In more recent years, after I became involved with the European Early Childhood Early Childhood Research Association and started attending their conferences, I became very jazzed and excited by their slant on the human rights of the young child -- something little if ever spoken about or considered in the U.S. They speak openly about young children, birth to 5, as 'human beings, not just human becomings' and value their occupations -- work and play.
So it was in this context that I considered, or reconsidered as I read these old notions of play being a rehearsal for life. Why can't it be 'life'? It is the life that the young children are living and being and doing in those moments. It is who they are and what they are working on and enjoying in those moments. Oh sure, it may be formational, it may be shaping who they will 'become' as adults -- but so what? Everything I still do, think, experience now as a 54-year-old continues to shape who I am becoming as a 54-and-a-half-year old, as a future 60-year-old, who I'll be if I live to be a wise old grandmother, isn't it? Wouldn't it be condescending to say of what I do, think, experience, and of my work, play and activities, that I am "rehearsing for an older age"? It's nonsense. We're always learning and growing and changing as human beings AND as human becomings. So there!
And forgive me, Lara, but I'm stealing one of your beautiful photos. Two-year-old Isabella and her grandpa, David, are at very different stages in life, but they seem to be sharing a very similiar understanding of and feelings about the play they are engaging in, aren't they? Aren't they both growing and changing and learning at this time? They aren't 'rehearsing' for a dang thing. They are LIVING and BEING in the moment, a totally shared human moment that transcends ages and generations. This is what play means to me.
Oh, well. I have so much more to think about!
How wonderful to find my little Belle here! I think you are definitely on to something, Mary...play is a state of mind, not a stage of life. Both learning and playful-mindedness permeate our lives...or perhaps as Artin might say, they do in healthy lives. I have long puzzled at the tendency to equate learning with 'what happens in school'...when it so clearly is everywhere, supported by our instinctual desire to play. It is why, I am really not so worried about the survival of the School of Ed...it is true that fewer people want to be 'school' teachers...honestly who would want to be a professional tester?...but given that we are all both learners and teachers in every moment of our lives (you point this out...that Isabella is, in a way, 'teaching' David in the picture), there is so much still for someone interested in education in the broadest sense to do.
ReplyDeleteI love this conversation. I have long wondered why education must be constructed and constrained as aimed toward the becoming of something specific, standardized, and dictated. Rather, why can't living, learning, growing and becoming be something constantly in flux, emergent, reflexive, unknown, even a lifelong mystery unfolding? One which we may know the answer near life's end or never know at all...always emergent, spontaneous, organically evolving and unknown. All that we do know is we continue to grow, to be, to become, to search and long for more. A thousand locks await for us to discover the key and unlock what has slumbered in hopes of being awakened. For me, these notions are at the height of wonderment when we are children. To foster that quench and thirst across the lifetime is pivotal. Rather than imposing the notion upon a child, than they became less than we expected, why can't we foster in the heart of children and adults to continue to explore and play with what they are yet to discover about themselves? Who cares if we cannot develop a test to measure or equate this? We can see, observe, document, and experience along side growth, development, and sneak a peak at what is yet to emerge. The lifelong learner, explorer...who is teaching who? It is a dance rather than a march toward something specific or dictated. It is jazz, it is the blues, it is improvising as we dance through this experience. In the words of John Dewey, "Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situations of experience its own full and unique meaning." "Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."
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