#30. Academia as Playground

To be an academic is, by definition, to be one who plays with ideas; but sadly, what we call “academic training” destroys play.

Dear friends,

Professors are often referred to as “academics.” I’m an academic. I’ve been a professor pretty much my whole adult life. I went into academia for fun, or at least mostly for fun.

What a luxury it is to be employed in a career where the task is to fiddle with things. That’s what academics are employed to do (at least in theory). Some of us fiddle with things in the lab, asking the child’s question, “What will happen if I do this to that?” All of us fiddle with ideas in our heads, testing them out to see how they fly when we describe them to others, or combine them with known facts, or subject them to some sort of empirical test. Some of us fiddle with numbers, coming up with new “proofs” of some theorem. Fiddling is fun. It’s play

Academia as mental playground. Pinterest

What Professors and Children Have in Common

If you look up the word academic as an adjective in any standard dictionary, one of the definitions you’ll find is “having no practical value.” To some that sounds like a put-down. Why devote time to something that has no practical value? That attitude is also why, as a society, we don’t value children’s play as much as we should. Play, as part of its definition, is something done for no practical gain, at least not conscious practical gain. Play, therefore, is “academic.” Professors and children have this in common. For both groups, the primary occupation (at least ideally) is play. Children are natural academics; we professors try to emulate them.

Of course, the practical side of me hastens to add that although play is something done just because it’s fun, it produces practical benefits as side effects. I have devoted much of my research career to documenting the value that play has for children’s development. Children play just for fun, but in the process, they develop their physical bodies, intelligence, and social and emotional competence, as I have explained in previous letters, especially Letter #5. For professors play can result in new insights and inventions, which sometimes improve the lot of humankind. That’s the rationale, at least, for paying professors to play.

I must also acknowledge that many of us (I included) became professors not just for fun, but also to add some benefit to the world. Our choices of what to fiddle with are typically informed in part by our beliefs that such fiddling might help solve some real problems in the world. So, our play might not be pure play, like a child’s play, done at a conscious level just for its own sake, but we can nevertheless bring a childlike playful spirit to it. That spirit opens our minds in ways that may lead to new insights into how to solve the problem, which we would not have seen if we were more narrowly focused on what seemed most practical. When we examine the biographies of those who have contributed most creatively to our culture (as we did for four scientists in Letter #28), we find that many, maybe most, say it was for them primarily play.

Schools Destroy the Playground

Our academic institutions, sadly, are also schools, and schools are designed in a way that tends to destroy the playground. Few students at any level in what we erroneously call their “academic” training, see themselves as playing. We call it work, and so do they. What we make them do is as close to the opposite of play as one can get. Children are designed to play and learn in play, but we drill that out of them in school.

We force students to go through the motions of “learning” what they are not interested in, where the reward is not the pleasure of doing and discovering but grades, which are passed off as tickets to some hypothetical future reward. Play is punished in this system, because it leads students to do things not in the curriculum. It disrupts the orderly classroom and interferes with the spouting back of the lessons the system wants students to spout. By the time students go on to tertiary schooling their expectations about the nature of “education” are rather well set, as something to endure, not enjoy. And by the time professors become professors all too many have become way too serious in what and how they teach, and the methods in college are not much different from the non-playful methods of primary and secondary schooling.

Moreover, altogether too many who go through this system and become professors never recover the true academic spirit, the spirit of play. They are in it just as a job, to make money, to advance through the system. Ironically, our so-called “academic” institutions appear to be almost deliberately designed to destroy the spirit of academia, the spirit of play. It is surprising that some manage to go through all this and become professors without losing entirely the academic spirit. It is not surprising that many of the most innovative scientists are those who resisted schooling and thereby persisted in the spirit of play (again, see Letter #28).

Final Thoughts

As I noted in Letter S3, I retired many years ago from university teaching although I continue to conduct research with the title research professor. I left teaching in part because the more I learned, from my research, about how people naturally learn, the more difficult it became for me to participate in the standard university educational system for undergraduates.

When I was teaching, I did my best to overcome the systemic constraints and bring an academic spirit to students in my classes. Though I failed to succeed well enough to keep me at it until typical retirement age, I did have some success. My primary goal as a professor was to encourage critical thinking. Our testing and grading system has trained students to memorize and regurgitate rather than think. Critical thinking is play; memorizing and regurgitating for a grade on a test are not. Critical thinking is playing with ideas. Students come into each course believing they don’t have permission to think. They are mere students, so their job is to “learn,” not think, and learning means memorizing and regurgitating.

To disrupt this ingrained schoolish habit and encourage thinking I developed what I call the idea approach to organizing a course. For whatever it may be worth, I will describe that approach in my next letter. I think the method could be used at every level of conventional schooling and would, at every level, empower students at least somewhat to play with ideas.

If you have questions or thoughts concerning what I have written here, please share them as comments below. Your comments, including any thoughtful disagreements you have, add to the value of these letters for me and other readers.

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With respect and best wishes,

Peter

[Note: This letter is adapted from a forward I wrote for the book The Playbook: Professors at Play, edited by Lisa Forbes & David Thomas, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2023.]