Psychology Today Blogs - Freedom to Learn

The Value of Play IV: Play is Nature’s Way of Teaching Us New Skills

Peter Gray — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 07:06:22 -0800

From a biological, evolutionary perspective, the primary purpose of play is to promote skill learning. Play is nature's way of assuring that young mammals, including young humans, will practice and become good at the skills they need to develop in order to survive and thrive in their environments. The German philosopher and naturalist Karl Groos developed this idea more than 100 years ago and expanded on it in two books--The Play of Animals (1898) and The Play of Man (1901).

Young animals practice survival skills through play.

Groos was ahead of his time, both in his thinking about evolution and in his thinking about play. He understood well the writings of Charles Darwin, and he had a sophisticated, modern understanding of instincts. He recognized that animals, especially mammals, must to varying degrees learn to use their instincts. Young mammals come into the world with biological drives and tendencies (instincts) to behave in certain ways, but to be effective such behaviors must be practiced and refined. Play, according to Groos, is essentially an instinct to practice other instincts. In The Play of Animals (p 75), Groos wrote: "Animals can not be said to play because they are young and frolicsome, but rather they have a period of youth in order to play; for only by doing so can they supplement the insufficient hereditary endowment with individual experience, in view of the coming tasks of life." Consistent with his theory, Groos divided animal play into categories related to the types of skills the play promotes, including movement play (running, leaping, climbing, swinging in trees, and so on), hunting play, fighting play, and nursing play (playful care of infants).

Groos's answer to the question about the biological purpose of play allows us to make sense of the patterns of play that we see throughout the animal world. For starters, it explains why young animals play more than do older ones of the same species; they play more because they have more to learn. It also explains why mammals play more than do other classes of animals. Insects, reptiles, amphibians and fishes come into the world with rather fixed instincts; they don't need to learn much in order to survive, given their ways of life, and there is little evidence in them of play. Mammals, on the other hand, have more flexible instincts, which must be supplemented and shaped through learning and practice provided by play.

Groos's theory also explains the differences in playfulness found among different orders and species of animals. Among mammals, primates (monkeys and apes) are the most flexible and adaptable order, with the most to learn, and they are the most playful of all animal orders. Among primates, human beings, chimpanzees, and bonobos (a species of ape closely related to chimpanzees and to humans) have the most to learn, and they are the most playful species. Also among mammals, carnivores (including the dog-like and cat-like species) are generally more playful than herbivores, probably because success in hunting requires more learning than does success in grazing. Aside from mammals, the only other animal class in which play has been regularly observed is that of birds. The most playful birds are the corvids (crows, magpies, and ravens), raptors (hawks and their relatives), and parrots. These are all long-lived birds, with larger brain to body weight ratios than other birds, which exhibit much flexibility and cleverness in their social lives and ways of obtaining food.

The idea that play's purpose is to promote skill learning helps us to understand species differences in types of play as well as in amounts of play. To a considerable degree, you can predict what an animal will play at by knowing what skills it must develop in order to survive and reproduce. Lion cubs and the young of other predators play at stalking and chasing; zebra colts, young gazelles, and other animals that are preyed upon by lions and such, play at fleeing and dodging (see post on chasing games and sports); young monkeys play at swinging from branch to branch in trees. Among species in which males fight one another for access to females, young males engage in more play fighting than do young females. And, at least among some species of primates, young females, but not young males, engage in much playful care of infants.

Human children practice all sorts of skills through play, including skills specific to their culture.

In The Play of Man, Groos extended his insights about animal play to humans. He pointed out that human beings, much more so than any other species, must learn different skills depending on the society in which they develop. Therefore, he argued, natural selection led to a strong drive, in human children, to observe the activities of their elders and incorporate those activities into their play. Children in every culture play at the general categories of activities that are essential to people everywhere, but their specific forms of play, within each category, are shaped by the kinds of activities they see around them. When children are free, they play far more, and in a far greater variety of ways, than do the young of any other species because they have far more to learn.

Consistent with Groos's theory, children play in ways that promote the full range of skills that human beings everywhere must develop:

• We, like all mammals, are physical beings who must develop strong bodies and learn to move in coordinated ways, and so we have physical play, which includes chasing and rough-and-tumble games that are quite similar to the ways that other mammals play. In many other respects, however, we are unique, and our play reflects that uniqueness.

• We are the linguistic animal, and so we have language play, which teaches us to talk.

• We are Homo sapiens, the wise animal, and so we have exploratory play, which combines curiosity with playfulness to teach us about the world around us.

• We are the animal that survives by building things--including shelters, tools, devices to help us communicate, and devices to help us move from place to place--and so we have constructive play, which teaches us to build.

• We are an intensely social species, requiring cooperation with others in order to survive, and so we have many forms of social play, which teach us to cooperate and to restrain our impulses in ways that make us socially acceptable.

• We are the imaginative animal, able to think about things that are not immediately present, and so we have fantasy play, which builds and exercises our capacity for imagination and provides a foundation for what we call intelligence.

These terms, which I have put in italics, do not refer to mutually exclusive categories of play, but rather to various functions that play can serve. Any given instance of play may serve more than one of these functions. A lively outdoor group game may be physical play, language play, exploratory play, constructive play, social play, and fantasy play all at once. Play, in all its forms combined, works to build us into fully functioning, effective human beings. (For an expansion of these ideas, see post on how the varieties of play match the requirements of human existence.)

Also consistent with Groos's theory, cross-cultural studies of play have shown that children play especially at the kinds of activities that are most valued by their culture. Children in hunting and gathering cultures play at hunting and gathering, using the kinds of tools that adults in those cultures use. Children in farming communities play at animal tending and plant cultivation. Children in modern western cultures play at games that involve reading and numbers, if they grow up in settings where these are valued, and they play with computers and other modern forms of technology, the tools of today.

Going beyond Groos, I would add that children are drawn to play not just at the skills that are most prominent and valued among adults around them, but also, even more intensely, at skills that are new and expanding. Because of this, children typically learn to use new technology faster than do their parents. From an evolutionary perspective, that is no accident. At a deep genetic level, children recognize that the most crucial skills for them to learn are those that will be of increasing importance in the future--the skills of their own generation, which may be different from the skills of their parents' generation. The value of this attraction to the new is especially apparent in modern times, in which technology and the skills required to master it change so rapidly.

Play's nature suits it well to its skill-building purpose.

Play, by definition, is activity that is psychologically removed from the real world. It is activity for its own sake, not activity aimed at some serious goal outside of the play itself such as food, money, gold stars, praise, or an addition to one's résumé (see posting on the definition of play). When we offer such rewards to children who are playing, we turn their play into something that is no longer play. Because play is activity done for its own sake rather than for some conscious end outside of itself, people often see play as frivolous, or trivial. But here is the deliciously paradoxical point: Play's educational power lies in its triviality.

Play serves the serious purpose of education, but the player is not deliberately educating himself or herself. The player is playing just for the fun of playing, not for anything else; education is a byproduct. If the player were playing for a serious purpose, much of play's educative power would be lost.

Because the child at play is not worrying about his or her future, and because the child at play suffers no real-world consequence for failing--that is, because of play's triviality--the child at play does not fear failing. Because the child at play is not seeking approval or praise or gold stars or anything else from adult judges, the child at play is unhampered by evaluation concerns. Fear and concerns about evaluation tend to freeze the mind and body into rigid frames, frames that are suited for carrying out well-learned habitual activities but not for learning new actions or thinking about new ideas. In the absence of concern about failure and others' judgments, children at play can devote all their attention to the skills at which they are playing. They strive to perform well, because performing well is an intrinsic goal of play, but they know that if they fail there will be no serious, real-world consequences, so they feel free to experiment, to take risks in ways that are crucial to learning. They do not have to devote part of their mental resources to the task of trying to figure out what some external judge is looking for. They can direct their activities in ways that they are ready for, rather than in ways that some judge has chosen for them.

Another aspect of play, besides its triviality, which suits play so well for its purpose of skill building is its repetitiveness. Have you ever noticed that most forms of play involve lots of repetition? A cat playfully stalking a mouse keeps releasing the mouse in order to stalk it again. A baby playfully babbling keeps repeating the same syllables or the same sets of syllables, sometimes altering the sequence slightly, as if deliberately practicing their pronunciation. A toddler playing at walking may keep walking back and forth, over the same route. A young child playfully reading may read the same (memorized) little book, over and over again. All sorts of structured games, such as tag or baseball or twenty questions, involve repetition of the same actions or processes over and over. But the repetition is never rote.

Because the repetitive action derives from the player's own will, each repetitive act is a creative act. If the act is exactly the same as the previous act, that is because the player wished to make it the same and was striving to make it the same. Often, though, each "repeated" act is different in some systematic way from the previous one; the player is deliberately varying the act in some way to fit the game or to experiment with new ways of doing the same thing. A side effect of such repetition is the perfection and consolidation of the newly developing skill.

The same skills that children learn so naturally in play become difficult in the typical school environment. Reading is an excellent example. Many years ago I watched my youngest brother learn to read, through his own play, before he started school, and later I watched my son do the same thing. At the Sudbury Valley School, the democratic non-school school that I have described in a previous essay, countless children have learned to read through play, at a wide range of ages, sometimes completely unaware of their learning. In this age-mixed community, where there are no formal reading lessons, children learn to read because reading is a valued part of their social environment. They see other children reading and hear them talking about what they have read, so they want to read. They play games that involve the written word. They are read to by adults and teenagers, who enjoy reading to them. They want to hear the same books over and over again until they have memorized them, and then they playfully "read" the books they have memorized until their pretend reading turns into real reading.

Contrast this to learning to read in standard schools, which for many children is painful and scars them for life about reading. Imagine what it is like for the child who, for whatever reason, is a little slower at learning to read than others in the class. Reading becomes a measure of self-worth and a source of anxiety and shame, and those emotions make learning to read not only painful but hard. When children are allowed to learn to read on their own, at their own pace, through their self-directed play, reading becomes and remains one of life's great pleasures. The same is true of other skills as well. Even throwing a ball can be difficult and shame-inducing when it is taught in school rather than learned in play.

Play is nature's way of teaching us the skills we need for life. But our educational system has stupidly turned play into something called "recess," truly trivializing it and marginalizing it, and has turned learning into something called "work," making it, by definition, something that children don't want to do.

© 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

The Value of Play III: Children Use Play to Confront, not Avoid, Life’s Challenges and Even Life’s Horrors

Peter Gray — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 07:32:08 -0800

Children's extraordinarily powerful drive to play did not come about to provide them with "recess" or "recreation." It came about for a far more serious purpose than that. It came about to help them survive. Throughout human history and pre-history, play has been children's primary means of acquiring the skills, values, and knowledge they need to survive within their culture. Children do not play to avoid the realities of life; they play at the realities of life. In doing so they come to grips with those realities--physically, intellectually, and emotionally.

In previous essays in this blog, I have described how play exercises and builds children's capacities for language, reasoning, locomotion, building things, and getting along with others (see especially the October 1, 2008, posting). I have there described play in ways that do not contradict the happy images we have of children playing at cherished activities in healthy environments. But play is not just adaptive in healthy environments. Play also helps children to confront and deal with the horrors of their world and ours, wherever those horrors exist.

We would like to think of children as fully sweet and innocent. In an ideal world, where the adults are fully sweet and innocent, children might be too. But the world is not ideal, and children growing up protected from the realities of the environment in which they must eventually make their way would be poorly equipped for that environment. It is no wonder that children resist the protective embraces of well-meaning adults, fight the restraints meant to keep them in idyllic playgrounds, and venture out, however and whenever they can, to experience the real world around them and incorporate it into their play. They, not we, know what's best for them.

The most dramatic evidence I know of concerning children's drive to embrace even the worst horrors of their environment through play is found in a remarkable book by George Eisen, published twenty years ago, entitled Children and Play in the Holocaust. Here are two concepts that lie at opposite ends of anyone's emotional spectrum: Nazi Holocaust and children playing. It is shocking to see the two next to one another in Eisen's title. And yet, as Eisen explains to us throughout the book, children interred in Nazi ghettos and concentration camps played--however briefly, until they were murdered. They played not because they were oblivious to the horrors around them. Nor did they play as a means to deny those horrors or divert their attention from them. Rather, they played in ways that helped them to understand, confront, and, to the degree possible, deal effectively with those horrors. Eisen's evidence comes from diaries and from interviews with survivors.

In the ghettos, the first stage in concentration before being sent off to labor and extermination camps, adults attempted to preserve for their children some semblance of the innocent play they had known before; but the children themselves, on their own, played games that fit their surroundings. They played games of war, of "blowing up bunkers," of "slaughtering," of "seizing the clothes of the dead," and games of resistance. At Vilna, Jewish children played "Jews and Gestapomen," in which the Jews would overpower their tormenters and beat them with their own rifles (sticks).

Even in the extermination camps, the children who were still healthy enough to move around played. In one camp they played a game called "tickling the corpse." At Auschwitz-Birkenau they dared one another to touch the electric fence. They played "gas chamber," a game in which they threw rocks into a pit and screamed the sounds of people dying. They made up a game called klepsi-klepsi--a common term for stealing--that was modeled on the camp's daily roll call. One playmate was blindfolded; then one of the others would step forward and hit him hard on the face; and then, with blindfold removed, the one who had been hit had to guess, from facial expressions or other evidence, who had hit him. To survive at Auschwitz, one had to be an expert at lying--for example, about stealing bread or about knowing of someone's escape or resistance plans--without giving oneself away. Klepsi-klepsi seemed to be practice for that skill.

In play, whether it is the sweet play we like to envision or the play described by Eisen, children bring the realities of their world into a fictional context, where it is safe to look those realities in the eye, to confront them, to experience them, and to practice ways of dealing with them. Some people think that violent play creates violent adults; but in reality the opposite is true. Violence in the adult world leads children, quite properly, to play at violence. How else can they prepare themselves emotionally, intellectually, and physically, for reality? It is wrong to think that somehow we can reform the world, for the future, by controlling children's play and controlling what they learn. If we want to reform the world, we have to reform the world; and children will follow suit. The children must, and will, prepare themselves for the the real world in which they must strive to survive. Let's try to make that word, in reality, not in pretense, as happy a one as we can.

The Value of Play II: How Play Promotes Reasoning in Children and Adults

Peter Gray — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 05:32:48 -0800

Twenty years ago, a pair of researchers in England reported on a series of experiments in which they showed that very young children could, in the context of play, solve logic problems that they seemed unable to solve in a serious context.

The problems they used were syllogisms, the classic type of logic problem described originally by Aristotle. A syllogism requires a person to combine the information in two premises to decide if a particular conclusion is true, false, or indeterminate (cannot be determined from the premises). Syllogisms are generally easy when the premises coincide with concrete reality, but are more difficult when the premises are counterfactual (contradictions to reality). The prevailing belief at the time that the British researchers conducted these experiments was that the ability to solve counterfactual syllogisms depends on a type of reasoning that is completely lacking in young children.

Here is an example of the kind of counterfactual syllogism that the researchers used:

All cats bark (major premise).
Muffins is a cat (minor premise).
Does muffins bark?

Previous research--including research by the famous Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget--had shown that children under about 10 or 11 years old regularly fail to solve such syllogisms correctly (that is, they fail to give answers that logicians take as the correct answers). When the British researchers put syllogisms like this to young children in a serious tone of voice, the children answered as Piaget and others would expect. They said things like, "No, cats go meow, they don't bark." They acted as if they were unable to think about a premise that did not fit with their real-world experiences. But, when the researchers presented the same problems in a playful tone of voice, using words that made it clear that they were talking about a pretend world, children as young as 4 years old solved the problems easily, and even many 2-year-olds solved them![1] They said, "Yes, Muffins barks."

Think of it: Four-year-olds in play easily solved logic problems that they were not supposed to be able to solve until they were about 10 or 11 years old!

How the playful state led young children to the "correct" answers to syllogisms

Piaget and other philosophers and psychologists of his time generally drew a sharp distinction between two kinds of reasoning----concrete reasoning and abstract reasoning (which Piaget called hypothetico-deductive reasoning). They argued that the first kind of reasoning depends on direct, concrete, previous experience with the conditions that are being thought about and the second kind depends on formal logic that has a mathematical foundation and can be applied to problems regardless of the person's experience, or lack of experience, with the concrete substance of the problems. Some philosophers and psychologists argued, further, that concrete reasoning develops naturally in nearly all people while abstract reasoning requires special training of the type found in Western schools. Others, including Piaget, contended that abstract reasoning does develop naturally, but typically does not emerge in children until they are about 11 years old. According to Piaget, young children could not solve counterfactual syllogisms, because they lacked the capacity for abstract reasoning. But Piaget was wrong.

Today, many if not most developmental and cognitive psychologists, myself included, reject the distinction between concrete and abstract reasoning. We argue that so-called abstract reasoning occurs through mental transformations that turn what at first appears to be an abstract problem into a concrete problem--that is, into a problem that is very similar to a problem that the person has previously encountered and solved in the real world. Those mental transformations involve imagination, and even young children are capable of them. From this point of view, all human reasoning is concrete; it is just that some problems involve a greater use of imagination than do others in order to put them into concrete form.[2]

Human play, by definition, involves imagination (see my Nov. 19, 2008, posting). Play naturally leads us to think of things as they might be rather than just as they currently are. In the playful state of mind it is easy for anyone to imagine and think about a world in which people can fly, in which time machines can transport us to the past, or in which all cats bark. Young children are masters of play, so it is no surprise that they can solve counterfactual syllogisms in the context of play.

Why can 11-year-olds solve counterfactual syllogisms in a serious context while 4-year-olds require a playful context? I think the answer has little to do with age differences in reasoning ability and much to do with differences in understanding of the researchers' purpose in asking the questions. Four-year-olds misinterpret the researchers' purpose. They believe that when adults ask them questions in a serious tone of voice, they want serious answers, answers that have to do with truth about the real world. So, they respond accordingly--"Cats don't bark." On the other hand, 11-year-olds, especially 11-year-olds who have been to school, recognize that the question is not about reality but is a test of logic, so they accept the counterfactual premise and give the answer that the researcher wants. They realize that this is a game that the researcher is playing, which has to do with a pretend world and not with the real world. Four-year-olds recognize the game-like quality only when the researcher makes it clear, through tone of voice and wording, that it is a game.

Researchers have found that unschooled adults in other cultures "fail" counterfactual syllogisms, just as young children in our culture do. In the past, this has been interpreted as evidence that schooling is necessary for the development of abstract thinking. But my guess is that those adults "fail" on such problems for the same reason that young children in our culture do; they misinterpret the intent of the questions. I bet if researchers put the same problems to unschooled adults in a playful mode, they too would easily solve them.

My overriding point here is that play automatically induces hypothetical reasoning. It leads us to think about pretend worlds, where anything is possible, and to reason about those possibilities, rather than to limit our thoughts just to things that are true in the immediate here and now. In this way play promotes the kind of thought that is crucial not just to all of theoretical science but to all planning about the future, in which we must imagine possible events and think about how we might deal with those events.

Please do not draw the wrong conclusion from this little discussion. I am not arguing that it is a good idea, educationally, to induce playful states deliberately in children in order to improve their reasoning, as the researchers did in their experiment. Children play naturally, and it is through natural play that children practice reasoning. Children who are manipulated into play by teachers who think that this will improve their reasoning will soon learn to resist the manipulations. Play, in the long run, is only play if it is self-chosen and self-directed. Children practice reasoning in their own ways, through their own self-chosen play; we can't do it for them and shouldn't try. All we need to do, as I have argued in previous installments (e.g. Sept. 30, 2008, posting), is to provide places where children can play and explore safely and naturally, with others in age-mixed groups. They will take care of the rest.

How playfulness allowed college students to solve a classic insight problem

Here is another example of an experiment showing the power of a playful mood to improve problem solving. In this case the subjects were college students and the problem was a classic insight problem, called candle problem. In this task, subjects are given a small candle, a book of matches, and a box of tacks and are asked to attach the candle to a bulletin board in such a way that the candle can be lit and will burn properly. They are allowed to use no objects other than those they were given. The trick to solving the problem is to realize that the tacks can be dumped out of the box that holds them and the box can then be tacked to the bulletin board and used as a shelf on which to mount the candle. In the typical test situation, very few people solve this problem. They fail to see that the tack box can be used for something other than a container for tacks.

In the experiment, some subjects were exposed to a slapstick comedy film for a short period just before being presented with the candle problem, while others saw a serious film and still others saw no film. The result was that watching a slapstick film greatly increased the percentage of subjects who solved the problem.[3] The researchers' interpretation was that a happy mood broadens thought and leads to insight. My own interpretation is similar but emphasizes the role of play. I think the slapstick comedy put the subjects in a playful state of mind and that playfulness, not just happiness itself, led to the broadened way of thinking. In play, we regularly view objects and information in new ways. In a serious state of mind, whether we are happy or not, we fail to imagine that a tack box might be a shelf; but in a playful state such imagination comes easily. In play we regularly imagine objects to be other than what they were originally designed for. In play a broom can be a horse, a thimble can be a bishop, and a tack box can easily be a shelf.

One of the main purposes of play in our species, I think, is to promote our use of imagination to solve problems. We appear to be the only animal that thinks in imaginative ways. Imagination provides the foundation for our inventiveness, our creativity, and our ability to plan for the future. I believe that our huge capacity and desire for play came about, in evolution, partly to promote our capacities to invent, create, and plan. When we allow children ample opportunities for real play, we are providing them with opportunities to exercise and develop those capacities. When we allow ourselves to take a playful attitude in our work and domestic life, we are providing ourselves with a context for solving problems that might otherwise be intractable.
-------------
References
1. Dias, M. G., & Harris, P. L. (1988). The effect of make-believe play on deductive reasoning. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 6, 207-221.
2. I elaborate on the idea that "abstract" thought is really just concrete thought coupled with imagination in my textbook, Psychology, 5th edition (2007), pp 348-351.
3. Isen, A. M., Daubman, K. A., & Nosicki, G. P. (1987). Positive affect facilitates creative problem solving. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 1122-1131.

The Value of Play I: The Definition of Play Provides Clues to Its Purposes

Peter Gray — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:25:12 -0800

Play in our species serves many valuable purposes. It is a means by which children develop their physical, intellectual, emotional, social, and moral capacities. It is a means of creating and preserving friendships. It also provides a state of mind that, in adults as well as children, is uniquely suited for high-level reasoning, insightful problem solving, and all sorts of creative endeavors. This essay is the first in a series I plan to post on The Value of Play. The subject of this first installment is the definition of play. Clues to play’s value lie in the definition.

Most of this essay is about the defining characteristics of play, but before listing them there are three general points that I think are worth keeping in mind. The first point is that the characteristics of play all have to do with motivation and mental attitude, not with the overt form of the behavior. Two people might be throwing a ball, or pounding nails, or typing words on a computer, and one might be playing while the other is not. To tell which one is playing and which one is not, you have to infer from their expressions and the details of their actions something about why they are doing what they are doing and their attitude toward it.

The second point, toward definition, is that play is not necessarily all-or-none. Play can blend with other motives and attitudes, in proportions ranging anywhere from 0% up to 100% percent play. Pure play occurs more often in children than in adults. In adults, play is commonly blended with other motives, having to do with adult responsibilities. That is why, in everyday conversation, we tend to talk about children “playing” and about adults bringing a “playful attitude” or “playful spirit” to their activities. We intuitively think of playfulness as a matter of degree. Of course we don’t have meters for measuring these things, but I would estimate that my behavior in writing this blog is about 80% play.

The third point is that play is not neatly defined in terms of some single identifying characteristic. Rather, it is defined in terms of a confluence of several characteristics. People before me who have studied and written about play have, among them, described quite a few such characteristics; but they can all be boiled down, I think, to the following five: (1) Play is self-chosen and self-directed; (2) Play is activity in which means are more valued than ends; (3) Play has structure, or rules, which are not dictated by physical necessity but emanate from the minds of the players; (4) Play is imaginative, non-literal, mentally removed in some way from “real” or “serious” life; and (5) Play involves an active, alert, but non-stressed frame of mind.

The more fully an activity entails all of these characteristics, the more inclined most people are to refer to that activity as play. By “most people” I don’t just mean most scholars who study play. Even young children are most likely to use the word play for activities that most fully contain these five characteristics. These characteristics seem to capture our intuitive sense of what play is. Notice that all of the characteristics have to do with the motivation or attitude that the person brings to the activity. Let me elaborate on these characteristics, one by one, and expand a bit on each by pointing out some of its implications for thinking about the purposes of play.

1. Play is self-chosen and self-directed; players are always free to quit.

Play is, first and foremost, an expression of freedom. It is what one wants to do as opposed to what one is obliged to do. The joy of play is the ecstatic feeling of liberty. Play is not always accompanied by smiles and laughter, nor are smiles and laughter always signs of play; but play is always accompanied by a feeling of “Yes, this is what I want to do right now.” Players are free agents, not pawns in someone else’s game.

Players not only choose to play or not play, but they also direct their own actions during play. As I will argue below, play always involves rules of some sort, but all players must freely accept the rules, and if rules are changed then all players must agree to the changes. That is why play is the most democratic of all activities. In social play (play involving more than one player), one player may emerge for a period as the leader, but only at the will of all the others. Every rule a leader proposes must be approved, at least tacitly, by all of the other players.

The ultimate freedom in play is the freedom to quit. A person who feels coerced or pressured to engage in an activity, and unable to quit, is not a player but a victim. The freedom to quit provides the foundation for all of the democratic processes that occur in social play. If one player attempts to bully or dominate the others, the others will quit and the game will be over; so players who want to continue playing must learn not to bully or dominate. People who don’t agree to a proposed change in rules may likewise quit, and that is why leaders in play must gain the consent of the other players in order to change a rule. People who begin to feel that their needs or desires are not being met in play will quit, and that is why children learn, in play, to be sensitive to others’ needs and to strive to meet those needs. It is through social play that children learn, on their own, with no lectures, how to meet their own needs while, at the same time, satisfying the needs of others. This is perhaps the most important lesson that people in any society can learn.

This point about play being self-chosen and self-directed is ignored by, or perhaps unknown to, many adults who try to take control of children’s play. Adults can play with children, and in some cases can even be leaders in children’s play, but to do so requires at least the same sensitivity that children themselves show to the needs and wishes of all the players. Because adults are commonly viewed as authority figures, children often feel less able to quit, or to disagree with the proposed rules, when an adult is leading than when a child is leading. And so, when adults try to lead children’s play the result often is something that, for many of the children, is not play at all. When a child feels coerced, the play spirit vanishes and all of the advantages of that spirit go with it. Math games in school and adult-led sports are not play for those who feel that they have to participate and are not ready to accept, as their own, the rules that the adults have established. Adult-led games can be great for kids who freely choose them, but can seem like punishment to kids who haven’t made that choice.

What is true for children’s play is also true for adults’ sense of play. Research studies have shown that adults who have a great deal of freedom as to how and when to do their work often experience that work as play, even (in fact, especially) when the work is difficult. In contrast, people who must do just what others tell them to do at work rarely experience their work as play.

2. Play is activity in which means are more valued than ends.

Many of our actions are “free” in the sense that we don’t feel that other people are making us do them, but are not free, or at least are not experienced as free, in another sense. These are actions that we feel we must do in order to achieve some necessary or much-desired goal, or end. We scratch an itch to get rid of the itch, flee from a tiger to avoid getting eaten, study an uninteresting book to get a good grade on a test, work at a boring job to get money. If there were no itch, tiger, test, or need for money, we would not scratch, flee, study, or do the boring work. In those cases we are not playing.

To the degree that we engage in an activity purely to achieve some end, or goal, which is separate from the activity itself, that activity is not play. What we value most, when we are not playing, are the results of our actions. The actions are merely means to the ends. When we are not playing, we typically opt for the shortest, least effortful means of achieving our goal. The non-playful, goal-oriented college student, for example, does the least studying in each course that she can in order to get the “A” that she desires, and her studying is focused directly on the goal of doing well on the tests. Any learning not related to that goal is, for her, wasted effort.

In play, however, all this is reversed. Play is activity conducted primarily for its own sake. The playful student enjoys studying the subject and cares less about the test. In play, attention is focused on the means, not the ends, and players do not necessarily look for the easiest routes to achieving the ends. Think of a cat preying on a mouse versus a cat that is playing at preying on a mouse. The former takes the quickest route for killing the mouse. The latter tries various ways of catching the mouse, not all very efficient, and lets the mouse go each time so it can try again. The preying cat enjoys the end; the playing cat enjoys the means. (The mouse, of course, enjoys none of this.)

Play often has goals, but the goals are experienced as an intrinsic part of the game, not as the sole reason for engaging in the game’s actions. Goals in play are subordinate to the means for achieving them. For example, constructive play (the playful building of something) is always directed toward the goal of creating the object that the player has in mind. But notice that the primary objective in such play is the creation of the object, not the having of the object. Children making a sandcastle would not be happy if an adult came along and said, "You can stop all your effort now. I'll make the castle for you." That would spoil their fun. The process, not the product, motivates them. Similarly, children or adults playing a competitive game have the goal of scoring points and winning, but, if they are truly playing, it is the process of scoring and trying to win that motivates them, not the points themselves or the status of having won. If someone would just as soon win by cheating as by following the rules, or get the trophy and praise through some shortcut that bypasses the game process, then that person is not playing.

Adults can test the degree to which their work is play by asking themselves this: “If I could receive the same pay, the same prospects for future pay, the same amount of approval from other people, and the same sense of doing good for the world for not doing this job as I am receiving for doing it, would I quit?” If the person would eagerly quit, the job is not play. To the degree that the person would quit reluctantly, or not quit, the job is play. It is something that the person enjoys independently of the extrinsic rewards received for doing it.

One reason why play is such an ideal state of mind for creativity and learning is because the mind is focused on means. Since the ends are understood as secondary, fear of failure is absent and players feel free to incorporate new sources of information and to experiment with new ways of doing things.

3. Play is guided by mental rules.

Play is freely chosen activity, but it is not freeform activity. Play always has structure, and that structure derives from rules in the player’s mind. This point is really an extension of the point just made about the importance of means in play. The rules of play are the means. To play is to behave in accordance with self-chosen rules. The rules are not like rules of physics, nor like biological instincts, which are automatically followed. Rather, they are mental concepts that often require conscious effort to keep in mind and follow.

A basic rule of constructive play, for example, is that you must work with the chosen medium in a manner aimed at producing or depicting some specific object or design. You don’t just pile up blocks randomly; you arrange them deliberately in accordance with your mental image of what you are trying to make. Even rough and tumble play (playful fighting and chasing), which may look wild from the outside, is constrained by rules. An always-present rule in play fighting, for example, is that you mimic some of the actions of real fighting, but you don’t really hurt the other person. You don’t hit with all your force (at least not if you are the stronger of the two); you don’t kick, bite, or scratch. Play fighting is much more controlled than real fighting; it is always an exercise in restraint.

Among the most complex forms of play, in terms of rules, is what play researchers call sociodramatic play—the playful acting out of roles or scenes, as when children are playing “house,” or acting out a marriage, or pretending to be superheroes. The fundamental rule here is that you must abide by your and the other players’ shared understanding of the role that you are playing. If you are the pet dog in a game of “house,” you must walk around on all fours and bark rather than talk. If you are Wonder Woman, and you and your playmates believe that Wonder Woman never cries, then you refrain from crying, even when you fall down and hurt yourself.

To illustrate the rule-based nature of sociodramatic play, the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky wrote about two actual sisters—ages seven and five—who sometimes played that they were sisters.[1] As actual sisters, they rarely thought about their sisterhood and had no consistent way of behaving toward one another. Sometimes they enjoyed one another, sometimes they argued, and sometimes they ignored one another. But, when they were playing sisters, they always behaved according to their shared stereotype of how sisters should behave. They dressed alike, talked alike, always loved one another, talked about the differences between themselves and everyone else, and so on. Much more self-control, mental effort, and rule following was involved in playing sisters than in being sisters.

The category of play with the most explicit rules is that called formal games. These are games, like checkers and baseball, with rules that are specified, verbally, in ways designed to minimize ambiguity in interpretation. The rules of these games are commonly passed along from one generation of players to the next. Many formal games in our society are competitive, and one purpose of the formal rules is to make sure that the same restrictions apply equally to all competitors. Players of formal games, if they are true players, must adopt these rules as their own for the period of the game and be willing to stick to them. Of course, except in “official” versions of such games, players commonly modify the rules to fit their own needs, but each modification must be agreed upon by all the players.

The main point I want to make here is that every form of play involves a good deal of self-control. When not playing, children (and adults too) may act according to their immediate biological needs, emotions, and whims; but in play they must act in ways that they and their playmates deem appropriate to the game. Play draws and fascinates the player precisely because it is structured by rules that the player herself or himself has invented or accepted.

The student of play who most strongly emphasized play’s rule-based nature was Lev Vygotsky, whose example of sisters playing sisters I just mentioned. In an essay on the role of play in development, originally published in 1933, Vygotsky commented, as follows, on the apparent paradox between the idea that play is spontaneous and free and the idea that players must follow rules:

“The … paradox is that in play [the child] adopts the line of least resistance—she does what she most feels like doing because play is connected with pleasure—and at the same time she learns to follow the line of greatest resistance by subordinating herself to rules and thereby renouncing what she wants, since subjection to rules and renunciation of impulsive action constitute the path to maximum pleasure in play. Play continually creates demands on the child to act against immediate impulse. At every step the child is faced with a conflict between the rules of the game and what she would do if she could suddenly act spontaneously. … Thus, the essential attribute of play is a rule that has become a desire. …. The rule wins because it is the strongest impulse. Such a rule is an internal rule, a rule of self-restraint and self-determination …. In this way a child’s greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action and morality.”[1]

Vygotsky's point, of course, is that the child's desire to play is so strong that it becomes a motivating force for learning self-control. The child resists impulses and temptations that would run counter to the rules because the child seeks the larger pleasure of remaining in the game. To Vygotsky's analysis, I would add that the child accepts and desires the rules of play only because he or she is always free to quit if the rules become too burdensome. With that in mind, the paradox can be seen to be superficial. The child's real-life freedom is not restricted by the rules of the game, because the child can at any moment choose to leave the game. That is another reason why the freedom to quit is such a crucial aspect of the definition of play. Without that freedom, rules of play would be intolerable. To be required to act like Wonder Woman in real life would be terrifying, but to act like that in play––a realm you are always free to leave––is great fun.

Along with Vygotsky, I would contend that the greatest of play’s many values for our species lies in the learning of self-control. Self-control is the essence of being human. We commonly say that people behave like “animals,” rather than like humans, when they fail to abide by socially agreed-upon rules and, instead, impulsively follow their immediate drives and whims. Everywhere, to live in human society, people must behave in accordance with conscious, shared mental conceptions of what is appropriate; and that is what children practice constantly in their play. In play, from their own desires, children practice the art of being human.

4. Play is non-literal, imaginative, marked off in some way from reality.

Another apparent paradox of play, also pointed out by Vygotsky, is that play is serious yet not serious, real yet not real. In play one enters a realm that is physically located in the real world, makes use of props in the real world, is often about the real world, is said by the players to be real, and yet in some way is mentally removed from the real world.

Imagination, or fantasy, is most obvious in sociodramatic play, where the players create the characters and plot, but it is also present to some degree in all other forms of human play. In rough and tumble play, the fight is a pretend one, not a real one. In constructive play, the players say that they are building a castle, but they know it is a pretend castle, not a real one. In formal games with explicit rules, the players must accept an already established fictional situation that provides the foundation for the rules. For example, in the real world bishops can move in any direction they choose, but in the fantasy world of chess they can move only on the diagonals.

The fantasy aspect of play is intimately connected to play’s rule-based nature. Because play takes place in a fantasy world, it must be governed by rules that are in the minds of the players rather than by laws of nature. In reality, one cannot ride a horse unless a real horse is physically present; but in play one can ride a horse whenever the game's rules permit or prescribe it. In reality, a broom is just a broom, but in play it can be a horse. In reality, a chess piece is just a carved bit of wood, but in chess it is a bishop or a knight that has well-defined capacities and limitations for movement that are not even hinted at in the carved wood itself. The fictional situation dictates the rules of the game; the actual physical world within which the game is played is secondary. Through play the child learns to take charge of the world and not simply respond passively to it. In play the child’s mental concept dominates, and the child molds available elements of the physical world to meet that concept.

Play of all sorts has “time in” and “time out,” though that is more obvious for some forms of play than others. Time in is the period of fiction. Time out is the temporary return to reality—perhaps to tie one’s shoes, or go to the bathroom, or correct a playmate who hasn't been following the rules. During time in one does not say, “I am just playing,” any more than does Shakespeare’s Hamlet announce from the stage that he is merely pretending to murder his stepfather.

Adults sometimes become confused by the seriousness of children’s play and by children’s refusal, while playing, to say that they are playing. They worry needlessly that children don’t distinguish fantasy from reality. When my son was four years old he was Superman for periods that sometimes lasted more than a day. During those periods he would deny vigorously that he was only pretending to be Superman, and this worried his nursery school teacher. She was only partly mollified when I pointed out that he never attempted to leap off of actual tall buildings or stop real railroad trains and that he would acknowledge that he had been playing when he finally did declare time out by removing his cape. To acknowledge that play is play is to remove the magic spell; it automatically turns time in into time out.

An amazing fact of human nature is that even 2-year-olds know the difference between real and pretend. A 2-year-old who turns a cup filled with imaginary water over a doll and says, “Oh oh, dolly all wet,” knows that the doll isn’t really wet. It would be impossible to teach such young children such a subtle concept as pretense, yet they understand it. Apparently, the fictional mode of thinking, and the ability to keep that mode distinct from the literal mode, are innate to the human mind. That innate capacity is part of the inborn capacity for play.

The fantasy element of play is often not as obvious, or as full-blown, in adults’ play as in children’s play. That is one reason why adults’ play is typically not of the 100% variety. Yet, I would argue, fantasy occupies a big role in much if not most of what adults do and is a major element in our intuitive sense of the degree to which adult activities are play. An architect designing a house is designing a real house. Yet, the architect brings a good deal of imagination to bear in visualizing the house, imagining how people might use it, and matching it with some aesthetic concepts that she has in mind. It is reasonable to say that the architect builds a pretend house, in her mind and on paper, before it becomes a real one.

When I say that my writing this blog is about 80% play, I am taking into account not only my sense of freedom about doing it, my enjoyment of the process, and the fact that I’m following rules (about writing) that I accept as my own, but also the fact that a considerable degree of imagination is involved. I’m not making up the facts, but I am making up the way of stringing them together, and I am imagining how you might respond to what I am writing. Sometimes my fantasy goes even further, and I imagine that the ideas I’m presenting will have certain positive effects on society. So, fantasy is moving me along in this, much as it moves a child along in building a sandcastle or pretending to be Superman. The fact that parts of my fantasy could possibly turn into reality does not negate its status as fantasy.

5. Play involves an active, alert, but non-stressed frame of mind.

This final characteristic of play follows naturally from the other four. Because play involves conscious control of one’s own behavior, with attention to process and rules, it requires an active, alert mind. Players do not just passively absorb information from the environment, or reflexively respond to stimuli, or behave automatically in accordance with habit. Moreover, because play is not a response to external demands or immediate strong biological needs, the person at play is relatively free from the strong drives and emotions that are experienced as pressure or stress. And because the player’s attention is focused on process more than outcome, the player’s mind is not distracted by fear of failure. So, the mind at play is active and alert, but not stressed. The mental state of play is what some researchers call “flow.” Attention is attuned to the activity itself, and there is reduced consciousness of self and time. The mind is wrapped up in the ideas, rules, and actions of the game.

This point about the mental state of play is very important for understanding play’s value as a mode of learning and creative production. The alert but unstressed condition of the playful mind is precisely the condition that has been shown repeatedly, in many psychological experiments, to be ideal for creativity and the learning of new skills. Such experiments are normally not described as experiments on play, but it is no stretch to interpret them as that. What the experiments show is that strong pressure to perform well (which induces a non-playful state) improves performance on tasks that are mentally easy or habitual for the person, but worsens performance on tasks that require creativity, or conscious decision making, or the learning of new skills. In contrast, anything that is done to reduce the person’s concern with outcome and to increase the person’s enjoyment of the task for its own sake—that is, anything that increases playfulness—has the opposite effect.

Strong pressure to perform well inhibits creativity and learning by focusing attention strongly and narrowly on the goal, thereby reducing the ability to focus on means. In the pressured state, one tends to fall back on instinctive or well-learned ways of doing things. That way of responding to pressure is adaptive in many emergency situations. When a tiger is chasing you, you use whatever means you have already learned for getting away or hiding; that is not a good time to experiment with new ways. Experts in any realm can usually perform well in the pressured state because they can call on their well-learned, habitual modes of responding and don’t need to learn anything new or act creatively. Their attention can focus on producing the best possible outcome using the repertoire of actions that are already second nature to them.

When we pressure students to do well on their schoolwork by constantly evaluating their work, we put them into a non-playful, goal-directed state that may motivate those who already know how to do it to perform well, but inhibits experimentation and learning in those who don’t already know how. Pressure widens the performance gap between experts and novices. Even experts, though, must play at their activity of expertise if they are going to rise to still higher levels of expertise. And, in some realms, such as art and essay writing, creativity is required no matter how much experience a person has had, and a playful mind always performs best in those realms.

When an activity becomes so easy, so habitual, that it no longer requires conscious mental effort, it may lose its status as play. That is why players keep making the game harder, or different, or keep raising the criteria for success. A game is a game only if an active, alert mind is required to do it well.
---------------
Does this extended definition of play make sense to you? Does it fit with the way that you think of play in everyday life? I ask this question genuinely. I want, for my own work, to be sure that I am using a concept of play that fits with the concept of play that people find useful in everyday discourse. I would very much appreciate your comments on this.

As I said, over the next few weeks I will be elaborating on the various functions of play, both for children and for adults, and I will refer from time to time to the definition of play that I have provided in this post. Keep tuned.
-------------
Reference
Lev S. Vygotsky, “The Role of Play in Development,” in M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman (Eds.). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, 92-104. (1978, original essay published in 1933).

Chasing Games and Sports: Why Do We Like to Be Chased?

Peter Gray — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:58:39 -0800

The three-year-old squeals with almost unbearable joy as she flees from the terrible monster, in the form of her father or big brother, who threatens to catch her and eat her for breakfast. The 22-year-old quarterback experiences a similar thrill as he twists, turns, and dashes around one monstrous defender after another on his way to the goal line; and fans in the stands share vicariously his joy, as they imagine themselves in similar flight. In nightmares and in real life, nothing is more terrifying than being chased by a predator or monster. But in play, nothing is more delightful.

Have you ever noticed that in all chase games the preferred position is that of being chased? The most universal and basic of all such games is tag. Children everywhere play it, and the goal, always, is to spend as much time being chased, and as little time chasing, as possible. The punishment for being caught is that you become "it," and then you must serve time as chaser until you catch someone and can once again enjoy the thrill of being chased.

In every chasing game that I know of, the main object and joy is to run successfully through or around those who are chasing you, while doing whatever else it is that the game demands. A typical example is "fox and geese," which my friends and I played endlessly, on ice skates, in paths carved through the snow on frozen ponds in Northern Minnesota. The preferred position always was to be one of the geese, not the fox. If you were caught, then you had to be the fox until you caught someone and could again be a goose. In real life, people would far rather be predator than prey; but in play, everyone prefers to be prey. Hide-and-seek and dodge ball are not exactly chase games, but they too follow the rule: The preferred position is to be pursued, which in hide-and-seek is the one who hides and in dodge ball is the one whom people are trying to hit with a ball. Punishment for being found or hit is that you have to be a pursuer until you find or hit someone, and then you can once again enjoy hiding or dodging.

All formal team sports follow the same rule; they are all variations of tag. In American football and in soccer, the primary goal and joy lies in running across a field carrying or kicking a ball while a horde of "enemies" chase after you, to tackle you or get the ball from you. Likewise for basketball and hockey. In baseball, the preferred positions are batter and base runner. The batter, after hitting the ball, tries to run around a specified loop, from one safe point to another and ultimately to "home," while a gang of enemies tries to capture him. In all such games the teams alternate between "offense" and "defense," and the preferred position is always offense. That is the position where you are chased.

From the biological perspective I am taking here, the terms "offense" and "defense" in team sports are misleading. Those terms come from the metaphor of war: The offensive players invade the defenders' territory and then scramble to avoid being caught by the defenders. But, if my analysis is correct, at the biological level the thrill from the games comes not from the simulation of war but from the simulation of predator-prey or monster-victim relations. In this light, the so-called "offensive" players, such as the quarterback scrambling in football, are really the defenders. They are, in play, trying to defend their own lives as they are pursued by pretend predators, monsters, or enemies.

And now, back to the original question. In chase games, why do we like to be the chased more than to chase? The answer can be inferred from observations of similar behaviors in other animals. Young mammals of most species play chase games very much like our tag; and the apparently preferred position for most species is that of being chased. A typical game--for a pair of young monkeys, lambs, or squirrels, for example--starts with one youngster playfully attacking the other and then running off, looking back to be sure that the provoked playmate is pursuing. When the pursuing animal catches the pursued and gives it a little play bite, the tables turn and the former pursuer flees gleefully with the other in pursuit. It is exactly like children playing tag. By all of the ways that animals show pleasure, the animal being chased shows the greatest pleasure in the game, just as is the case for humans.

More than a century ago, the philosopher and naturalist Karl Groos (in The Play of Animals, 1898) pointed out that natural selection shaped young mammals to find joy in fleeing from one another in play, so they would engage in such play repeatedly and develop skills that would help them in real life to flee from predators and same-species enemies. In most species of mammals, predation is the leading cause of death, especially while young, and in some species aggressive attacks from others of one's own kind are also a relatively common cause of death. For most mammals the ability to flee effectively from predators or enemies is a clear requirement for survival, and the same was true for our species during most of our evolutionary history. When an animal is running from a real predator, the motivating force is fear. When an animal is practicing, in play, how to get away from a play predator, the motivating force is joy. It is no coincidence, then, that our greatest real fear becomes, in play, our greatest joy.

As you might predict, the rule that being chased in play is more fun than chasing does not hold for large predatory animals. Young wolves, lions, and tigers play chase games, but their behavior strongly suggests that they prefer the position of chaser. Such animals are rarely preyed upon, and for them the games serve more as practice at predation than at fleeing. That is why your dog likes to play at chasing cars (big prey), balls (small prey), and all sorts of other moving objects. Your dog, unlike you, gets more of a thrill from play at chasing than from play at being chased, because, in its ancestry, skill at running down game was more crucial to survival than was skill at fleeing, dodging, and hiding.

Next time you watch your favorite quarterback dodging and darting downfield, think of those after him as play versions of lions, tigers, and trolls. You will enjoy the game all the more if you do. If I were to name a football team, I would call it something like the "Fleeing Fawns,"not "Lions," "Bears," or "Eagles." It is the prey, not the predator, who is the game's hero. I'd probably have a hard time selling that to the 22-year-old quarterback, however. Maybe that's why we evolutionary psychologists aren't often asked to name sports teams. Oh well, in my heart I'm cheering for the Fleeing Fawns; and so is everyone else, even if they don't know it.

Reasons to Consider a Less Selective, Less Expensive College: Saving Money is Just One of them

Peter Gray — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:36:09 -0700

Families who, for years, have been dutifully squirreling money into college tuition funds have discovered, over the last few weeks, that a skunk has gotten into their stash. The stock-based college funds have plummeted, as have the parents' retirement funds and the value of their home. This situation is leading many high-school seniors and juniors to expand their thinking about what colleges to apply to, and it will lead them also to think carefully about which offer to accept, when those admissions offers begin to arrive in the mail. The local state university, or one of the state colleges, which costs a fraction of what an elite private school costs, is beginning to look a lot more attractive than it did before.

When my wife was finishing high school, some years ago, she had an academic record that could have gotten her into most highly selective colleges. She chose, instead, Fitchburg State, a school you will never see in Newsweek's rankings of top colleges or in anybody's guide to the most selective schools in America. She looked carefully, and she concluded that, for what she wanted to study, Fitchburg's program was as good as any; and she especially liked the fact that neither she nor her parents would have to go into debt for her to go there. She was also pleased that her fellow students would come from a diverse set of backgrounds. She--who is now a highly respected physician, at the top of her field--has never regretted that decision. There is no indication that her Fitchburg diploma, which she proudly displays, has served her any less well than a diploma from Harvard would have. I personally envy the reverse snobbery that she is able (subtly) to display among her colleagues who have degrees from fancy schools.

For decades, our nation's educational establishment has been promoting a simplistic, wrong-headed view about college selection. That view is: Apply to the most selective schools that you have a chance of getting into, and then go to the most selective school that accepts you. The notion out there is that you are "selling yourself short," "not being all you can be," if you don't go to the most selective and expensive college that is willing to take you. Because that notion has gotten so firmly into people's heads, private colleges have for many years been able to get away with increases in tuitions and other fees that have vastly outstripped inflation and are nothing short of outrageous. Here I will present a case for thinking carefully and not falling into the trap that has captured so many.

For equally able students, education at a highly selective college does not lead to a better job or higher income than does education at a less selective college.

Some people are fooled by a misleading statistic. Yes, it is true that graduates from Harvard (and its ilk) do, on average, make more money than graduates from Fitchburg State (and its ilk). But, remember, those who go to Harvard are, on average, quite different to begin with from those who go to Fitchburg. Because most people have the mindset that they should attend the most selective school they can get into, Harvard and others like it are able to select the cream of the crop (by the usual definition of cream). These are people who are destined to do well, career wise, no matter where they go to school. Most of them are extraordinarily bright and motivated (and the rest have very rich or famous parents).

The fact that the average graduate of an elite college makes more money in adult life than does the average graduate of a less elite college has no bearing at all on the question of whether or not you (or your son or daughter) will make more money by going to an elite college. The only kind of research study that would help at all to answer that question is one that compares students who had equal initial academic ability and income-earning potential but chose to go to colleges differing in prestige level. Fortunately, such a study has been done; but not many people know about it.

In 2002, Stacy Berg Dale and Alan Krueger published the results of an extensive study of the relationship between college attended and subsequent income for students who, on other measures, had comparable potential.[1] They used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972. As one part of their study, they focused exclusively on those students who had applied to and been accepted by at least one highly elite college and at least one less elite college. Then, from this pool, they compared the adult incomes of those who had chosen the elite school to the adult incomes for those who had chosen the less elite school, and they found no significant difference. In another part of the study, they used statistical means to equate students for income potential, based on information about them when they were in high school (such as their SAT scores), and, again, found that students with equal initial potential did essentially equally well, income wise, regardless of the prestige level of the college they attended.

There was, I should note, one interesting exception to the general conclusion that prestige of college attended did not affect adult income. That exception was for students coming from very low-income families. For that group, and only that group, attending an elite college did significantly boost average income. Perhaps, for that group, attending an elite school helped in various ways to elevate them into a higher social class, which helped them get better jobs and make more money as adults than they would have otherwise. For the typical middle-class college student, however, there was no such effect. So, if you happen to come from a low-income family and have great high-school grades and SAT scores, then, depending on a lot of other conditions, you might want to listen to the standard advice and go to the most prestigious school you can get into. It is also the case that the most prestigious colleges have the best financial aid packages for those who come from low-income families. If you can get into Harvard and your family has no money to pay for it, Harvard will pay all of your expenses. For you, Harvard might not only provide a bigger boost up than Fitchburg State, but it might be cheaper as well.

There is no evidence that the quality of a college education correlates with its cost.

Quality of college education is very difficult if not impossible to assess in any general way. What works great for one person may be terrible for another. Moreover, consistent with the theme of most of these blog posts, the education that you get in college, regardless of what college you attend, will depend on what you put into it. Real education is not done to you; it is done by you. Therefore, it is important for you to assess schools based on what you can do there.

It is also the case that, at many elite schools, the most famous professors (the ones drawing the highest salaries) will generally be least available to you as an undergraduate student. They will be busy with their research and graduate students. It is standard practice now that professors who get big research grants use part of that money to "buy out" some or all of their courses. The result is that the university hires, for paltry amounts, graduate students and outside part-timers to teach those courses.

If you go to a less elite college, especially if it one without a graduate program, the professors may not be famous, but they may well be better scholars than the graduate students and part-timers who are teaching the famous professors' courses elsewhere. They are also likely to be more dedicated to teaching and to have more time and motivation to get to know you as a person. They may welcome you to participate in their research or other scholarly or community work, as a junior colleague, which could give you invaluable experience not available in the classroom.

I myself went to an Ivy League college, many years ago, partly because of the fame of the members of its physics department. I was, at the time, planning to major in physics. I took my first physics course from the most famous of all of those professors, and it was the worst course I ever took in my life. He often appeared late for lectures, and when he did appear he would talk incoherently; he seemed to be making his lecture up on the spot, while his mind was somewhere else. None of us could understand him, and most of us just stopped attending class. That experience led me to change my focus of study to biology and psychology--which may or may not have been a good thing.

Of course, there are many wonderful professors in prestigious schools who do take their teaching seriously. I know personally quite a few of them. I'm just saying that you can't assume that the famous professors at any given prestigious school are good teachers, or are teaching at all. Wherever you apply, you should find out who actually teaches the courses you are likely to take, and you should find out what you can about students' evaluations of those teachers. If possible, visit their classes.

It is often better to be a "big fish in a little pond" than the reverse.

A well-documented psychological phenomenon, relevant to your college choice, is what social psychologists call the "big-fish-little-pond effect."[2] The phenomenon has to do with self-esteem. Many research studies have shown that, given equal academic abilities, students in a non-selective academic setting feel better about their academic abilities than do students in a highly selective setting. Stated differently, a student of moderate ability might feel incompetent, even depressed, in an environment of super achievers. Conversely, that same student might feel like a super achiever himself or herself--and might even start performing like one--in an environment in which his or her performance stands out as one of the best. Unfortunately, our educational world is constructed so as to promote a competitive attitude, so such comparisons and their effects on self-esteem are inevitable. Getting accepted at that Ivy League college might give you an immediate burst of high self-esteem, as your classmates look at you with envy and your grandparents gloat; but actually going to that college could lead to a very long bout of depression, if it turns out to be more than you bargained for.

Separate from self-esteem, there is another advantage of being a big fish in a little pond. A good student at a less prestigious school generally has a much better chance of being noticed by the professors and, therefore, of receiving extra educational opportunities and wonderful recommendations for future careers or studies, than does a student of equal ability at a highly prestigious school. Those extra opportunities and glowing letters may, in many cases, more than compensate for any loss in prestige value that comes from not having gone to Harvard. Moreover, if the classes are easier at the less-prestigious school, that could be a good thing, not just for your self-esteem but also for your education. It would leave you more time to go beyond the assigned coursework, to take charge of your own education, in ways that in the long run will lead to more real learning than the assignments and tests given in class.
----------

I'm not saying it is always a mistake to go to the most prestigious college you can get into. I'm just saying that there are many good reasons to consider seriously the alternative. Another thing to consider is this: For you, given what you really want to do in life, is a four-year college advantageous at all? Many young people today--including many who could easily get into the most prestigious colleges in the country--are carving out great lives for themselves, happy at their work, making good livings, without going to college at all. "A mind is a terrible thing to waste, at college, if you've got better things to do." But that's another essay.
----------
References
1. S. B. Dale & A. B. Krueger, "Estimating the payoff of attending a more selective college," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117 (2002), 1491-1527.
2. H. W. Marsh & K-T. Hau, "The big-fish-little-pond effect on academic self-concept," American Psychologist, 58 (2003), 364-376.

“No Child Left Inside”: An Example of The Wrong Way to Solve a National Problem

Peter Gray — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 11:47:28 -0700

On Sept. 18, the US House of Representatives passed, by a landslide vote of 293 to 109, its version of the "No Child Left Inside" act. The Senate version has yet to been voted on. This legislation has been pushed by a coalition of environmentalists, educators, public health specialists, and business groups called the No Child Left Inside Coalition.

I share all of the concerns of the Coalition, at least as they are expressed on the Coalition's website. I am an ardent environmentalist, much concerned about the rape of our planet and its potential future inhabitability. I am concerned about the great ignorance on the part of so many of our citizens about the outdoors. I am concerned that we see very few children playing outdoors today. I am concerned that what passes for outdoor "play," all too often today, is highly structured, adult-supervised sports, which have little or nothing to do with discoveries about the outdoors. I am concerned about the epidemic rates, today, of childhood obesity and depression, and I agree with the Coalition that these rates are at least partly the results of the absence of outdoor adventure in children's lives.

Since I agree with the Coalition on all of this, you might think that I would support the No Child Left Inside legislation, which the Coalition has been working so hard to pass. But I do not.

Schools suck the fun out of everything they teach. Do we want schools now to suck the fun out of outdoor adventure?

This legislation, in my mind, is a perfect example of the kind of thinking that has caused many of the problems that the Coalition is concerned about, not the kind of thinking that can solve them. Every time we see a national problem, and especially if that problem has anything to do with children, a hue and cry goes out to solve that problem through the school system. The attitude seems to be that every problem can be solved by piliing yet another set of required courses and examinations onto the backs of schoolchildren. Don't you see, you members of the Coalition, that the school system and our reliance on it to babysit our children and to force onto them an ever growing list of "educational" demands is the problem? And don't you see that the more we attempt to regulate school activities through government mandates, the more restrictive and antithetical to the spirit of discovery school becomes?

If this new act becomes law, then each state will be asked to submit, to the US Department of Education, a plan for "environmental literacy." Here is what the House act says about that plan (quoted from the Coalition's website):

"State plans must include: relevant content standards, content areas, and courses or subjects where instruction will take place; a description of the relationship of the plan to state graduation requirements; a description of programs for professional development of teachers to improve their environmental content knowledge, skill in teaching about environmental issues, and field-based pedagogical skills; a description of how the state educational agency will measure the environmental literacy of students; and a description of how the state educational agency will implement the plan, including securing funding and other necessary support."

Passage of this legislation would, no doubt, be a coup for the educational industry (see my August 27 post). It would result in a new set of courses, tests, textbooks, educational specialists, program administrators, grant writers, and so on and so on. What would it do for children? It would give them yet another set of school requirements, yet another set of tests to pass. Is this the way to get children to love and explore the outdoors? Has the school system been so successful in getting children to love all the other things it teaches--like math, history, and physics--that we now want to entrust it with teaching our kids to love the outdoors?

Take a look, for example, at what our school system already does in the realm of "physical education." Because people think that the body as well as the mind needs training, most schools require students to take a physical education class each year. What this class does is to take something that should be joyful play and turn it into something that, for many if not most kids, is tedious, sometimes odious, and often embarrassing. By forcing everyone to do the same activities, at the same time, in accordance with the school's schedule, and by testing and grading kids on everything and publicly comparing their performances, the school system effectively turns everything that should be play into work.

If you care about children's love for the outdoors, write to your US senators and ask them to vote against "No Child Left Inside."

How Can We Increase Children's Outdoor Play and Adventure?

To solve a problem, it is often valuable to start by thinking about what caused the problem in the first place. When I was a child (longer ago than I'll say), most kids spent enormous amounts of time outdoors. We went everywhere on our own, by foot and on bikes. We played games in vacant lots, and in rural areas outside of town, as well as in parks. We discovered things like butterflies, frogs, and snakes. We went fishing and swimming on our own. We took ice skating adventures across frozen lakes and hiking adventures in the woods, on our own, with no adults. What has happened to change all that?

One thing that has happened is that school and adults outside of school have taken over children's lives. When I was a child, school performance was much less emphasized than it is today. There was very little if any homework. On school days we had all day after 3:00 to play, plus an hour at lunchtime (during which we were not confined to school). The school year was shorter then than now, and we had three months of summer to play. Most communities did not have adult-organized sports leagues, and if they did have them we were never made to feel that we must participate for the sake of our résumés. Our parents did not feel that it was their responsibility to drive us places, or to watch us do everything we did so they could cheer us on or protect us from dangers. They trusted us. They trusted that, given freedom, we would enjoy ourselves and would for the most part do things that were good for us.

Many parents will argue that it is not their kids that they distrust, but the neighborhood. I'm to a considerable degree sympathetic with that fear. Partly because fewer kids are outdoors playing, many neighborhoods may in fact be less safe now than then. It used to be that if anyone harassed someone outdoors, there would be many kids around, of all ages, as witnesses and deterrents. It is also the case that today, with both parents in most families away at work, there are fewer adults at home in any given neighborhood, fewer adults who could spot potential problems. People (adults as well as children) are also less likely to know their neighbors today than in the past, and that too makes neighborhoods less safe. And, of course, there are more cars on the streets than there used to be, and communities no longer feel that it is their duty to construct and maintain sidewalks, parks, and playgrounds.

So, if these are the causes of the decline in outdoor play and adventure, then these are the issues we should work on. Lets stop trying to solve problems through increased schooling, which only makes the problems worse, and start trying to solve them through steps that will give our children more real freedom, including freedom to play outdoors. Here are some things you might do:

Speak out against increased school hours, homework, and testing. Let your school board, your school superintendent, and others in your community know that you, as a parent, resent the amount of busywork that is being forced on your children and resent the ever-increasing intrusion of school into your child's time and your family's time. Initiate local legislation to decrease the school day and school year. Fight against state-mandated testing.

Work outside of the school system to develop safe places for children to play. Let the legislators in your community know that they should start spending less money on schools and more money on sidewalks, parks, and police protection in areas where children can play. Urge your community to develop and maintain parks that are safe yet provide opportunities for adventure--parks that have woods to explore, trees to climb, ponds and streams to fish in. Develop and support programs that allow children to engage with the outdoors in their own playful ways, on their own time, with others of their own choosing, without adult supervision and certainly without testing.

Meet with other parents in your neighborhood to talk about the problem of providing safe places and opportunities to play. Maybe you can set up a neighborhood watch, which will help assure people that the neighborhood is safe for children's play. Maybe you can find ways to take weekend trips with other families, to campgrounds or other places where the kids can play safely, with one another in new and exciting settings, while the adults ignore them and socialize among themselves in their own chosen ways.

I know that these steps may not be easy. They require initiative. They run counter to the spoken agenda in most communities, which is always for more school and more direct adult supervision of children. Yet, if you scratch the surface of thinking of the adults in your community, you will find that many of them, in their hearts, recognize that children are more constrained, more imprisoned, today than they themselves were when they were children. If you ask them to say why, they are likely to come up, on their own, with lists not unlike what I have suggested here. What we need to do now is to transfer that heartfelt understanding into the head, to organize our efforts, and to take rational action to give our children real freedom to play outdoors.
------------------
I hope that some of you, in the comments section below, will suggest additional ways to give children freedom and opportunity for outdoor play, perhaps ways that you have seen work for your own children. And don't forget to tell your senators to vote against No Child Left Inside.

The Varieties of Play Match the Requirements of Human Existence

Peter Gray — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:15:15 -0700

From an evolutionary perspective, the main purpose of play is education. Play is nature's way of ensuring that young mammals will practice the skills they need for survival. You can predict what a young mammal will play at by knowing what it must learn. Young carnivores, such as lions and tigers, play at stalking, chasing, and pouncing. Young zebras and other animals that are preyed on by lions and such play at running, dodging, and escaping. Young monkeys play endlessly at chasing one another and swinging from trees. Young humans--who have far more to learn than do the young of any other species--play in far more ways than do the young of any other species.

This is the first of a series of essays on the educational value of human play. My point in this installment is that the universal forms of human play--the forms that can be seen in any human culture--match well with the varieties of skills that human beings everywhere must develop to survive and thrive. From an evolutionary perspective, that is no accident.

As a caveat, I should note at the outset that the varieties of play that I list and describe below are not mutually exclusive categories. Any given instance of play that you observe is likely to combine more than one of these varieties. But I think you will recognize, in the list, the range of types of play that we take more or less for granted in children, because we see them everywhere. I ask, as you read this essay, to not take play for granted; think about its extraordinary value to the developing child.

Locomotor play

All, or at least nearly all, young mammals engage in locomotor play, such as playful running and leaping, and young humans are no exception. People everywhere must learn to control their own bodies, to move quickly and effectively through space, to avoid falls, and to recover from falls that inevitably occur. As I noted in a previous essay in this blog, toddlers spend an average of six hours a day at playful walking--walking for no other purpose than the fun of it. In the process they become experts at the universal human skill of two-legged walking. After walking comes running, jumping, climbing, swinging, and--depending on the environment and culture--swimming, bicycling, roller blading, ice skating, cartwheeling, and all sorts of other ways of experiencing the thrill of movement. Children, and adults too, do all this for no other reason than fun, but in the process they acquire skills that may save their lives many times in the future.

Rough and tumble play

Overlapping with locomotor play is rough-and-tumble play, playful chasing and fighting, which we also share with other mammals. Like all mammals, we are physical beings that need fit bodies for life's work and emergencies. Rough-and-tumble play builds strength, coordination, and endurance. Children on their own initiative don't lift weights or run laps to keep in shape. Nothing would be more dull and wearisome than that. Instead, they chase one another around, and maybe wrestle or play at sword fighting, to happy exhaustion, many times per day if they have the opportunity. Nothing is more fun that that!

In most cultures boys and girls engage about equally at playful chasing, but boys everywhere engage in more playful fighting than do girls. Play fighting is sometimes confused with real fighting by adults who don’t look closely at it, but for anyone who looks closely the distinction is clear. In fact, it is not unreasonable to say that play fighting is the opposite of serious fighting. In a real fight the purpose is to hurt the other person and/or make that person run away. In a play fight the purpose, quite deliberately, is to go through fighting motions without hurting the other person or making that person want to leave. Some researchers have argued that a major function of play fighting, beyond pure physical exercise, is to help children learn restraint and especially to help boys learn how to be in close and peaceful proximity with other boys. Play fighting is one of the ways by which boys bond. We might think of it as boys’ means of hugging. But I’ll save that story for a future essay.

Language play

We are the linguistic animal, and so we have language play that teaches us to talk. Nobody has to teach language to young children. They learn it on their own, through play. The earliest stages of language play involve the production of language-like sounds. At about 2 months of age, infants begin to make repeated, drawn-out vowel-like cooing sounds--ooh-ooh-ooh, eeh-ahhh-eeh-ahhh. At about 4 or 5 months of age, the cooing gradually changes to babbling, as the baby begins to put consonant and vowel sounds together--ba-ba-boo-ba-ga-da-da-da-badada. Such cooing and babbling is clearly play. It only occurs when the baby is happy; it has structure; it is self-motivated; it is not done to get something--it is done purely for its own sake. All that makes it play. With time, the babbled sounds come increasingly to resemble the sounds of the child's native language, and by about one year of age the child's first words appear and may be repeated over and over in a playful manner.

As children grow older they begin to play with simple grammatical constructions. Many years ago, as research for her doctoral dissertation, Ruth Hirsch Weir recorded and analyzed the "crib speech" of her son Anthony, when he was 28 to 30 months of age. Because this speech occurred when Anthony was alone in his crib, it clearly did not involve an attempt to communicate; it was pure play. Some of Anthony's crib speech is reminiscent of the repetitive phrases, with systematic variation, that you might hear in recordings made for self-instruction in a foreign language. Here's an example [From Weir's book, "Language in the Crib."]:

"What color? What color blanket? What color mop? What color glass? ... Not the yellow blanket, the white. It's not black, it's yellow. Not yellow, red."

In the first part of this sequence Anthony is playing with his new ability to ask about the colors of things and is consolidating his understanding of color words. In the second part he continues playing with color words, but now the focus is on negating and correcting.

Playful language practice doesn't occur just when children are alone; it also occurs in pseudo-communicative exchanges with others. The famous developmental psychologist Jean Piaget gave, as an example, the following exchange between his 3-year-old daughter and himself [in his book, "Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood"]:

What's that? (she asked, looking at a picture) -- It's a cowshed. -- Why?-- It's a house for cows. -- Why? -- Because there are cows in it, do you see? -- Why are they cows? -- Don't you see? They've got horns. -- Why have they horns? ... and so on, and so on.

The daughter here was almost certainly not asking questions to get information; rather, she was playfully exercising her newfound capacity to ask questions and elicit responses from her father. All of us who have spent time with young children have experienced similar exchanges. They can be frustrating or fun, depending on whether we take them as serious questions or recognize them as linguistic play.

With still further development, children's language play can involve puns, rhymes, alliterations, and deliberate distortions of grammar, all of which help the child consolidate his or her growing understanding of linguistic sounds, words, grammar, and meanings. Listen closely to the playful language of any young child, alone or in pseudo-dialogues, and you will find many instances of practice at constructions that represent a joyful challenge to the child.

Exploratory play

We are Homo sapiens, the wise animal, who makes sense of the world, and so we have exploratory play, which combines playfulness with curiosity to help us understand our surroundings. Newborn babies, even on their first day out of the womb, look at patterns that are brand new to them in preference to patterns that they have already seen earlier in the day. Within a few weeks, babies start putting things within their reach into their mouths. Like puppies, they examine things orally, by mouthing them. By about 5 or 6 months of age, they transition to the uniquely human way of examining objects, with hands and eyes together. Put a novel object in reach of a 6-month-old and she will pick it up, hold it before her eyes, look at it, squeeze it, rub it, turn it over, pass it from hand to hand, shake it, pound with it, and act on it in various other ways that seem well designed to learn about its properties.

We come into the world as little scientists, pre-programmed to try to understand everything around us. Nobody has to tell us to explore and learn about our environment; we do it naturally, all our lives, in increasingly sophisticated ways, unless someone turns it into work by trying to make us do it.

Constructive play

We are the animal that survives by building things--including shelters, tools, devices to help us communicate, and devices to help us move from place to place--and so we have constructive play, which teaches us to build. In constructive play a child strives to produce some object that he or she has in mind. A child making a sandcastle, or creating a spaceship from blocks, or drawing a giraffe, is engaged in constructive play.

In many cases the objects built in constructive play are miniature or pretend versions of "real" objects that adults in the culture build and use. Hunter-gatherer children make small versions of huts, bows and arrows, blowguns, nets, knives, slingshots, musical instruments, digging sticks, rafts, rope ladders, mortars and pestles, and baskets in their play. Through such play they become good at building, and by the time they are adults they are making well-crafted, useful versions of the real things.

Constructive play can be with words and sounds as well as substances, and people everywhere, adults and children alike, produce stories, poems and melodies in their play. Among the countless kinds of constructions playfully made by children in our culture today are computer programs, written stories, and secret codes with invented symbol systems. Constructive play can be intellectual as well as manual.

Pretend and sociodramatic play

We are the imaginative animal, able to think of things that are not immediately present, and so we have fantasy play, or pretend play, which builds our capacity for imagination. In this type of play children establish certain propositions about the nature of their pretend world and then play out those propositions logically. In doing so they are exercising the same capacities that allow us, as adults, to think about things that are not immediately present, which is what we all do when we plan for the future and what scientists do when they develop theories to explain or predict events in the real world.

We are an intensely social species, requiring cooperation with others in order to survive, and so we have many forms of social play, which teach us to cooperate and to restrain our impulses in ways that make us socially acceptable. The social form of pretend play--in which children engage in elaborate joint pretend ventures and enact roles and scenes that they make up together--is called sociodramatic play. In such play, children are doing much more than just exercising their imagination. As they enact roles, they are exercising their ability to behave in accordance with shared conceptions of what is or is not appropriate. If you are the mommy, or the daddy, or the pet dog in a game of house, then you must behave in accordance with the players' shared understanding of how mommies, or daddies, or pet dogs behave. You cannot behave impulsively; you must think about what you are doing to be sure it will be acceptable. I will have more to say in a later essay about play as exercise in self-control. The learning of self-control is perhaps the most important general function of all sorts of human play.

Children in sociodramatic play are also practicing the art of negotiation. As they decide who will play what roles, who will get to use which props, and just what scenes they will enact and how, the players must all come to agreement. Indeed, a basic rule of all social play is that everyone must agree. Anyone left unhappy by a decision will quit, and if everyone quits there will be no game. Since the motive to play is strong, the motive to keep the other players happy is strong. That is true of all social play, but it is especially apparent in the negotiations that are observed in sociodramatic play. Keeping our companions happy, so they stay with us and continue to support us through life, is surely one of the most valuable of human survival skills, and children continuously practice that skill in social play.

Games with explicit rules

We are the rule-abiding animal, able to keep contracts and follow explicit, socially agreed-upon rules, and so we play formal games, which teach us to follow explicit rules.

All play to some degree involves rules. Rules in the minds of the players give structure to any form of play. In play fighting, for example, a basic rule is that you don't really hurt the other person--you don't kick, bite, or scratch, and if you are the larger and stronger of the two you don't use your full force. In constructive play a basic rule is that you must attempt to depict some object that you have visualized in your mind; you don't just scribble or pile blocks randomly. In sociodramatic play a general rule is that you must act in accordance with shared understanding of how the person or animal you are pretending to be would act. The rules in all of these forms of play are mostly implicit; they are understood but unstated. In formal games the rules are explicit, meaning that they are clearly stated, in categorical terms, in a way that makes it possible for observers to agree on whether or not the rules have been followed. All competitive games have such rules, as they are necessary to make the competition fair, but many non-competitive games do too. Dances and cooperative games like jump rope (of the variety where the goal is to keep the rope spinning and the jumper jumping as long as possible) are examples of cooperative games with formal rules.

Human beings everywhere must follow explicit as well as implicit rules to function socially. For example, a cooperative hunt may involve explicit rules concerning what each member of the hunting party must do and when. People also need to abide by rules or laws designed to keep peace within the community, and they need to follow through on social agreements (oral or written contracts) made between themselves and others. These crucial social skills are exercised in formal games.
---------------

When children are free to play, have sufficient time to play, and have playmates of a range of ages with whom to play, they play in all of these ways. In doing so, they learn all of the basic skills that are required of human beings everywhere--physical skills, linguistic skills, intellectual skills, social skills, self-control, and law-abiding skills. We cannot teach any of these skills to children. All we can do is provide the conditions in which they can teach themselves, using the joyful, playful means designed by evolution. Our job is to make sure that children have lots of time and and opportunity to play. They'll take care of the rest.