine is not a symptom of
immaturity or absence of logic. Rather, it forms the foundation for a more
mature mode of thought toward anothers point of view.
To be fair, parents arent solely to blame. Gone are the pre-cable TV
days when all you got were four or five stations. Today, the lure of satellite
and cable TV is strong. (One recent survey found that 69 percent of American
kids ages 6 to 14 had TVs in their bedrooms.) Add the Internet, TiVo, and video
games and most kids dont feel the need to play, especially outside. Other
factors include sprawl, which has taken away the woods and open areas in many
neighborhoods. Fear of violence also means many parents no longer open the back
door on a nice day and tell their kids to come home when it gets dark. (In the
last 25 years, the average home range for suburban kids, in fact, shrank from
one mile to less than 550 yards.) Working parents are also crunched for free
time.
Parents are working longer hours so children arent getting the outdoor
time, Goodenough says. Even if there are outdoor sports, its not the same as
that deep connection to the earth. Its not about the outdoor world.
No Time Out This connection to the earth is critical, says
Goodenough. Play can certainly happen indoors young Einstein building the
fort out of his mothers quilt, for instance but outdoor memories are what
really stick.
Research has shown that outdoor play takes a far bigger role in
peoples memory than indoor play time, even if hours outside are fewer than
those within, she says.
This is especially relevant today: kids are shuttled back and forth all
day in cars.
So often they dont travel on foot, Goodenough says, discussing missed
opportunities for children to use all of their senses. Theyre driven
everywhere in SUVs.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Preventions Kids
Walk-to-School: Then and Now Barrier and Solutions, 42 percent of children
ages 5 to 18 walked or bicycled to school in 1969. By 2001, the number dropped
to 16 percent. Reasons cited include families living further from schools that
are increasingly being built on large parcels on the outskirts of town, traffic
concerns, and the fear of crime.
No one wants to have their kids shot or kidnapped, Goodenough
acknowledges, but thats actually a declining risk in the last decade.
Still, she says, Kids spend too much time now indoors, especially at
school.
In fact, some schools nationwide are doing away with recess altogether.
According to the National Association of Early Childhood Specialists in State
Departments of Education, more than 40 percent of elementary schools nationwide
have reduced, eliminated, or are in the process of eliminating recess
from the school day.
It shows the atrophy of adults who dont know how to enjoy time or the
outdoors, especially with children, says Goodenough. What started as a
survival skill building shelters and going out into the world doesnt exist
anymore. Everything we do now is many times removed from the natural world.
Thats why some kids say theyd rather be indoors where the [power] outlets
are.
For some kids, their only outdoor time is spent at local playgrounds,
what Goodenough calls austere concrete and plastic gyms. Usually theres a
climbing object and a swing, all on a flat surface. The problem, she says, is
that this kind of space only develops gross motor skills like balance and
coordination. It does little for creativity and sensory exploration.
This focus on the physical goes back a long way. Author Susan Solomon, a
contributor to Where Do the Children Play?, writes in American Playground that
when freestanding playgrounds were first created in the late 1880s, one of the
beliefs was that physical activity, especially muscle control, had a moral
dimension that would create better citizens.
Eventually playgrounds got dulled down even more as safety concerns
grew. In 1999, 156,000 children were treated in hospital emergency rooms
because of public playground-related injuries, according to the U.S. Consumer
Product Safety Commission. Add to this a lawsuit-crazy culture and public
playground design has become an exercise in restraint and caution.
Goodenough says that in Ann Arbor, Mich., where she now lives, sledding
was recently banned during recess after an elementary school student suffered a
concussion. Concerns over bullying and the lack of personnel to supervise
students have also prompted schools to put limitations on playground use.
Of course, not all cities and towns are doing away with recess, and some
are starting to understand the importance of free play. Even New York City, a
haven of traditional playgrounds, is creating new playscapes that encourage
exploration and imagination. Based on child development theories, the new
spaces will include trained play workers, water features, ramps, and
open-ended objects.
Play is not an option for kids; play is how children learn to build
community, how they learn to work with other people; its how they learn to
kind of engage their sense of creativity, the playscape designer, David
Rockwell, told The New York Times in January. Were thinking of imagination as
important a muscle as running.
How She Got Here and Where Were Going Goodenoughs interest in
all of this was sparked in 1990 when she was teaching in California and
pregnant with her second son, Will. During a lecture one day by environmental
psychologist Roger Hart about childrens relationships with the environment,
she started thinking about what motivated children to find secret hiding
spaces, what she calls just for me places.
Theres an unforgettable thrill of being apart from the rest of the
world, Goodenough says. It can be modest hiding in a cupboard or under a
chair but that capacity to be able to look out and not be seen is very
powerful.
Six years later, while on vacation at Pocono Lake in Pennsylvania,
without toys or a TV, she and Will spent an afternoon building little huts out
of ferns and bark. She started thinking again about secret spaces. Through
teaching childrens classics and after talking to other people about their
memories of childhood, she decided to pull together a collection of essays,
poems, and short stories, called Secret Spaces of Childhood. Joyce Carol Oates
and Robert Coles were two of the contributors. She says she was surprised at
how varied the pieces were.
I thought everyone would have the same memory the blanket over the
table or the tree house, but they were all different, she says. Its about
developing a sense thats as unique as we are. What concerns me is that when
you take away the choice you give a child a toy with a single monologue
thats pulled by a string you take away imagination.
Luckily, she says her own childhood in Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich., was
full of imagination, thanks in part to the woods behind the house and a family
ethos that cherished the outdoors.
In our family, if you were taking a walk or watching the stars at
night, this was considered sacred space, she says.
As we continue to lose this sense of sacred space, and along with it,
free play, Goodenough says its a downward spiral for children, documented by
research: a rise in stress, diabetes, and obesity, for starters. Children also
lose an appreciation for the environment and the opportunity to find their
niche.
In our highly programmed, commercial world, down time and away space
slip away. Children need the space and time every day to do nothing, so that
who they are can grow.
To learn more go to www.childrenplay.org.
Do you remember a secret space that you had as a kid? How did play
impact who you've become? Share your stories with other readers here.
About the Article A version of this article originally appeared in
the Spring 2007 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate
School of Education.
Respond to this story with an e-mail to the editor.
Illustrations by Ken Dubrowski
Umesh Sharma
Washington D.C.
1-202-215-4328 [Cell]
Ed.M. - International Education Policy
Harvard Graduate School of Education,
Harvard University,
Class of 2005
http://www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/index.html (Edu info)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/ (Management Info)
www.gse.harvard.edu/iep (where the above 2 are used )
http://jaipurschool.bihu.in/
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