Growing up in the Playground

The Social Development of Children

Andy Sluckin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351809757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

First published in 1981, this work is based on the author's research in the playgrounds of two Oxford schools. It describes the order amongst the apparent chaos by relating the playtime activities – the games, rhymes and taunts of five-to-ten-year-olds in first and middle schools – to children's goals, problems and solutions. It shows how children learn and display in the playground a remarkably complex set of social skills and the study clearly demonstrates the importance of playtime for preparing a child to cope in the adult world.

1

‘What do you think playtime’s for?’

Author: What do you think playtime’s for?

Jon (5 years): I think it’s to make me grow up a bit.

Author: How?

Jon: Well, I think running around and playing hopscotch and lying down make me grow up a bit. Well, I mean I get a bit more excited in the playground.

Author: You say it helps you to grow up?

Jon: No that doesn’t mean anything. I can’t think of anything else what it’s for.

Author: What about playing hopscotch, do you think it’s a very grown-up thing to do?

Jon: No, of course not.

Author: I thought you said playing hopscotch makes you grow up?

Jon: It doesn’t make you grow up right to the ceiling!

Author: What does it do?

Jon: It makes me grow up extremely slowly.

The developing child comes under many influences. The first is that of the parents, but children do not stay forever within the confines of the home. By the time they are five or six, they start to spend much of their day at school. Some children have a difficult settling-in period, but others take to it like a duck to water. If the classroom is often strange and frightening to a young child, the break between lessons can be worse. For in the playground there are even more children confined together. We all know that there are opportunities to learn at home and in the classroom, but is there anything to be learnt at playtime? This book is about my attempt to find out.

When I asked the teachers and children at an Oxford First School, ‘What do you think playtime’s for?’, both groups gave similar replies. ‘It’s a time when they can let off steam’, ‘the teachers get a break’, ‘we get fresh air and exercise’. ‘But are the children learning anything?’, I insisted. The adults elaborated upon five-year-old Jon’s suggestion that ‘playtime makes me grow up extremely slowly.’ ‘They learn how to get on with one another and make friends’, ‘to sink their own selfish interests from time to time in order to become part of a game’, and ‘to cope with each other as people, as human beings with equal rights. They need to give and take equally with nobody interfering.’

Few of these teachers, however, had a clear idea of just what their pupils do when they are by themselves. It’s a world that may seem more or less closed to adults, but this is mainly because we choose to ignore it. Most of the teachers explained that they abhor playground duty and only really take note of what is going on around them should a problem arise. It is no coincidence that Head Teachers avoid this chore. Likewise, parents rush past the playground so as to get away from the deafening din of their offspring who scream at the tops of their voices. But is it all just running about with no particular purpose other than to let off steam?

Iona and Peter Opie, lifelong collectors of children’s folklore, have looked more closely at just what goes on at playtime and they reveal a far more complex world and one that is immensely rich in tradition. The material for their books ‘The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren’ and ‘Children’s Games in Street and Playground’ was collected during the 1950s and 1960s. They describe the seasonal customs, initiation rites, superstitious practices and beliefs, rhymes and chants, catcalls and retorts, stock jokes, ruderies, riddles, slang epithets, nicknames and innumerable traditional games common in playgrounds throughout the British Isles. But although their findings have become widely known, the teachers and parents that I have met have been sceptical that this world extended into their own back yard. Though they fondly recollect the traditions of their own schooldays, they lament that the impact of television and other aspects of modern culture have done much to destroy the continuity of oral lore. But in two Oxford schools at least, I can report that the playground world lives on.

You don’t have to look that closely to realize that children at playtime are not ‘just like little savages’, but there may still be a sense in which playground life can be said to be primitive. Is this where the social skills necessary for adult life are learnt? Is this where children begin to master how to manipulate their peers with words alone? At times children’s sophisticated use of language is strikingly similar to that of adults. According to the Opies, the day to day running of playground life involves ‘affidavits, promissory notes, claims, deeds of conveyance, receipts and notices of resignation, all of which are verbal and all sealed by the utterance of ancient words which are recognized and considered binding by the whole community.’ There are certainly parallels between the methods of management of the child and adult social worlds, but just how important is experience in the playground? To find out I decided to make my own observations of the social interactions of five-to ten-year-olds at playtime.

HOW TO WATCH CHILDREN

The study of learning, or rather the impact of experience on development, has always been a central theme in psychology. But few researchers have investigated learning in the natural environment, preferring instead the more controlled but artificial conditions of the psychological laboratory. Although such an approach has been dominant, it has never been without criticism. Many researchers have suggested their own alternative methods. They stress the need for careful and systematic observation in natural surroundings, and this goes far beyond the occasional opportunities we all have for looking. Both zoologists and anthropologists have always done this, but each in their own characteristic way. The influence of both these disciplines can be seen in the few observational studies that have taken place in the playground.

The influence of zoology arises out of the success over the past thirty years of systematic observation of animals. Why not try the same method with humans? In just the same way as zoologists were careful not to interact with, and so influence the behaviour of, ducks, chickens, monkeys and other creatures, so the psychologists were with human beings. They became non-participant observers who noted down whenever any of a long list of carefully defined categories of behaviour occurred.

Despite the small number of such studies at playtime, those that have been conducted span many countries and give a clear indication of much that is easily quantifiable about human behaviour. One researcher observed three-to eleven-year-olds in United States, Swiss and Ethiopian playgrounds. Another made extensive notes on the play of five-to seven-year-olds in playgrounds in Kyoto (Japan), Delissaville (Australian Aborigine), Hong Kong (Chinese), Bali, Ceylon, New Delhi, Pondicherry, Kenya (Kikuyu) and Crown Point in New Mexico (Navajo). A third, Rivka Eifermann, recorded the play and games of Israeli children. All three projects provide much basic data about such features of playground life as the amount of interaction, the size of sub-groups of children and their sex and age composition. For instance, some sex segregation was seen everywhere, though there was least among the Kikuyu and most in Ceylon, but in all settings boys tended to play with boys and girls with girls. Similarly, in all cultures it was the boys who were more aggressive whilst the girls spent more time in conversation.

Eifermann’s observations come nearest of all to our theme of growing up in the playground. She was able to investigate whether the way of life of the Israeli kibbutzim reflects itself in the children’s patterns of play. Six-to fourteen-year-olds were watched for about a year during playtime in two kibbutz and two moshav schools. The moshav makes a good comparison, for although these are also rural communities, they differ by being co-operative settlements in which the families only pool their incomes to a degree. In contrast, the kibbutz family is totally subordinated to the community.

The games in the two kinds of school showed clear differences. ‘The children of the dream’, as Bruno Bettelheim once called those born in the kibbutz, played games which tended to reflect the values of co-operation and egalitarianism to a greater degree than the moshav children. Apparently, it is not that competition as such is shunned, but rather that its potential impact is overcome by the children playing games which stress a good deal of co-operation within sub-groups. Similarly, in any game with single children competing against each other, there were rarely any roles that allowed either of the participants an advantage.

How does this choice of activities come about? Perhaps unduly competitive games are discouraged by adults. Alternatively, it may be that the children themselves decide between different kinds of activities, preferring those that conform with what they see going on around them. Eifermann unfortunately did not examine this issue, but her findings do support those theories of play which stress the preparatory and exploratory character of children’s playful activities. She shares in a tradition that stretches back at least to Plato and Aristotle, who regarded play as ‘tools for young builders’, and is echoed nowadays by Jean Piaget, the grandfather of modern child psychology. It is perhaps worth adding that Eifermann’s results tend to conflict with theories that have emerged under the influence of Sigmund Freud, which have a common theme that children’s games express a hidden revolt against adult values. Indeed, there has never been a lack of theorists willing to speculate about the functions of play, nor of authors eager to collect and summarize the disparate and often irreconcilable viewpoints. Yet paradoxically there has been little straightforward description of what children actually do in the playground.

Whereas those studies influenced by zoology observe people as if they were just another species, and banish from their minds any preconceptions they might have about the nature of human societies, anthropologists have done quite the reverse. Their method is to go and live amongst the people they want to study. They learn their language and ways and try to understand the culture from within. At around the same time in the 1920s when the young Margaret Mead went to the South Sea Polynesian island of Samoa to find out about the lives of girls and women of the community, the young Jean Piaget was likewise participating in games of marbles with four-to twelve-year-old boys in and around Geneva. The book that arose from this study was called ‘The Moral Judgment of the Child’ in which Piaget was concerned, as the title says, with moral judgments; that is, a child’s ideas about rules, justice, ethical behaviour and so on. He chose to study marbles as merely one context in which such knowledge was displayed.

Piaget sought to understand two aspects of the game:

First, the practice of the rules, i.e. the way in which children of different ages apply rules; and second, the consciousness of rules, i.e. the idea which children at different ages form of the character of these game rules, whether of something obligatory and sacred or of something subject to their own choice.

As with his other research, the findings were interpreted in terms of developmental stages. This aspect of growing up in the playground, or of moral development, involves passing through each of four stages of the practice or behavioural conformity to rules. Initially the child uses the marbles simply as a free play material, not attempting to adapt his behaviour to any social rules. Between three and four years he enters stage two and begins to imitate aspects of the rule-regulated play of his elders. But although confident that he is following these older children’s rules, he none the less plays in an idiosyncratic, socially-isolated manner, unintentionally flouting the rules at every turn. Stage three comes at around seven or eight when the child starts to play in a genuinely social way, in accordance with a mutually agreed set of rules. But it is only around eleven or twelve that they are completely understood and always obeyed.

As for the consciousness of rules, it is hardly surprising that during stage one of free play, the child seems to have none. During stage two some very harsh ideas about rules emerge, for now they are regarded as eternal and unchangeable, stemming from a parental or divine authority. Any suggested alterations are resisted since the new rules would be ‘unfair’, even if acceptable to the other players. Yet the same child who sees rules as sacred is none the less unwittingly breaking them at every turn of his actual behaviour. However, once the child begins actually to obey the rules at seven or eight, a change in attitude follows a few years later. The ten-or eleven-year-old sees them for what they are, as merely arbitrary conventions that can be changed, provided that all the players agree.

Piaget is not primarily known for his excursions into the social world of the playground, but rather for his discoveries about how children understand their physical environment. We cannot be sure whether or not he ever played marbles again, but if he did, these games were not recorded.

My own work in the playground takes up, nearly five decades later, some of the themes that Piaget first suggested. It is an attempt to understand the social world of a First and Middle School playground, through noting what the children did and said to each other, and supplementing this material through talking both to them and to their teachers. The number of children I watched is small but I came to know them well and to realize the complexities of life in their playground community. In revealing the many ways in which children talk to and manipulate each other, we are reminded not only of our own childhood, but also of everyday adult life. It is both an illuminating and amusing exercise!

2

‘Hey Mister, can I be in your book?’

Teresa (7):

What do you use that radio for? Who are you speaking to with that sort of thing? Because it won’t do you any good; unless you’re operating for someone to smuggle us away.

Children are inevitably interested in a strange man talking into a pocket dictaphone and walking round their playground, but they are not nearly so self-conscious as adults. Nor is the playground a secret society, but only a world which normally grown-ups do not enter. Of course, the younger the children the more easily they become accustomed to an observer. Those who watch preschool children find that a non-participant role causes them quickly to lose interest in an adult who never initiates any interactions nor responds to any of the children’s attempts to make contact. This was the approach I tried in First School and by the end of a month of pilot observation the number of approaches by the five- and six-year-olds had fallen dramatically to practically zero. This lack of interest continued during the following two years of the study and even when I observed the ten-year-olds at Middle School I was able to stand within a few feet of them and whisper into my tape recorder the actual words that they used, without their seeming the least bit disturbed.

But an adult who talks to himself and refuses to interact is something of a mystery. During the early days I was asked:

Who are you talking to?

What’s that radio for?

Why are you following us about?

Why don’t you answer? Why don’t you answer?

Hey, you Man, speak!

Since the teachers were fairly non-committal as to why I was there, the children soon began to proffer their own explanations:

He’s a nutter.

He’s a deaf man.

He’s a spy.

Why are you lazy like that, why are you so lazy?

I know, I know, it’s because he’s tired.

He’s shy, it’s a radio, he’s recording what we say,

I’ll make him wake up.

He doesn’t speak, he’s a bastard.

If you don’t speak, I’ll just have to smack you.

I won’t leave you alone, till you tell me what that thing’s for.

Within a few weeks the children became more and more familiar with my presence and I became part of the furniture of the playground. On one occasion they used me in a game of ‘all after that man there’ and for fifty seconds I was mobbed, pulled and kicked by a bevy of five-year-olds. Happily, the noise was more alarming than the blows and so I concluded that this was a...