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"Spontaneous play is as
important as any work a person may later do, for by means
of it, the child is nurturing a sturdy
seedling capable of blossoming into his or her unique
self."
How much help do children really need from adults? I
am told by a Secondary School teacher that the most
disruptive effect on learning in the classroom is that
many have no confidence in their ability; they are
disadvantaged by a lack of self-esteem.
How can this have come about I wonder. Babies are born
with the power to grow in ability. Jean Piaget and other
developmental psychologists have observed that infants
are virtually helpless at birth, their activity merely
reflex actions such as sucking at whatever touches the
inside of their mouths and waving their arms and legs.
Yet they grow into capable two year olds with no
assistance.1
Human infants, like the young of other species, have an
instinct to do what they need to do at any moment, in
order to travel further on the road towards becoming
capable members of their species.2 Most
babies learn quickly how to co-ordinate the activities of
sucking and swallowing; then they learn to use their
eyes, ears, noses, fingers, feet and organs of balance,
to cope with the effects of the force of gravity, to
respond in kind to smiles and laughter and to recognise a
number of people, although they can be seriously put out
if somebody they think they know turns up in a hat.
The growth of physical and mental abilities will only
occur if the baby's surroundings are favourable for
healthy growth; it must contain the food that the baby
requires if they are to grow. The food required for a
baby to handle objects is practice in grasping, picking
up, holding, dropping or carrying things to its mouth. At
the same time as the baby is exercising its ability to
handle the object, it is sensing the properties of the
object, its shape, weight, malleability, texture and so
on. As a result of this activity, the baby's body of
knowledge and know-how grows. Gradually he or she learns
to handle a particular object more deftly and also to
adapt his or her picking up and holding skills to other
objects. The psychologist D.O. Hebb has observed that a
baby tends to select for investigation things that are
different but only slightly different from those with
which it is already familiar.3
This instinctive learning activity is the baby's work,
the raison d'etre of childhood. We call it play. But play
of this spontaneous instinctive kind is as important as
any work a person may later do, for by means of it, the
child is nurturing a sturdy seedling capable of
blossoming into his or her unique self.
I think it is generally recognised that both genes and
environment play a part in determining what a child
becomes, but healthy and full growth depends mainly on
two things: the suitability of a child's environment for
healthy human growth and the character of the
individual's response to the environment. Given a
favourable environment, a child's growth is the result of
his choice of activity: on what he chooses to pay
attention to, what he likes, loves or hates and on how
much opportunity he takes to respond strongly and with
discrimination to his experiences.
So the child grows provided his or her environment is
suitably nutritious.
The Pillars of Mental Health
Jean Liedloff,4 after having lived for several months
with a tribe of Yequana South American Indians-an
extremely happy people-became convinced that for optimum
growth, babies need surroundings and treatment as close
as possible to what they "expect" to find.
For several weeks after birth, the mother, or another
member of the family, carried the baby with her wherever
she went and the baby could sense, among other things,
the familiar beating of a human heart. Then as soon as he
or she could toddle unaided, the child was able, while
keeping an eye on the whereabouts of mother as she went
about her work, to play; exploring his surroundings as
far as he could reach, exercising his physical and mental
judgement and budding human powers, as and when he felt
moved to do so.
As parents know and have always known, babies delight in
having an effect on their surroundings, both inanimate
and animate. Yequana babies could become acquainted with
other members of the tribe of all ages and learn from
observation what kind of behaviour was acceptable. In
this way, they could build up a healthy self-esteem and
the feeling that life is good: two gifts, it has been
said, that are the twin pillars of mental health.
Adults can help the process of growing if they are aware
of-and indeed respect and rejoice in-children's
instinctive wisdom regarding their learning needs, in
particular their ability to recognise appropriate bits of
functional, mental and emotional nourishment that are
present around them.
The Situation Today
Young children need to use all their waking hours for
growing in the above sense. That is why they should not
be subject to formal schooling much before their seventh
birthdays. Before that age, children should not be
expected to learn skills of civilisation such as reading.
If, as some do, they insist on working out for themselves
how to read, we should not be surprised, for most
children want to imitate their elders' skills, just as
they want to "do it myself" (however long it
may take them) and to feel that they are becoming
effective and responsible members of the
family.
Nowadays in industrialised countries where the work-day
environment of adults is rarely suitable for the
spontaneous play of children and thus of their healthy
growth, it is imperative that society-parents and
planners-provide suitably equipped spaces, both indoors
and out, in which children can foregather, supervised by
adults who appreciate the value of entirely spontaneous
play.
In the recent past, some "pre-school
playgroups" and, for older children, "adventure
playgrounds" provided good substitutes for the local
woods, quiet roads and the village greens of a hundred
years ago. Nowadays their value is rarely understood, and
so it can happen that, at a very early age, young
children can lose the ability to recognise the
nourishment needed for growth because, for so long, it
has not been there. In fact, we have come to the point
when the adult population needs to go to school for some
intensive education in the nature of babies' and young
children's needs and how to provide for them.
I was glad to see a recent TV programme which provided
some evidence of the benefits to children of being
introduced to formal teaching in the arts of literacy
only at the age of seven. It heartened me that somebody
had publicly challenged the present assumptions of both
the Government and of the majority of parents. In
Britain, children are expected to become proficient
readers at six; some are successful but the majority are
insufficiently developed intellectually before the age of
seven to learn to read with ease and pleasure. However
skilled their teaching may be, many children fail to
satisfy their teachers' expectations in the field of
activity which, it is obvious to them, their elders
consider to be the most valuable. This may have tragic
results: after two or three years of instruction that has
made no improvement in their skill, they come to the
conclusion that they are "stupid" and incapable
of success at school.
Surely this cannot be good for their educational
prospects or for their self-esteem or for that of their
teachers or for the peace of the classroom or, indeed,
for the future of civilisation.
And there is a greater tragedy: time and energy is wasted
on premature schooling when children need all the time
they can get during their first seven years for the
essential work of childhood. They need to spend their
days amid a variety of opportunities to develop their
potential humanity-their physical and mental and
emotional powers. Perhaps because the essential knowledge
and know-how learned in such an environment cannot be
taught, its value is underestimated. For whatever reason,
the trend of the last twenty years has been to focus more
and more on the purely intellectual development of even
the youngest children. Parents want to be sure of access
to the schools of their choice. Therefore they want
"pre-schools" which 'get the children on', and
also get them accustomed to being continuously directed
by a teacher or to answer the question, "What would
you like to do?", which the children soon learn
means choosing an approved occupation and sticking to it
for a long time-at least five minutes! And if a child
stops to watch what is happening around it or to ponder
or dream, it risks a repetition of the question, with the
slightly irritated addition of the word "now".
Sadly, the theories of the Behaviourist School of
psychology, current during the early part of this
century, still linger. For example, the child is still
thought of by some
as a "blank slate" waiting for the teacher to
write on it, and therefore, it is reasoned, the earlier
the better.
A Useful Piece of Research
I have been lucky in that my life has been spent in
observing the voluntary behaviour of children of all
ages. I was the eldest of five. Then I had the great good
fortune to spend three years as a student-assistant to a
group of biologists who were studying the nature of human
health-the health of the whole person, physical, mental,
emotional and social, and hoping to discover in what it
consists and in what kind of environment people can
cultivate it in themselves.
This observational research was the brain-child of two
experienced doctors of medicine, George Scott Williamson
and Innes Hope Pearse, who, after many years thought on
the subject and three years running a pilot scheme in an
ordinary house in Peckham-an inner-city suburb of
London-opened a specially designed building in the same
area, to house a scientific laboratory-cum-social club
which they called "The Pioneer Health Centre."
It became known world-wide as "The Peckham
Experiment," after the 1943 publication of the book
of that name by I.H. Pearse and L.H. Crocker.5
Williamson's and Pearse's basic method of promoting whole
health was to ensure the freedom of the individual,
within an environment in which everyone was equally free,
to use their own initiative in discovering or creating
leisure activities to their taste, or to do nothing but
relax and chat or watch what was going on. The same
opportunities, geared to the needs of toddlers and
under-fives, were provided in the "nurseries"
in which babies and young children could be left during
the afternoons when their mothers were occupied elsewhere
in the building. After some months, "the
Doctors" realised that it would be necessary to find
means of giving the same freedom to the school age
children of the member-families. When this was achieved,
primarily by allowing those children who had proved they
could swim (and most who could not, quickly learned) to
use the large centrally situated swimming pool and the
adjacent gymnasium as playgrounds during most of the
afternoon and early evening.
The children had shunned classes but, through playing in
the water and in the air above it, and on the Swedish
apparatus with which the gymnasium was furnished, they
attained a high degree of skill. After this innovation, a
marked change in the general behaviour of the children
was observed; they became much more purposeful and
serene, although equally energetic, and more responsible
for themselves and their surroundings. Moreover their
relationships with their elders became happy ones.
Through what I learned at the Peckham Centre,6 and later while running a pre-school
playgroup on Peckham lines for up to twelve children in
my own home; through observing the behaviour of my own
five children with relative detachment, and studying
theories of child development while writing a book7 on the spontaneous play of young
children, I acquired some useful knowledge of how babies
and small children grow through spontaneous play in a
suitable environment.
Until about fifty years ago, most children in both town
and country areas of Britain had some opportunity to play
with other children out of sight of organising and
controlling adults. A hundred years ago when families
were larger, even toddlers had playmates in the home, or
had opportunities for "doorstep" play with
neighbouring children. Now children are often in a
minority, both in the home and in the neighbourhood. Out
of doors, they are rarely seen except being conveyed here
and there in cars or coaches.
This situation can become healthier when adults
understand children's needs and learn how to provide for
them. So it is to be hoped that all adults and
adolescents, and especially young parents and people in
positions of authority will hasten to make themselves
proficient in this area of knowledge and make a point of
observing the spontaneous behaviour of babies. I would
recommend people to begin by reading my book The
Self-Respecting Child.
References
1. Jean Piaget, The Origin of
Intelligence in the Child.
2. R.Winthrop White, Motivation
Reconsidered: the Concept of Competence in
Psychological Review, 1959 Vol.66 no 5.
3. D.O.Hebb, A Textbook of Psychology,
1958.
4. Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept,
Gerald Duckworth 1975, Penguin
Books 1986 and Addison-Wesley 1987.
5. I.H.Pearse & L.H.Crocker, The
Peckham Experiment, George Allen and Unwin
1943, reprinted by Scottish Academic Press 1985.
6. Alison Stallibrass, Being Me and Also
Us: Lessons from the Peckham
Experiment, Scottish Academic Press 1989.
7. Alison Stallibrass, The
Self-Respecting Child, Thames and Hudson 1974,
Pelican Books 1977 and Addison-Wesley 1989.
Alison Stallibrass has worked as
an educator since 1936 and studied child development
since the 1940's. She has published two books on
education, as well as contributing to numerous
periodicals.
This article was published in New Renaissance,
Volume 8, No. 4, issue 27
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