Playground theory

November 8, 11:45 AMBoise Alternative Education ExaminerMarie Furnary

Previous Next

Comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Boise Alternative Education Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

Play structure? Or structured play? Do children have the right to be free?  
                                                                                 AP Photo/Alex Brandon

My friend John, who used to be a public school librarian in Seattle, told me this summer:

People used to ask me how to choose the best school for their kid in Seattle. Sometimes I answered, “check out recess -- watch what kids are picking up on the playground.” I still think that’s the place students learn most during a typical day in elementary school.

Part of the reason parents pull their kids out of school is because they don’t like what occurs on the playground each day. Why are playgrounds so important to our assessment of what “should happen” or what “does happen” at school? If school is about academics, why are playgrounds important at all?

Although Americans value freedom, our fears overwhelm what we know to be sacred truth from our own childhood experience: uninterrupted, unguided time – time to ourselves – is essential in forming our personal views of the world. In fact, those views, bit by bit, create the world we experience – by seeing patterns in what we read, by connecting new ideas to those we know, our brains begin to “see” what is around us, and to develop new ideas that can open the eyes of others to our unique point of view.

Coming into middle school classrooms without the previous experiences of freedom that their parents once knew as children roaming free in friends’ backyards, students are confused. They have no personal background on which to scaffold ideas. Having been driven to play-dates and soccer practices and birthday parties all their lives, they sit in class, waiting for teachers to feed them information, to paint the map by which they must learn, to “do things to” them.

everyone is an explorer...

In his new book, Manhood for Amateurs, Michael Chabon describes childhood as “a branch of cartography” – a map to make sense of all the hazards and thrills encountered during the adventure of growing up. When the adventure is missing, when children are too protected, too hemmed in, too structured, the ability to see their world as a product of their own creation goes missing…and the potential to create a life is lost.

It is difficult to take responsibility for our lives – to see that we are not victims of inadequate school systems or bad teachers or violent neighborhoods – but players in the creation of these influences. Taking such responsibility for ourselves opens opportunities. A student who sees school as a place where he does things for himself, rather than as a place where things are done “to” him is a student who will succeed in life.

In The Joy of Living, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche says,

…if we begin to accept responsibility for our experience, our lives would become a kind of playground, offering innumerable possibilities for learning and invention. Our sense of personal limitation and vulnerability would be replaced by a sense of openness and possibility…we would be able to meet the demands of any situation in which we might find ourselves.

Trees, mountains, oceans, forests -- food for thought     
AP Photo/Courtesy of Amy Coplan

That personal playground, that place of perpetual play and connection with life – is the classroom we want our children to attend. In schools that require students to take personal responsibility for their learning, this is how everyone feels – that they are playing all day, exploring ideas, learning to create a world that is worth living in. The playground of ideas – the life of the mind – is the goal, not the enemy.

Playgrounds – places where kids are free to play wild, unfettered, without adult restriction – are hotbeds of creativity. Fueling imagination, allowing kids to feel that they are the center of an unending adventure full of unknown hazards and unspeakable thrills, playgrounds offer kids space to make their own rules. As Michael Chabon says,

Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted – not taught – to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?