Chris Jepson: To play at being human

“Do not … keep children to their studies by compulsion, but by play.” — Plato

As a child I lived for recess, to play. As an adult, little has changed.

I’m afraid I’m becoming one of those. You know, one of those. An old man curmudgeon lamenting, longing for some lost paradisiacal past of his halcyon youth. A time when a king-size, mind you, a king-size Coke was 12 ounces, a time when the renewal of your 50-cent library card was the total extravagant extent of any parental involvement in your after school education, and of a time when two daily recesses were the norm for an elementary school student.

Most of us understand that nothing is forever. Seasons. Batting streaks. Civilizations. When historians look back on what triggered the collapse (perhaps I exaggerate) of the American Empire or what aptly illustrates a pivotal turning point in our nation’s history, from “greatness” to mediocrity, they may look no further than a recent quote from Leesburg Elementary School Principal Patrick Galatowitsch from the Orlando Sentinel, “Allowing kids to run around on the playground without appropriate guidance isn’t helping our kids to be focused on instruction.”

There is so much wrong with Galatowitsch’s perspective that I am at a loss as to where to begin. “Allowing kids to run around on the playground”? Is this educator, nay, administrator bereft of imagination? We should be encouraging our children to do exactly that, to run around—exhaustingly—much the time. And why the hell not, it’s a playground!

“Without appropriate guidance”? Are you kidding me? Arguably, I learned as much on the playground as I did sitting in the classroom. You learn to play with others; to be part of a team, a side. You learn fair play. To share. You observe bad behaviors (in others, in yourself) that do not work, that are unacceptable. You experience peer pressure, feuds, cliques, bullies, loves and triumphs. Ah, young love. On your own with others your age, without the omnipresent supervision of adults, you grow and mature. I am saddened for America’s youth if modernity determines that unsupervised child’s play has become unacceptable.

“Helping our kids to be focused on instruction”? Exercise and play and unsupervised child-to-child interactions do just that — help children to focus on their instruction.

Remember for a glorious second how free you once felt. The clock on the wall behind the teacher moved so achingly slow and then bingo, the moment arrived when all the second grades headed out to the playground for 15 or 20 minutes of just running and horsing around. Boys over there, girls in the shade. Who liked you? Who didn’t? Who cares? It was ecstasy.

Google “the value of recess, of play” and read study after study supporting the idea of play as conducive to learning.

But we don’t really require studies, do we, to intuitively know, to value play as an integral part of life. George Bernard Shaw offered, “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”

There’s a Biblical quote that from my perspective gets it profoundly wrong. Corinthians 13:11 reads, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

If child be the father of man, more’s the pity if we put away play. You may as well repress your humanity. And where’s the joyful play in that? Ask any elementary school student.