Unstructured play also requires a shared imagination which is a building block for conversational skills later in life. The ability for individuals in our society to be able to have conversations with each other does seemed to have diminished along with the freedom of unstructured play in childhood.
I might like it too, if it were made clear that I was signing up for such activities by going to work for that company. I saw an "Outward Bound" style documentary about workers participating in such an activity, and it looked interesting, fun and even constructive for the purposes intended: achieving group solidarity.
I had a contrasting experience when, in the 90's, I began to think about writing a math book (with a particular view to creating a resource that would be helpful to unschoolers), and decided to enroll in a Calculus class in a community college so that I could tutor it and find out more about what people had difficulty with. In that class one day the instructor decided to put us into cooperative learning groups (just starting to become a thing in the 90's I think). Being relentlessly logical, I thought: this class is graded on a curve; any help I give to my classmates is going to adversely affect my grade. Being somewhat imaginative, I began to wonder if there might be subtle ways in which I could "help" my classmates that would actually succeed in leaving them more confused than ever. Well, I did not end up confronting this moral dilemma, because I quickly concluded that I was, in any case, still going to get my "A". Something to think about for those who would compel cooperation though.
This comes up in the world of RPGs (role-playing games) with games taking different perspectives on whether different player and the characters they play are competing. Many (not all) D&D tables can feel like they have sides—the DM versus the players. Some indie rpgs take a different perspective—you're all telling a story collaboratively, and everyone might enjoy it (even you!) when your character has a setback, if it's told well.
Trophy (https://trophyrpg.com/) takes this to a greater extreme, where pretty much all of your characters are doomed from the start, and you're playing to find out _how_ they succumb and to _what._ The _characters_ be competing with each other to stave off their ends, but the players are collaborative, curious, and playful.
Peter, thank you for sharing your expertise in such an accessible forum! We have homeschooled our children for over a decade, and while we generally keep to a classical education approach, we greatly value (and leave time for) free, creative play. When they were younger this would lead to creating plays with lots of costume and comedy, building rafts that got tested in a shallow river, hand-publishing newspapers, inventing board games, etc.
Now that our oldest boy is in his teens, he enjoys competitive team games with his friends in an adjacent conservation area. They all take this very seriously, dividing themselves up into fair teams, developing a communication code, determining tasks and end goals to complete. They do all of this without any adult input or interference, ensuring that the younger players are involved on their own account, always return invigorated and full of stories, ready to add more rules or goals for their next outing.
Having had some experience in video games, my son notes how much more immersive this experience is, how they learn to communicate clearly deftly, and especially how much more he bonds with his friends. He also recognizes that there are few boys his age that benefit from this type of experience which has helped him grow more independent, relationally adept, and confident.
I have been taking a "classical education" approach to my own education lately. I began wanting to investigate science and math with a view to writing a science/math book that would be accessible to beginners, and wanted to explore the historical contexts in which they developed ... which led to Greek history, and to Plato and Aristotle.
Interesting that Plato would be one of the earliest to espouse compulsory education, together with strong elements of censorship. I wonder that the history of philosophy does not take up this issue more: are children's minds such that we must take control of them, lest they become a danger to us all?
I find that, in many of these activities that combine competition and play, there is a sort of meta-culture of cooperation and playfulness that engulfs a more limited competitive spirit, one which is entirely contained within individual matches. When you play a match of some competitive board game, say, chess, the players are very single-mindedly focused on winning the match. Once it's over, though, all preoccupation with winning future games dissolves: players are more than willing to give each other pointers, dissect past matches, share their favorite strategies, and so on, and it appears to be as much in the name of bonding with fellow players as it is in the name of improving at the game.
The way I see it, a preference for contest has emerged to prepare children for a competitive workforce/job market, to strive to raise their game.
I remember being a child and taking part in a holiday camp (1980’s Butlins) talent show - except I didn’t know it was one. I was about 8 years old and had really enjoyed myself, had fun telling jokes on the stage with my friend until an adult said
“soon we’ll find out if you’re through to the next round”.
Suddenly it felt sour. When I didn’t get through to the next round I began to consider it differently, question my worth.
Competition is natural human behavior, too. We should absolutely allow children to play cooperatively as much as they like, but it strikes me as fanciful to think that doing so would somehow result in a "more peaceful society." It is trendy and prevalent now to prohibit children from engaging in competitions in schools and other supervised group environments outside of sports. If anything, the push to get kids into competitive activities may be a response to teachers and administrators quashing activities that result in winners and losers. Ultimately, children should have opportunities for both kinds of engagements and freely decide how much of each to engage in. If left to their own devices, they will compete as well as cooperate. Competition can be stimulating and motivating; winning is fun and losing is an important experience. Children don't always or universally prefer noncompetitive play.
Wouldn't it be nice if kids could freely decide as you suggest? But most children have no choice about being in school, where the whole system is competition-based.
I have observed when playing social, coffee house chess there is an equilibrium of sorts being sought between play and contest. Played with a 5 minute clock, this limits to some extent the ability to draw upon superior knowledge of the opening; novelty takes time to find the best response to; and throughout the game there are limited opportunities for calculation, and thus one must rely on making good guesses, relying on pattern recognition. This inevitably steers the game somewhat in the direction of play, as one is operating out of a "lets try this and see what happens" approach. Moreover, the attraction of the game for those who are relatively skilled players is precisely to be able to try out new things, where a 10 minute game is a less risky investment of your time than a long tournament game.
Yet different motivations still lead to different ways of playing the game. Some players who value winning over exploring interesting, novel positions find ways to approach the opening that minimizes any attempt on the part of their opponents to create novelty. They succeed at creating positions where very little that is interesting is going on, yet their superiority with the position gives them a competitive edge. I find playing these players to be completely boring and avoid them when possible; yet they do win. Other players, at the opposite end of the spectrum, do not seem to take the game quite seriously, and engage in "trash talking" throughout the game, talk that may either be either insults or merely comic banter, but which has the function of being distracting. Some people clearly enjoy this kind of thing (both opponents) but I am inclined to feel "this is not chess" and avoid these people also, to the degree possible.
Contests between animals for mating privileges has always been the least interesting aspect of animal behavior to me. Watching them, I can't help as a human being feeling like "Why don't they just opt out? Or why don't they look for ways of gettiing even?" Then I have to remind myself: they have to do what works, procreatively, or they wouldn't be there. I am surprised that there is not more "cheating" against the rules of ritualized aggression though. Sure, you might be seriously injured, but if genetically you're going to lose anyway (?)
Timothy Gallwey offered a pretty good defense of the value of competition in his book "The Inner Game of Tennis" : it demands of you that you develop your talents to the highest degree possible, within the constraints of the rules governing the game at least, in a way that social play does not. That would be a reason to voluntarily seek out competitive play, for those with a high "competence drive". Although social status, and mating opportunities, might provide another motive.
On the other hand, the competitive element ruined for me the possibility of doing college mathematics. I had begun to be good enough at math to be able to appreciate some its real beauty, beyond its use as a tool. But when I began to explore higher level math courses, with the thought of perhaps majoring in math, what I found was an emphasis on puzzle-solving, and a comparative neglect of focusing on exploring and revealing math's beauty. Some of this I understand as the effect of teaching to the test: its relatively easy to test on an exam your puzzle-solving ability, not so easy to test your ability to perceive and comprehend beauty. But some of it is probably driven by this competitive drive to prove yourself not only competent, but superior to others. Which is just sad, because its very doubtful that skill at this kind of mathematics is going to lead to an advantage in the mating game. Now if you are able to reveal its beauty on the other hand ...
As you have, I have also observed how good chess players can improve their game by experimenting in more playful games, where they really are "playing" with new possibilities within the structure of the game.
I think I would have liked the result better though if they had lost somewhere along the way, while still showing that they could compete on a very high level.
Hard to break out of that frame "What matters in the end is that they won."
Peter, do you see new comments when they are posted on old threads? Substack only informs me of responses to me personally, although I do not have my own substack yet.
I've made a few posts on previous threads that I subsequently deleted, thinking they are perhaps slightly off topic. I might create a substack titled just that for such comments - "Slightly Off Topic".
I don't see new comments on old threads--or any comments--unless I deliberately look for them by opening up the post and scrolling through the comments. --- I like your "Slightly Off Topic" idea for a Substack but please feel free to make slightly off topic comments here.
Thanks for the reply, Peter. In that case I'll always make whatever comments I have on the latest thread, rather than trying to attach them to previously established topics.
I'm trying to be mindful of not demanding too much of your attention - I don't know how you manage to get much other work done while minding responses on both Substack and Facebook. But if I could suggest a future topic, not quite centered on play perhaps (?), I wonder if you could address how self-directed learners acquire critical thinking skills. Its not that I think this is difficult exactly, certainly not more than attempting to do so in a coercive setting (John Holt once said if children thought we were serious when we enrolled them in a critical thinking course, the first question they'd ask is: how come I gotta be in this class?). But its something I thought you might have interesting things to say about, and its the main objection offered in the most helpful review of Free to Learn on Amazon - how are self-directed learners going to acquire critical thinking skills? (The brief answer I guess is that we care about whether what we learn is actually true or not. Feynman, in Surely You're Joking, said that the scientific method was essentially just a kind of intellectual honesty).
There are I think related issues here of what constitutes a valid explanation according to the premises, or epistemology, of evolutionary psychology. Just because many men wear 3 piece suits and many women wear high heels doesn't mean we can account for that by referring to natural or sexual selection, not unless we treat them very abstractly, in which case we can't make specific predictions. (Speaking as if I know what I'm talking about here; its tedious to say over and over again "it seems to me that ..."
As Vygotsky contended long ago, critical thinking derives from conversation. In discussions, people ask critical questions and must respond to such questions. In my observations at Sudbury Valley I saw lots of this. I discuss it to some degree in Free to Learn. I also published academic articles years ago on the lack of critical thinking in college students because they have been through a school system that punishes it and rewards students for feeding back what they have been told rather than challenging it. When kids try to challenge the teacher in school they get punished. Our schools teach students NOT to think critically, but simply to parrot what they are told or what they are required to read. My son discovered that by the time he was in third grade, which is why he eventually refused to go along with the school paradigm. He was unwilling to stop thinking critically. Most kids are more adaptable.
Lol, I should have checked the index of Free to Learn first. I am in the process of carefully rereading it, this time checking out sources when possible, but I'm still only on p. 32.
Unstructured play also requires a shared imagination which is a building block for conversational skills later in life. The ability for individuals in our society to be able to have conversations with each other does seemed to have diminished along with the freedom of unstructured play in childhood.
Totally agree, this is why adults have improv teachers come into the workplace to teach everyone to loosen up!
Meanwhile the workers be asking "Is this going to be on the exam?"
Haha, can't blame them!
I always loved workplace team building activities.
I might like it too, if it were made clear that I was signing up for such activities by going to work for that company. I saw an "Outward Bound" style documentary about workers participating in such an activity, and it looked interesting, fun and even constructive for the purposes intended: achieving group solidarity.
I had a contrasting experience when, in the 90's, I began to think about writing a math book (with a particular view to creating a resource that would be helpful to unschoolers), and decided to enroll in a Calculus class in a community college so that I could tutor it and find out more about what people had difficulty with. In that class one day the instructor decided to put us into cooperative learning groups (just starting to become a thing in the 90's I think). Being relentlessly logical, I thought: this class is graded on a curve; any help I give to my classmates is going to adversely affect my grade. Being somewhat imaginative, I began to wonder if there might be subtle ways in which I could "help" my classmates that would actually succeed in leaving them more confused than ever. Well, I did not end up confronting this moral dilemma, because I quickly concluded that I was, in any case, still going to get my "A". Something to think about for those who would compel cooperation though.
This comes up in the world of RPGs (role-playing games) with games taking different perspectives on whether different player and the characters they play are competing. Many (not all) D&D tables can feel like they have sides—the DM versus the players. Some indie rpgs take a different perspective—you're all telling a story collaboratively, and everyone might enjoy it (even you!) when your character has a setback, if it's told well.
Trophy (https://trophyrpg.com/) takes this to a greater extreme, where pretty much all of your characters are doomed from the start, and you're playing to find out _how_ they succumb and to _what._ The _characters_ be competing with each other to stave off their ends, but the players are collaborative, curious, and playful.
Peter, thank you for sharing your expertise in such an accessible forum! We have homeschooled our children for over a decade, and while we generally keep to a classical education approach, we greatly value (and leave time for) free, creative play. When they were younger this would lead to creating plays with lots of costume and comedy, building rafts that got tested in a shallow river, hand-publishing newspapers, inventing board games, etc.
Now that our oldest boy is in his teens, he enjoys competitive team games with his friends in an adjacent conservation area. They all take this very seriously, dividing themselves up into fair teams, developing a communication code, determining tasks and end goals to complete. They do all of this without any adult input or interference, ensuring that the younger players are involved on their own account, always return invigorated and full of stories, ready to add more rules or goals for their next outing.
Having had some experience in video games, my son notes how much more immersive this experience is, how they learn to communicate clearly deftly, and especially how much more he bonds with his friends. He also recognizes that there are few boys his age that benefit from this type of experience which has helped him grow more independent, relationally adept, and confident.
Looking forward to your next letter!
I have been taking a "classical education" approach to my own education lately. I began wanting to investigate science and math with a view to writing a science/math book that would be accessible to beginners, and wanted to explore the historical contexts in which they developed ... which led to Greek history, and to Plato and Aristotle.
Interesting that Plato would be one of the earliest to espouse compulsory education, together with strong elements of censorship. I wonder that the history of philosophy does not take up this issue more: are children's minds such that we must take control of them, lest they become a danger to us all?
I find that, in many of these activities that combine competition and play, there is a sort of meta-culture of cooperation and playfulness that engulfs a more limited competitive spirit, one which is entirely contained within individual matches. When you play a match of some competitive board game, say, chess, the players are very single-mindedly focused on winning the match. Once it's over, though, all preoccupation with winning future games dissolves: players are more than willing to give each other pointers, dissect past matches, share their favorite strategies, and so on, and it appears to be as much in the name of bonding with fellow players as it is in the name of improving at the game.
Now, if we could only get our election process to look like that.
Prior to about 1980 it did look like that.
The way I see it, a preference for contest has emerged to prepare children for a competitive workforce/job market, to strive to raise their game.
I remember being a child and taking part in a holiday camp (1980’s Butlins) talent show - except I didn’t know it was one. I was about 8 years old and had really enjoyed myself, had fun telling jokes on the stage with my friend until an adult said
“soon we’ll find out if you’re through to the next round”.
Suddenly it felt sour. When I didn’t get through to the next round I began to consider it differently, question my worth.
Thank you for this comment, Julie. You might enjoy my Psychology Today post that deals with reasons why adults push competitions on kids: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/202209/kids-want-cooperate-we-make-them-compete
Competition is natural human behavior, too. We should absolutely allow children to play cooperatively as much as they like, but it strikes me as fanciful to think that doing so would somehow result in a "more peaceful society." It is trendy and prevalent now to prohibit children from engaging in competitions in schools and other supervised group environments outside of sports. If anything, the push to get kids into competitive activities may be a response to teachers and administrators quashing activities that result in winners and losers. Ultimately, children should have opportunities for both kinds of engagements and freely decide how much of each to engage in. If left to their own devices, they will compete as well as cooperate. Competition can be stimulating and motivating; winning is fun and losing is an important experience. Children don't always or universally prefer noncompetitive play.
Wouldn't it be nice if kids could freely decide as you suggest? But most children have no choice about being in school, where the whole system is competition-based.
Fascinating!
I have observed when playing social, coffee house chess there is an equilibrium of sorts being sought between play and contest. Played with a 5 minute clock, this limits to some extent the ability to draw upon superior knowledge of the opening; novelty takes time to find the best response to; and throughout the game there are limited opportunities for calculation, and thus one must rely on making good guesses, relying on pattern recognition. This inevitably steers the game somewhat in the direction of play, as one is operating out of a "lets try this and see what happens" approach. Moreover, the attraction of the game for those who are relatively skilled players is precisely to be able to try out new things, where a 10 minute game is a less risky investment of your time than a long tournament game.
Yet different motivations still lead to different ways of playing the game. Some players who value winning over exploring interesting, novel positions find ways to approach the opening that minimizes any attempt on the part of their opponents to create novelty. They succeed at creating positions where very little that is interesting is going on, yet their superiority with the position gives them a competitive edge. I find playing these players to be completely boring and avoid them when possible; yet they do win. Other players, at the opposite end of the spectrum, do not seem to take the game quite seriously, and engage in "trash talking" throughout the game, talk that may either be either insults or merely comic banter, but which has the function of being distracting. Some people clearly enjoy this kind of thing (both opponents) but I am inclined to feel "this is not chess" and avoid these people also, to the degree possible.
Contests between animals for mating privileges has always been the least interesting aspect of animal behavior to me. Watching them, I can't help as a human being feeling like "Why don't they just opt out? Or why don't they look for ways of gettiing even?" Then I have to remind myself: they have to do what works, procreatively, or they wouldn't be there. I am surprised that there is not more "cheating" against the rules of ritualized aggression though. Sure, you might be seriously injured, but if genetically you're going to lose anyway (?)
Timothy Gallwey offered a pretty good defense of the value of competition in his book "The Inner Game of Tennis" : it demands of you that you develop your talents to the highest degree possible, within the constraints of the rules governing the game at least, in a way that social play does not. That would be a reason to voluntarily seek out competitive play, for those with a high "competence drive". Although social status, and mating opportunities, might provide another motive.
On the other hand, the competitive element ruined for me the possibility of doing college mathematics. I had begun to be good enough at math to be able to appreciate some its real beauty, beyond its use as a tool. But when I began to explore higher level math courses, with the thought of perhaps majoring in math, what I found was an emphasis on puzzle-solving, and a comparative neglect of focusing on exploring and revealing math's beauty. Some of this I understand as the effect of teaching to the test: its relatively easy to test on an exam your puzzle-solving ability, not so easy to test your ability to perceive and comprehend beauty. But some of it is probably driven by this competitive drive to prove yourself not only competent, but superior to others. Which is just sad, because its very doubtful that skill at this kind of mathematics is going to lead to an advantage in the mating game. Now if you are able to reveal its beauty on the other hand ...
Mark, what you say to me suggests you might enjoy my Psychology Today essay about how free play at Soccer led boys to become better soccer players and ultimately win a championship. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/202111/the-team-coached-themselves-won-the-tournament
As you have, I have also observed how good chess players can improve their game by experimenting in more playful games, where they really are "playing" with new possibilities within the structure of the game.
Yes, I have read that article - another good one.
I think I would have liked the result better though if they had lost somewhere along the way, while still showing that they could compete on a very high level.
Hard to break out of that frame "What matters in the end is that they won."
Peter, do you see new comments when they are posted on old threads? Substack only informs me of responses to me personally, although I do not have my own substack yet.
I've made a few posts on previous threads that I subsequently deleted, thinking they are perhaps slightly off topic. I might create a substack titled just that for such comments - "Slightly Off Topic".
I don't see new comments on old threads--or any comments--unless I deliberately look for them by opening up the post and scrolling through the comments. --- I like your "Slightly Off Topic" idea for a Substack but please feel free to make slightly off topic comments here.
Thanks for the reply, Peter. In that case I'll always make whatever comments I have on the latest thread, rather than trying to attach them to previously established topics.
I'm trying to be mindful of not demanding too much of your attention - I don't know how you manage to get much other work done while minding responses on both Substack and Facebook. But if I could suggest a future topic, not quite centered on play perhaps (?), I wonder if you could address how self-directed learners acquire critical thinking skills. Its not that I think this is difficult exactly, certainly not more than attempting to do so in a coercive setting (John Holt once said if children thought we were serious when we enrolled them in a critical thinking course, the first question they'd ask is: how come I gotta be in this class?). But its something I thought you might have interesting things to say about, and its the main objection offered in the most helpful review of Free to Learn on Amazon - how are self-directed learners going to acquire critical thinking skills? (The brief answer I guess is that we care about whether what we learn is actually true or not. Feynman, in Surely You're Joking, said that the scientific method was essentially just a kind of intellectual honesty).
There are I think related issues here of what constitutes a valid explanation according to the premises, or epistemology, of evolutionary psychology. Just because many men wear 3 piece suits and many women wear high heels doesn't mean we can account for that by referring to natural or sexual selection, not unless we treat them very abstractly, in which case we can't make specific predictions. (Speaking as if I know what I'm talking about here; its tedious to say over and over again "it seems to me that ..."
As Vygotsky contended long ago, critical thinking derives from conversation. In discussions, people ask critical questions and must respond to such questions. In my observations at Sudbury Valley I saw lots of this. I discuss it to some degree in Free to Learn. I also published academic articles years ago on the lack of critical thinking in college students because they have been through a school system that punishes it and rewards students for feeding back what they have been told rather than challenging it. When kids try to challenge the teacher in school they get punished. Our schools teach students NOT to think critically, but simply to parrot what they are told or what they are required to read. My son discovered that by the time he was in third grade, which is why he eventually refused to go along with the school paradigm. He was unwilling to stop thinking critically. Most kids are more adaptable.
Lol, I should have checked the index of Free to Learn first. I am in the process of carefully rereading it, this time checking out sources when possible, but I'm still only on p. 32.