Playing make-believe is the serious business of childhood
Sunday May 30, 2004
A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play
By Vivian Gussin Paley
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO; 111 PAGES; $19
Like our obsession with finding the next great diet, American public opinion about how we educate our children boomerangs from one extreme to another. One day we're all for letting them roll around in the mud; the next, we tell them to sit quietly at desks as we test them on verb conjugation.
Propelled by the Bush administration's "No Child Left Behind" policy, mainstream public education has most recently swung toward the formal side. Reading and writing are the hunter-gatherer skills of our age. Kindergarten has become the place to learn them. By second grade, we start giving children standardized tests to assess how much they've learned. Have we gone too far? Are we raising children with heads so densely packed with "facts" that their imaginations will slip away like dreams?
In a new slim volume, "A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play," Vivian Gussin Paley contends that we "perform a grave error" when we discard fantasy play as the foundation of early childhood education. Paley is an important voice: She spent 37 years as a kindergarten teacher at the famed University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and has written a dozen books on early education. Her essay is a richly detailed reminder of the enormously important role of imaginary play -- but falls short of arguing convincingly that it should be the basis for early education.
Playing make-believe is the gold dust of childhood. Pretend play helps children build dreams, grapple with fears, experiment with language and social rules and sharpen their observations about the world, and bestows a thousand other unrecognized blessings, Paley writes. Through imaginary games, children test how the world works and where they fit in. Pretend to be a baby and crying is OK. Pretend to be a firefighter and you must act brave. Fantasy play lets children try out roles and behaviors with little fear of adverse consequences. You can be a wicked wizard in the morning and a heroic knight by snack time. In either case, your friends will still sit next to you. This is good, Paley points out. "When play is curtailed, how are [children] to confront their fantasy villains?" she asks.
Teachers can also use stories to convey lessons. Paley describes how "Franklin" kept disrupting play in the corner of her classroom devoted to building blocks. Just telling Franklin to play nicely didn't work. Paley resorted to storytelling: "Once there was a boy who had a big problem in blocks. Pretend I'm that boy," Paley told her class. She began waving her arms and shouting. The real Franklin laughed. "That's me! You're pretending me, right?" Paley then asked Franklin to pretend to be a child called "Good Player, " who knew how to cooperate with others. He did. After that, whenever Franklin lost control, his classmates would remind him to "play" a different character. "Hey Franklin, you're pretending the wrong boy, remember?"
Through "play," Paley gently gave Franklin instructions he could follow, rather than reprimanding him or isolating him in "time-outs." But Paley's thesis gets hazy when she writes about how teachers should be guided by children's stories. As a teacher, Paley writes, "I rarely paused to listen to the narratives blooming everywhere in the garden of children in which I spent my days. I saw myself as the bestower of place and belonging, of custom and curriculum, too often ignoring the delicate web being constructed by the children in their constant exchange of ideas."
And so? Paley doesn't finish the thought. She recites another classroom conversation -- "Let's both be baby sisters and our nice mother isn't lost yet" -- then wonders what it means. "These were the dialogues that had begun to fill my journals and there was never enough time to follow up every intriguing notion and original idea." Not every game of "make-believe" need teach a lesson, but as a parent, I want my children to take away more from their teachers than their teachers take from them.
Strikingly absent from this book is any discussion of what happens to children outside the classroom. On one end of the spectrum are children with schedules as crammed as those of corporate executives: swim lessons, ballet, karate, T-ball, music -- maybe even a foreign language and cooking. Paley's work should send a message here: Lighten up, folks. Close your eyes, open your imaginations and play "pretend" with your kids. At the other extreme are children who live in a world stripped of anything resembling healthy educational experiences.
Teachers need to nurture these children's imaginations, but it also stands to reason that these children desperately need teachers to help them learn the basics that other families take for granted: the ABCs, counting and the colors of the rainbow. Early childhood education should not resemble an Atkins diet of pure instruction and no make-believe. Neither should it be the other way around. Paley does children a great service by reminding us of the enormous value of fantasy play. Our job, as parents and educators, is to give children time to pretend they've fallen down a rabbit hole, without neglecting the skills they will need to read what Wonderland looked like to Alice.
Elizabeth Corcoran is a contributing editor at Forbes.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/30/RVGQQ6PUKP1.DTL
