Summary

The Theory of Play

For Neva Boyd, play is its own end. Further, she sees play as transcending cultural and historical lines and believes that human play has the same characteristics in primitive man and in modern man.

Beyond this, she finds play to be not only a voluntary activity but also a biological necessity. In effect, a human cannot "not play." Yet, she distinguishes between play that is aimless or rudimentary and play that is directed and properly structured to maximize results.

Play takes many forms‑ songs, dances, games, drama, sports, and various arts. Chiefly, this refers to her view of play as behavior that does have an indirect effect on routine life. Miss Boyd examines this concept in connection with her use of the term "play behavior." Play is a joyful experience. Play takes you into another world of its own creation, disregarding conventional behavior yet subject to a special set of social controls. Withal, play is not merely amusement or escape from reality, says Miss Boyd Social values are found and observed in play that are unlike any in other behavior, for play has its own rules and it provides incentive for one's best behavior and expression of one's ultimate capacity. Play requires intelligence, imagination, aesthetic feeling, sensitivity, spontaneity, originality, and productivity. At some length, she develops her thesis that play provides for ethical education through pleasurable disciplined behavior in moral education. Moreover, play call be a powerful tool for correction of deviant behavior. Miss Boyd's view here is that the deviant behavior should not be discussed with the child. In particular she insists that play has its own rewards and that prizes or undue recognition tend to rob play of its true value, which she holds Io be self‑realization.

In the final section of this paper Miss Boyd discusses the transfer value of play. She uses the term "transformation" to describe the process through which values of play become a part of wider social behavior. Play helps the child translate and express his experience.

Activity in which reciprocal responsiveness via play is dominant provides a basis of unconsciously acquired understanding of self and others. The real point is the influence of play on human learning and the development of the human being socially, mentally and physically. In the early period of their existence, the settlements provided social activities in the nature of play, programs ranging from nursery schools for young children and athletic games for youth to social clubs for youth and adults. Within this range of cultural education organic normality and social ethics were prompted as by-products of play activities.

The schools at that time were not wholly unmindful of the educational value of play and a play program comprised of games was introduced experimentally in a public school system in Massachusetts. The experiment was not successful, probably because of the rigidity of the play activities as taught by teachers of physical education, which largely prevented the emergence of spontaneity in the games and play and also because of the prevalent emphasis on physical activities in the play curriculum. Formal education has utilized in some small degree the form play activities but has in its individuated and competitive system failed to preserve the spontaneity that gives the play activity vitality and makes it play and art and therefore gives it organism-as-whole value.

The writer had observed children at play in the early social settlements and had noted their failures in their efforts to create their own play as well as their occasional happyfiying successes.

Play takes innumerable forms and varied content. The play of a human being has its beginnings in his dynamic impulsive behavior, which becomes play when he employs it for his own satisfaction.

Many attempts have been made to define play none of which are wholly satisfactory and yet most of them state facts about play.

Experience reveals the difficulty many adults and even children have to get into play psychologically and yet there is no genuine play without it. Play is a universal form of behavior common to man. Play is a way of behaving and therefore play behavior is a common form of human behavior. The play impulse finds expression in many forms of behavior and is indulged in for the satisfaction it affords in itself. The essential factor in play is the processes of playing. Simple play behavior patterns are easily understood when one realizes that human bodies are similarly constructed and therefore function similarly whether that of primitive man or civilized. Play is likely to remain rudimentary unless it takes place in groups.

play for aesthetic satisfaction the process of playing affords:

Play stems from man and presses for expression. Perhaps no phase of human behavior is so spontaneous as play. Pleasure, enjoyment, imagination, fun, and so on, are sometimes offered as the marks that distinguish play from other forms of behavior. Through many generations man has created, throughout the world, patterns, which are expressive of human play behavior.

The structures an material function of the body not only produce a rich array of play activities but include aesthetics, social behavior and social relationships, etc. Throughout the world and through eons of time, play behavior has found expression in similar play patterns. This has resulted in a rich production of play activities. Like many forms of primitive human behavior the outward expression of play has become conventionalized play and playing, dramatic acting, drama, sports, and the graphic and plastic arts. Play behavior can find expression in both crude and refined forms among all peoples.

The play of each involves similar patterns of play behavior.

It is quite probable that al of us are able to determine whether the behavior which we observe is play or whether it is work or behavior of some other sort than play. Because of this evident difference between play and other forms of behavior, in this discussion, the term “play behavior” is used to refer to play.

Play Behavior

This last is play behavior. Play is a form of behavior native to man.

Play is a dynamic irradiant, organism-as-whole experience and like all behavior it can be evoked by stimuli of various sorts. Observation of play behavior in man shows it to be different from all other forms of behavior. Play behavior employs many mediums of expression varying in character at various times of life but it is distinct behavior different from other forms. Play behavior has produced some units of behavior or patterns that are called dances, games, sports, drama, stories, etc. These play activates were produced in the play life of common people. All forms of play activities are the products of Spontaneity. Play behavior is essentially spontaneous, psychophysical and psychosocial. Play behavior requires stimuli and this comes largely in the response to the play behavior of others, or at least to their sympathetic attention.

The organization and structure forms of play behavior expression, such as the dances, games, etc., arc the product of the ages. Folk play activities such as folk games; dances, etc. are produced under primitive social conditions and in the functioning of the organism-as-a-whole play behavior. If these activities are to serve their best purpose educationally (and therefore therapeutically) social informality and spontaneous play behavior must be preserved. Children, youth, and many adults respond readily to play tinder such conditions. Failure to preserve the spirit of spontaneous play behavior in play activities inheres in the anachronism of the sophisticated style of formal teaching.

(a) Spontaneity

Perhaps the most distinctive character of play is the player's feelings of organismic, organism-as-a-whole irradiance. Spontaneous irradiance of feeling is that essential characteristic of all true play whatever form it may take. Relatively few adults actually play but a sort of residue of, the joyful play experienced in a person's childhood and youth remains with them always and flavors life as nothing else does. Without childhood play the "joy of living" is likely to be lacking.

Play must have some degree of exhilaration. Why, it may be asked, are spontaneity and exhilaration great essentials of play? Striving for excellence in play activity prevents freedom and spontaneity. Records of play of both primitive and civilized peoples, particularly children, indicate that the simple forms of play, or play patterns, arise spontaneously among all human beings. True play is always “happifying.” Play means happiness. Play, like many other things, is best appreciated by seeing children who were without it. Children without play are not happy. Happiness involves many things even to a child. It is this inner feeling of play the child must learn. Once a child learns the “spirit of play”, every new situation turns up numberless new associations and abilities.

Another distinctive character of play is its extroversiveness, that is, it frees the player from the sense of self and at the same time projects him psychologically into the play activity. Play centers interest outside of self. This ability to create and simultaneously play a role in a play situation is a primitive way of experiencing the delightful feeling of freedom from self. Observers of children’s play describe the players as being completely free from self and it might be added as “being wholly in their play”.

Play in all its forms is a complete contrast to conventional behavior and legitimizes originality, giving it full release, for play creates its own world. Play is that form of social organization through which original nature is channeled most unhampered, and yet the play patterns of a particular cultural group are not a violation of social customs but rather a preserver of them.

Values in Play

It is well to remember that the greatest value of play is enjoyment. Play develops the capacity to enjoy as well as the resources necessary to enjoyment. Play also contributes to sound intellectual achievement.

Play creates happy emotional condition of the organism-as-a-whole. Play involves social values, as does no other behavior. The spirit of play develops social adaptability, ethics, mental and emotional control, and imagination. These are the more complex and adjustments a child learns through play. In play, there are adjustments to new situations constantly. Play experience can prepare the person for purposefulness in non-play activities, for true play creates the incentive to use one’s best ability. Through play a person can develop a pattern of self-reliance and self-confidence. Well-chosen play activities have potentially unique value seldom understood or actualized. In the process of play, new powers emerge, such as bodily coordination, and aesthetic sensitivity. New values are experienced by the player, such as new social obligation to contribute to the maintenance of the common project undertaken by play group. Play activities yield immediate satisfaction to the players and the results of the effort are certain.

Play in the sense of function activates and heightens organismic tones and animates the player as he projects himself imaginatively and behaviorally into the activity and helps create the play situation. True play is its own value for the value of play is in play itself. The value of any play activity for the individual person depends on many factors:

Chronological and mental age, previous play experiences

The selection of play activity in relation to the players and the leadership given in the playing of it;

Play and art use the great essentials-intelligence, imagination, aesthetic feeling, sensitivity, spontaneity, originality, and productivity. The basic factor in true play and true art is aesthetic sensitivity. While the raw material of sensitivity is the same for play and art, the form of expression is different and it would be regrettable were expression limited to play and the expression of the arts neglected in the development of the child.

It is safe to assume that all children need discipline in thinking, in social behavior, in conformity to social custom. The formal teaching of social behavior including moral and ethical education by verbal means is inadequate. Education through the medium of actual social activity develops and gives expression to personal resources and moral normality.

The child gradually learns right and wrong, good and bad, in the play situation. In play, there is pleasurable disciplined behavior in moral education. There is ethical education involved in play activities and play situations. The play patterns of a particular cultural group are preservers of social customs. Children play family life, shop keeping, etc., patterned after the culture of the group, but they also exhibit courage, endure pain unflinchingly, respect the rights of others and willingly abide by the agreements made in play. The spirit of play develops social adaptability and child ethics.

Only when ethical behavior and law observance are voluntary is ethical education complete. Out of the experience of playing games even young children then to formulate rules for behavior. The teacher or play leader does not grant this demand but the child who has prestige among the children may be chosen for desirable roles in excess or exchange of other children. This behavior is a long-term demonstration of social justice and ethical moral behavior. The child becomes social unconsciously. At best, children are punished with the intention of improving them or correcting their behavior. Correction of undesirable behavior is best carried on via self-determined action in a coordinated activity by action, which permits the child to formulate moral judgments and conclusions. The child can be held responsible for much of his behavior and denied common privileges when he violates the right to these, and they should be taken away or the child should be helped to correct his behavior.

To expect a child or adult with a past of deviant behavior patterns to transform verbally presented dictum [sic] of social conformity is questionable methodology in either education or reeducation; both must be achieved primarily by the child’s own social behavior. That social behavior must eventually give him sufficient satisfaction to orient him toward socially acceptable behavior and away from the specific deviant behavior. Positive Experience

(b) Negative Experience

Play and Behavior Change

In the whole field of social work and that of education as well, there is urgent need of facts regarding the function of play and recreation in the education and reeducation of children, adolescents and adults. More or less permanent changes are known to have been wrought in persons through [sic] play activities in school children, normal and subnormal, hospitalized children, in youth, mentally ill youth and adults. While play is of great value in institutions concerned with the treatment of problem and anti-social behavior, or deviant behavior it is also a value in bringing about behavior change in all children, youth and adults afflicted with personality problems. Play, particularly the playing of organized games, has proven to be a dynamic process at once correctional, disciplinary, and developmental. In organized play or social groups especially those of children and adolescent youth, many individual personality problems are revealed and resolved. Many individual children are helped out of some distressing condition by play. Play may result in a release of the blockages by replacing them, the child developing out of them, or by outgrowing them.

Froe example, there is Wally, physically handicapped, who changed his anti-social behavior after having a play experience in dramatics. While providing the individual with the kind of play experience that will correct faulty or problem behavior and compensate for the results of neglect or misadventure, guiding play experience of children or youth with problems is not psychiatric treatment. Disciplined by play activity, perhaps a game, which is free and unregimented, the unconscious is released in play and its deviant overt aspects are subjected to the social judgment of the other players which may or may not bring it to the consciousness of the child or youth in question, or it may be released and dissolved unconsciously in the healthy impersonal activity. Play tends to take the manifest and potential person forward not merely to correct his deviance.

Both work and play can be used therapeutically. In both work and play, the emotional satisfaction and the overt results achieved in each reinforce each other. In play, the player proves to himself and others what he can do. In mental illness as in normal health, work and play constitute two sources of satisfaction for both emotional and overt results.

Problem behavior falls into types and is related to age categories. Young children frequently reveal symptoms of problem behavior, such as too great dependency on eating, thumb sucking, use of pacifiers, etc. Various forms of play are conducive to lessening this type of dependence. Players with normal development and social experience progress in depth and expansion through both repetition and variety of play activities with freedom and order. Also what may be called personality or character attributes become increasingly stabilized in play. An egotistic person finds difficulty in getting into play activities imaginatively. Children can be freed from self-reference by playing games with other children. While in true play children almost invariably share in the joy of another who has made a good play, they are unlikely to accord similar goodwill to a “show-off”. While games are likely to be a good beginning in the freeing of children from self-reference, dramatization of stories and other forms of dramatic play would also be desirable, even though this more advanced play might require varied experience over a period of time.[GS1] [GS1]

Problem Behavior

The term “build-up” best expresses the most effective treatment of some forms of problem behavior, in fact treatment of many forms. It should be remembered that problem behavior of a serious nature in children and often in adults frequently is “outgrown”. Children and adults frequently grow out of problem behavior, just as the body renews itself. When play activities are coordinated with the readiness of potentialities in children, correction and “out-grown” is brought about positively by the process of the actualization of potentialities.

A teacher may personally get good response without changing a child’s character. She may personally influence a child and change his behavior overtly but it may not have reformed him. The social group can be a factor in bringing about change to desirable behavior. Schools, children’s hospitals and other agencies have proven that organized programs and well-selected play activities have been both preventive and corrective of deviant behavior in children. Lawlessness in children can best be corrected in social group activities.

Negative Influences in Play

While the values in play are many and play activities and the experiences therein are essential in the growth and development of children, play does not always bring good results. There is a kind of play that separates, sets us in conflict with each other in contrast to play that draws us together.

An overemphasis on winning defeats other possible values in play. Stress put upon the structure and technique of a play activity by the play leader or teacher tends to prevent the release of organic elements essential to creativity and expression of any kind.

Fun is the essence of the spirit of play but when the pretense of fun is “played up”, it tends to kill the natural vitality of play. Pretense of fun kills real play.[GS2] [GS2]

Negative attitudes brought into play activities and play projects, if not checked, destroy the value of play for the players. In play, a person proves his ability and thereby convinces himself of it. It may result in farcing in play.

Among the factors of great influence on the value of play is the quality of the content of the activities. Play utilizes the whole person and organism-as-a-whole activates the whole.[GS3] [GS3] The essential factor in play is the process.

In true play, whatever the particular play activity, the players spontaneously project themselves behaviorally and psychologically into the activity for the satisfaction the process of playing affords them.

The play behavior attitude of play is this ability to project oneself into a play activity and voluntarily act consistently with the requirements of the play situation.

True play requires a unique form of self-determined, spontaneous play behavior which lasts only as long as the player’s psychological integrity holds out. When the player repudiates the challenge of the play situation imaginatively and mentally withdraws from the game or play situation, he ceases to play and no longer maintains the spontaneous imaginative physiological participation which is the unique essential of the function of the spirit of play, even though he may continue to act overtly in maintaining the letter of the game or activity.

Play comprises attitudes and situations. Play is a continuous circulatory process or reaction. In play, this is the individual’s self-selected situation stimulation and his self-selected action. Playing in a group is a process of individual behavior taking place in a problem-solving situation, which tends to make the situation and his action intelligible to the player.

In play, all that a child or person is by inheritance and learning may come to expression. Whatever a player expresses in play, he assimilates just as he assimilates the milk he drinks. Play in itself is an innate tendency serving as a natural impetus to everything in a child. In the function of playing various aspects of play behavior become organized into problems. In play activities the participants play roles. If is a drama he acts consistently within the frame of the play.

The Theory of Play

By Neva Boyd

Editor's Commentary (Paul Simon)

Although this paper has been prepared by Miss Boyd, it had not been put in final form for publication. In the interests of clarity, the editor has rearranged some of the material.

In this paper, written during her post‑retirement years, Miss Boyd sought to bring together a summation of her theory of play as it had been developed across her years of practice and education. She discusses the concept of play, values, behavior change, and other principles.

For Neva Boyd, play is its own end. Its essence is psychological involvement and spontaneous activity for its own meaning. She sees play as a universal form of behavior, not alone limited to Homo sapiens but also to various forms of animal life. Further, she sees play as transcending cultural and historical lines and believes that human play has the same characteristics in primitive man and in modern man.

Beyond this she finds play to be not only a voluntary activity but a biological necessity. In effect, a human cannot "not play." Yet she distinguishes between play that is aimless or rudimentary and play that is directed and properly structured to maximize results.

Play takes many forms‑ songs, dances, games, drama, sports, and various arts. The forms tend to be the social products of given cultures, but the characteristics are universal. Chiefly, this refers to her view of play as behavior that does have an indirect effect on routine life. Miss Boyd examines this concept in connection with her use of the term "play behavior." She suggests that play behavior patterns are Common from culture to culture and in civilization regardless of changes that may have occurred in the "work" requirements of mankind. Variations in ethnic folkways are nonetheless products of spontaneity, creativity, exhilaration, and organism‑as‑a‑whole behavior.

Play is a joyful experience. It frees the player from ;I sense of self and projects him psychologically into a pleasurable activity. Play takes him into another world of its own creation, disregarding conventional behavior yet subject to a special set of social controls. Withal, play is not merely amusement or escape from reality, says Miss Boyd Social values are found and observed in play that are unlike any in other behavior, for play has its own rules and it provides incentive for one's best behavior and expression of one's ultimate capacity. Play requires intelligence, imagination, aesthetic feeling, sensitivity, spontaneity, originality, and productivity. Beyond this, play enables us to see the incongruous as funny, thereby developing it)" sense of humor. Touching this aspect only too briefly, Miss Boyd notes it is not unusual for a child of three to evince a sense of humor

At some length she develops her thesis that play provides for ethical education through pleasurable disciplined behavior in moral education. Particularly in childhood, when play provides a community one can understand and influence or and the rules of which he can accept, are social justice and conscience developed. Moreover, play call be a powerful toot for correction of deviant behavior. Miss Boyd's view here is that the deviant behavior should not be discussed with the child. In fact it should riot even be brought to his attention. She suggests that ''probing into the personal life in search of problem behavior" evokes guilt feelings and fear of reprisal. She believes that play provides release and re‑education and thus correction, adding that it is preferable for a child to look back on his bad behavior and rejoice in having overcome it. She also believes that deviance may be outgrown, often without the individual's awareness of its existence. She opposes punishment on the grounds that it centers attention on offender and contributes nothing toward the solution of the problem. Instead. She proposes a positive build‑up in a person through provision of game and play activities designed to strengthen the concept of self. In this respect play activities may be seen as analogous to reinforcement theory or other ego‑building procedures consonant with today's ego psychology and behavior modification.

Although she uses such terms as conditioning and behavior modification," Miss Boyd does not subscribe to either traditional or neo‑behaviorism, as such is reflected in the writings of Watson, Hull, or Skinner. In particular she insists that play has its own rewards and that prizes or undue recognition tend to rob play of its true value, which she holds Io be self‑realization. While she agrees that winning is important in competitive games, she sees awards as overemphasizing competition and creating an abyss between winner and loser: tending to make more of a place for those who excel and less of a place for those who lose. This inevitably discourages the minority and decreases the good will that should be present in all competition.

In the final section of this paper Miss Boyd discusses the transfer value of play. She uses the term "transformation" to describe the process through which values of play become a part of wider social behavior. She bases this approach oil her concept of the wholeness of the organism, the capacity to generalize and to abstract. She sees this as I two‑way process Children transform what they see in life into play and transform what they experience in play into life situations. Play helps the child translate and express his experience. However, she does not mean that direct transfer of specific behavior is necessarily carried over but rather that improved organism‑as‑whole functioning contributes to the energy and resources that put into other activity.

It should be noted that she felt "that there are potentials in every child, youth‑even adults‑ which may not be indicated by the current manifestation or expression but are undeveloped. The worker (leader) needs to function with faith in this undeveloped potential."

The purpose of the author is to share with educators and leaders of children, youth and adults the potential resources common to mankind, which can best be realized through the medium of play.

Activity in which reciprocal responsiveness via play is dominant provides a basis of unconsciously acquired understanding of self and others. Such play activities serve not only of a means of creating universality and humanizing sensitivity, but also as a means of giving organized constructive expression.

The medium of expression and the degree of unconsciousness, interpersonal reciprocity evoked among the players influences the development of character.

Our concern at the moment is with this development and its implications for the evolution of human character and a social being. The real point is the influence of play on human learning and the development of the human being socially, mentally and physically. Play activities carried on in groups stimulate empathy, emulation, effort, competition, cooperation, purpose, etc., and provide visible results of one's own efforts as well as learning by seeing one's failures and successes and those of others.

Human living is not departmentalized, each department having it's own peculiar basis. We shall find social living to be the foundation of every aspect Of man's being regardless of how many specializations are developed, every aspect if valid, will be based on the unity of social living.

Specialists who view social living from various aspects may deal only with what kills within that point of view. Education, however, must deal with the whole person and with a range of variables which file specialist may ignore. Somehow the way must be found to make whole, theoretically, the man the specialists have taken apart if the teacher is to be given an outlook that it is the facts of the fluidity of childhood.

Economics, political science, sociology, medicine law and social science stem from social living and man's efforts at problem solving. Self-maintenance and progress are the results of this problem-solving propensity of man. This is a cooperative process of borrowing and incorporating into his own living the achievements of his forebears and contemporaries.

It was in the early settlements, not in the schools, that cultural activities such as the arts, drama, music, etc., were experimentally prompted often by gifted professional men and women who in general served without monetary compensation.

The earlier of these neighborhood social center, called social settlements were established first in England and later in the United States, and attracted persons of similar background and character as volunteer workers. Under such leadership it was inevitable that the settlement house should become a cultural center with emphasis on play activities for children and diversional social activities for youth and adults.

In the early period of their existence, the settlements provided social activities in the nature of play, programs ranging from nursery schools for young children and athletic games for youth to social clubs for youth and adults. Within this range of cultural education organic normality and social ethics were prompted as by-products of play activities.

The schools at that time were not wholly unmindful of the educational value of play and a play program comprised of games was introduced experimentally in a public school system in Massachusetts. The experiment was not successful, probably because of the rigidity of the play activities as taught by teachers of physical education, which largely prevented the emergence of spontaneity in the games and play and also because of the prevalent emphasis on physical activities in the play curriculum. Formal education has utilized in some small degree the form play activities but has in its individuated and competitive system failed to preserve the spontaneity that gives the play activity vitality and makes it play and art and therefore gives it organism-as-whole value.

It was in the settlements that the writer developed a lifetime interest in the educational value of play as well as in providing education, initially in a private school, for promotion though training of play leadership as a profession. The writer had observed children at play in the early social settlements and had noted their failures in their efforts to create their own play as well as their occasional happyfiying successes.

To understand play, it must be considered not only as expressed by children in games and youth in sports, but as basically humanistic and cultural in the broadest sense. If play is thought of as comparable to the irradiance of a brilliant jewel it will be given a truer interpretation that were a definition attempted.

Play takes innumerable forms and varied content. It begins in early infancy and undergoes changes progressively in form and content, as do other aspects of growth and development. The play of a human being has its beginnings in his dynamic impulsive behavior, which becomes play when he employs it for his own satisfaction.

In the attempt to define play one realizes that it is difficult to define the obvious. To the observer there is no difficulty in detecting the difference between play and other forms of behavior, but the verbalization of the points of distinction is difficult. Many attempts have been made to define play none of which are wholly satisfactory and yet most of them state facts about play.

My own definition is that to play is to transport oneself psychologically into an imaginatively set up situation and to act consistently within it, simply for the intrinsic satisfaction one has in playing. Experience reveals the difficulty many adults and even children have to get into play psychologically and yet there is no genuine play without it. The essence of all play lies in its spontaneous creation for the pleasure of the process affords the players in the fun of playing. When this essence is lacking, only the semblance of the play activity may exist and this is not play.

Play is a universal form of behavior common to man. Play is a way of behaving and therefore play behavior is a common form of human behavior. The play impulse finds expression in many forms of behavior and is indulged in for the satisfaction it affords in itself. The essential factor in play is the processes of playing. The value of play is in itself, not in acclaim or evaluation, monetary or otherwise, of its outward form.

Simple play behavior patterns are easily understood when one realizes that human bodies are similarly constructed and therefore function similarly whether that of primitive man or civilized. What we can observe but cannot explain is the propensity to play any more that the impulse to walk can be explained.

There the evidence that children cut off from human society play, but their play remains crude or rudimentary and takes the form of animals among which they live and the bodily functioning may be contrary to its structure as it is when such children run on all fours instead of in an upright position.

These facts suggest that play if it develops at all in complete social isolation remains as rudimentary as the pattern set by the animal environment. Not only is that evident as judged by the records of feral children but it implies that play is a product of association in groups.

Play is likely to remain rudimentary unless it takes place in groups.

Human intelligence finds expression in two distinct forms:

1. play for aesthetic satisfaction the process of playing affords:

2. the more matter of fact expressions in purpose to achieve desired ends.

Play stems from man and presses for expression. It is extroversive or expressive. Perhaps no phase of human behavior is so spontaneous as play. Pleasure, enjoyment, imagination, fun, and so on, are sometimes offered as the marks that distinguish play from other forms of behavior. Through many generations man has created, throughout the world, patterns, which are expressive of human play behavior.

The structures an material function of the body not only produce a rich array of play activities but include aesthetics, social behavior and social relationships, etc. Throughout the world and through eons of time, play behavior has found expression in similar play patterns. This has resulted in a rich production of play activities. Like many forms of primitive human behavior the outward expression of play has become conventionalized play and playing, dramatic acting, drama, sports, and the graphic and plastic arts. All these activities can be performed in a wide range extending from simple forms to the higher arts befitting the abilities of peoples and individuals of all degrees of intelligence and proficiency. Play behavior can find expression in both crude and refined forms among all peoples.

Play activities such as song, dance, drama, games and sports are largely the social products of many cultures, and in their unstudied form have come to be classified as folkways and judged to be of purer quality than are the more calculatedly and intellectually produced forms. All the common humanistic behavior that created these forms of play is potentially present though the forms are changed and possibly elaborated and refined as the dance or game passes from one ethnic group to another.

The simpler forms of play based on the playful use of the physical body, such as running, jumping, climbing, throwing, swimming, and the playful use of the senses such as identification of sounds, color, sensation, are indigenous to all primitive and civilized peoples. Although susceptible to change in elaboration and refinement of humanistic characteristics as peoples advance culturally, the structural characteristics of the play persist, even though the players of one ethnic group may play a far more complex form stemming from similar roots than does another group. The play of each involves similar patterns of play behavior.

It is quite probable that al of us are able to determine whether the behavior which we observe is play or whether it is work or behavior of some other sort than play. Because of this evident difference between play and other forms of behavior, in this discussion, the term “play behavior” is used to refer to play.

Play Behavior

Human beings everywhere behave in two distinctly different ways. They function in ways that have to do with routine living and they behave in ways that have nothing to do with routine life. This last is play behavior. Play is a form of behavior native to man.

Play is a dynamic irradiant, organism-as-whole experience and like all behavior it can be evoked by stimuli of various sorts. Observation of play behavior in man shows it to be different from all other forms of behavior. The basic distinction is that it is spontaneous and is indulged in by the players solely for immediate intrinsic satisfaction.

Play behavior employs many mediums of expression varying in character at various times of life but it is distinct behavior different from other forms. Play behavior has produced some units of behavior or patterns that are called dances, games, sports, drama, stories, etc. These play activates were produced in the play life of common people. Because human beings are so similar in spite of their differences, these Play behavior are similar enough so that they have been diffused, taken over from once country to another, or from the primitive to the civilized and vice versa. For while every ethnic group produces its own distinctive folkways and each has distinctive characteristics they are all products of common factors in human life and serve to give expression to such.

All forms of play activities are the products of Spontaneity. Play behavior is essentially spontaneous, psychophysical and psychosocial. It encompasses gestural reciprocation and repartee.

Human play behavior ranges from mere bodily movement, such as gamboling about similar to that of a young animal, to the highly intellectual function characteristic of a game of chess or bridge.

The earliest evidence of playfulness is the infant's response to the parents' playful loving stimulus. Play behavior requires stimuli and this comes largely in the response to the play behavior of others, or at least to their sympathetic attention.

The organization and structure forms of play behavior expression, such as the dances, games, etc., arc the product of the ages. Folk play activities such as folk games; dances, etc. are produced under primitive social conditions and in the functioning of the organism-as-a-whole play behavior. If these activities are to serve their best purpose educationally (and therefore therapeutically) social informality and spontaneous play behavior must be preserved. Children, youth, and many adults respond readily to play tinder such conditions. Failure to preserve the spirit of spontaneous play behavior in play activities inheres in the anachronism of the sophisticated style of formal teaching.

(a) Spontaneity

Perhaps the most distinctive character of play is the player's feelings of organismic, organism-as-a-whole irradiance. Spontaneous irradiance of feeling is that essential characteristic of all true play whatever form it may take. It would also seem to be an essential of all true art including the art of living. It is sometimes said that persons lacking the "joy of living" were never young. Relatively few adults actually play but a sort of residue of, the joyful play experienced in a person's childhood and youth remains with them always and flavors life as nothing else does. Without childhood play the "joy of living" is likely to be lacking.

The term “Spontaneity" vaguely conceived seems to be commonly used as free, unstudied, extroversive behavior, or as a personality attribute without relation to environment, situation or culture.

Were the term scientific, it would refer to dynamic organism-as-a-whole environment behavior. It is in this sense that the term is used in this text. Spontaneity may arise in the thought processes and from individual initiative, or in Social processes, or in the Integration of both. In any case spontaneity gives the impulse to action or achievement.

There is a peculiar wholeness in spontaneous action and a tendency to act with significant pertinence to the dominant aspect of the situation. It is possible for it to die almost at birth but this is not the natural course for the nervous system in completes the impulse.

Moreover, when spontaneity is born in social group interaction, and this would seem to be cooperative interaction, and as mutuality prevails the impulse to action is coordinated into unified or integrated power. Under such conditions all the participants are moved to action, not alone by their individual impulse but by the coordinated power of all the participants. This is true whether an infant responds to a bright orange or a Socrates is impelled by an idea.

Excitement (mob behavior) may be spontaneous but it offers no opportunity for deliberation and disciplined procedure. Action is impulsive and purpose and consequences unconsidered. It is only at the point at which meaning and the impulse to act integrate that spontaneity arises.

In fact it would seem that spontaneous, on-the-spot action often involves an instantaneous focusing of a configuration of pertinent intelligence born of deliberative thinking and accumulated experience together with the intuition and judgment issuing in the immediate situation.

Spontaneity is the condition essential for the activation of primary forms of behavior such as imagination, empathy, emulation, imitation, vocalization, bodily rhythm, and the understanding of self and others.

Play must have some degree of exhilaration. Excitement is not the equivalent of exhilaration, nor is activity the equivalent of spontaneity. Both exhilaration and spontaneity may be present in relatively passive play and as it may be in work. The point of emphasis is that regardless of the fact that games of good form may occupy children they are not playing unless they are expressing spontaneity and exhilaration within the rules and in the process of solving the problem constituting the playing of a game.

Why, it may be asked, are spontaneity and exhilaration great essentials of play? Spontaneity is in the best sense, in the belief of the writer, freedom of functioning on the basis of the organism-as-a-whole.

Although conscious effort required in acquiring techniques for the furtherance of a play activity or an art is essential, it is quite different in effect from beginning with the emphasis on the technique before the activity is developed. Learning is too often trying to do what one cannot do rather than doing what once can do and progressing without sacrificing the spontaneity essential to the activity in progress. Striving for excellence in play activity prevents freedom and spontaneity. In striving for excellence, freedom and spontaneity are almost inevitably sacrificed. Interest tends to be centered in self and competition is over emphasized.

Records of play of both primitive and civilized peoples, particularly children, indicate that the simple forms of play, or play patterns, arise spontaneously among all human beings. This is what might be expected since it is a playful use of the natural functioning of the human body in some of its overt aspects. For instance, games confined to such types as throwing, catching, kicking, striking, and the like are overt action patterns that are largely determined by bodily structure. But other types of heavier with more mental, intellectual and emotional content similarly create play patterns. Much of the ritual of primitive people is in general believed to stem from the play impulse.

(b) Happiness

True play is always “happifying.” Play means happiness. It is characterized by feelings of pleasure which tend to break out in laughter. Play, like many other things, is best appreciated by seeing children who were without it. Children without play are not happy. Happiness involves many things even to a child. It means not being afraid, it means not doing things that other people understand and like, and it means knowing one can do things. It should be noted however, that players may not be spontaneous or joyous in the process of learning a complex game or some involved activity.

Happiness means good emotional tone, as surely as good posture means good muscle tone. There is a sense of correct balance and ease, a conscious knowledge that one can adjust to circumstances. That is why a child must play to be normal.

A person can help a child to learn to play some few things till he has learned a way of feeling, an attitude towards doing. It is this inner feeling of play the child must learn. Once a child learns the “spirit of play”, every new situation turns up numberless new associations and abilities.

Another distinctive character of play is its extroversiveness, that is, it frees the player from the sense of self and at the same time projects him psychologically into the play activity. Playful feelings are often said to take one “out of himself” and that play takes the player “into another world”.

Play centers interest outside of self. This ability to create and simultaneously play a role in a play situation is a primitive way of experiencing the delightful feeling of freedom from self. Albert Einstein is quoted as saying; “The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and sense in which he has attained liberation from self”. Observers of children’s play describe the players as being completely free from self and it might be added as “being wholly in their play”.

Play in all its forms is a complete contrast to conventional behavior and legitimizes originality, giving it full release, for play creates its own world. In no other form of activity is the individual so free to indulge in what may be called rough behavior, noise, physical activity, and antics and to largely disregard conventional behavior, all of which fall within the cultural frame of reference. And yet play is not an experience in lawlessness for it has its own social controls, its own code of morals, and its own rules, all of which is voluntarily adhered to for the most part and can be enforced, thus keeping the balance between personal freedom and social cultural demands.

Play is that form of social organization through which original nature is channeled most unhampered, and yet the play patterns of a particular cultural group are not a violation of social customs but rather a preserver of them. Not only is the content to the play in conformity with the fundamental institutions and the ethical morals of the culture but also play requirements are in harmony with the ethics of the group. For instance, children may play family life, shop keeping, funeral, school, etc., patterned in general in line with the institutional customs of the group, but in their play they also display courage, endure pain unflinchingly, respect the rights of others, abide by the rules, all in line with the ethics of their cultural group.

Values in Play

(a) General

It is well to remember that the greatest value of play is enjoyment. In playing, players are merely having fun and should never be made conscious of what it is doing form them. Play develops the capacity to enjoy as well as the resources necessary to enjoyment. When the sub-intellectual portion of man is underdeveloped, we have a kind of social undernourishment. Undernourished children have appetite but when undernourishment is extreme we will call it malnutrition and a child suffering form that has no appetite. A child or person who suffers a social undernourishment lacks resourcefulness and has little means of healthy living.

Play is not only a release of surplus energy as is popularly believed, nor merely a means of amusement, nor an escape from reality. It is the means of organization and development of the physical, emotional, social life, and expression of the social and emotional elements which constitute the basis upon which a healthy, morally stabilized life rests. Play also contributes to sound intellectual achievement.

Play creates happy emotional condition of the organism-as-a-whole. It brings about disciplined emotional development and healthy emotions. Playing children are emotionally released; they run, laugh, and shout without restraint. They express their feelings. When we find ourselves in situations in which we are free to act as our “feelings” prompt, there is no emotional conflict in the functioning of the organism. This is what happens in spontaneous play.

Play involves social values, as does no other behavior. The spirit of play develops social adaptability, ethics, mental and emotional control, and imagination. These are the more complex and adjustments a child learns through play. He learns them not as ends in themselves, not as external goals of conduct toward which he must strive, but he falls into them unconsciously as ways of acting successfully under various play conditions. They become habits of meeting situations happily. Changing a habit does not mean changing a rule or even consciously learning a series of acts. It means only continued adjustments to new situations. In play, there are adjustments to new situations constantly. As the child grows older it will be an adjustment to new mental situations as well as physical and social ones.

Play experience can prepare the person for purposefulness in non-play activities, for true play creates the incentive to use one’s best ability. Through play a person can develop a pattern of self-reliance and self-confidence. This has meaning in the intellectual development of the person. A person able to understand situations is likely to retain this attitude in all situations and to try to understand whatever he undertakes.

Well-chosen play activities have potentially unique value seldom understood or actualized. In the process of play, new powers emerge, such as bodily coordination, and aesthetic sensitivity. New values are experienced by the player, such as new social obligation to contribute to the maintenance of the common project undertaken by play group. Play activities yield immediate satisfaction to the players and the results of the effort are certain.

Play in the sense of function activates and heightens organismic tones and animates the player as he projects himself imaginatively and behaviorally into the activity and helps create the play situation. This is a dual (multiple) process. The experience of creating his role himself as a player while he helps to create the activity gives the person control over himself as a player thus what he, as a player, does or fails to do is his responsibility.

Creating and controlling oneself as a player as one helps to create the activity is in functional patterns, though not in experiential content, identical with acting in the drama, painting a picture, writing a poem, or composing a symphony. Obviously any of these forms of activity may be created with great skill and finish but without the essential function of play.

True play is its own value for the value of play is in play itself. To many persons the various forms of play activities are of equal value whether engaged in by the individual person apart from others, or in cooperative action with others.

The value of any play activity for the individual person depends on many factors:

1. Chronological and mental age, previous play experiences

2. The selection of play activity in relation to the players and the leadership given in the playing of it;

3. The teacher’s personality and relationship to the players;

4. The sincerity, spontaneity, facility and degree of participation of the teacher in the activity.

What the activity does for the particular participator is subordinate in importance to that of the activity itself.

(b) Aesthetics

Play and art use the great essentials-intelligence, imagination, aesthetic feeling, sensitivity, spontaneity, originality, and productivity. The player and the artist create a tangible thing regardless of the fact that it may be composed entirely of intangibles-the song, or game for instance.

The basic factor in true play and true art is aesthetic sensitivity. While the raw material of sensitivity is the same for play and art, the form of expression is different and it would be regrettable were expression limited to play and the expression of the arts neglected in the development of the child.

For the best results in sensitivity in a young child enables him to see the incongruous as funny. Long before he can draw a funny picture, he sees as funny the work of others when he recognizes that the picture is incongruous. He may see as funny his own product, a drawing which began as an aesthetic impulse and failed to correspond with it. Humor may remain covert or find expression in subtle forms of facial expression and other forms of gesture.

It is not unusual for a child of three to evince a sense of humor. Wit, however, if it develops, comes with some facility with language. Humor, when expressed by children, may be frowned upon by adults and may be wholly neglected in the education of children.

(c) Ethics

The various elements, which make up the whole person and his intelligence, are mutually influential. One aspect of education may affect another or the whole. Only as the whole child and youth develops progressively all aspects of personality as they emerge and change is the person educated.

In providing for the growth and development of children and youth in all aspects, physical, mental, social and cultural, there is need to consider the moral education of the individual. Dr. Mather, a Harvard geologist, pointed out the need for ethical consciousness. He said:

If civilization is to be saved from catastrophe, the ethical consciousness of each person must be greatly strengthened, renewed and improved. Natural science discloses the imperative need. Something that transcends natural science must assist men to respond to this challenge.

He went on to say:

The well springs of good lie deep within the spirit of man. The sources of discerning love are in the inner, private life of individuals.[1][1]

Culture grows out of people living and acting together, making rules regarding social relations and defining ways of acting in important matters common among them. But morality requires teaching as a safeguard.

Morality is a matter of consciousness, and conscience is “to know”. Conscience is the consciousness of right and wrong and this consciousness is the center of morality; to judge morality otherwise than as consciousness is defeating. It is only in recent years that the power of consciousness has become commonly accepted and somewhat understood.

Moral values are not specific forms of behavior but emerge in a variety of situations and begin for the infant by his being allowed to act freely and having his action appraised by the parents. Parents who try to develop in their children specific moral values which civilization has wrought out by meticulous guidance and safeguards frustrate the child’s intelligence and his sense of values.

It is safe to assume that all children need discipline in thinking, in social behavior, in conformity to social custom. The formal teaching of social behavior including moral and ethical education by verbal means is inadequate. Cultural education conveyed in verbal form is largely comprised of abstracted elements, which have been made into moral precepts largely prior to experience that might make them meaningful.

Education through the medium of actual social activity develops and gives expression to personal resources and moral normality.

Children may be trained or educated to behave well, even to do so voluntarily. The motive may be to win the approval of others or self-approval. Good behavior, however, too often is given precedence over experiences that develop conscience.

The experience that contributes to conscience is using one’s sense of right in solving every day problems as they arise and profiting by the results. As conscience develops it must be coordinated with maturation and experience in making judgments.

Problem solving involving ethical judgments is a highly productive experience.

It is essential that both parental guidance and correction of the child be conducive to his general position orientation so that he shall gradually desire to do what he understands is right and to abstain from wrong. Possibly this orientation can best be accomplished when the point at issue arises in the process of the child’s happy participation in constructive activity, partly because the situation is conducive to his understanding.

The teaching of social and moral education is due neither to individualized interpersonal influence nor the acquisition of formal behavior, but by everyday social living in various communities more or less successively and concurrently. A blueprint of such communities might be a succession of concentric areas and this brings us to a consideration of the scope of play and something of its value in everyday human life of adults as well as of children and youth.

One should not be confined or hamstrung by superimposed moral principles, but moral principles are essential and are demonstrated in social association and play. The child gradually learns right and wrong, good and bad, in the play situation. In play, there is pleasurable disciplined behavior in moral education. Players get discipline in right and wrong. In the playing of games there is opportunity in the situation that is ripe for correcting.

There is ethical education involved in play activities and play situations. The play patterns of a particular cultural group are preservers of social customs. Not only is the content in conformity with the fundamental institutions of the culture, but the ethical requirements are also in harmony with the ethics of the group. Children play family life, shop keeping, etc., patterned after the culture of the group, but they also exhibit courage, endure pain unflinchingly, respect the rights of others and willingly abide by the agreements made in play. The spirit of play develops social adaptability and child ethics.

Only when ethical behavior and law observance are voluntary is ethical education complete. Not only must the child learn his own primitive ethics but also he must arrive at higher ethics. The curative treatment of a specific aspect of problem behavior carried on in reference to its positive effect on the wholeness of the person can be a form of moral education.

For example, a number of little girls worked out quite a group feeling in “hide and seek”. Cheating fortunately did not begin until they had tasted the pleasure in playing in keeping within the rules of the game. When cheating started the game was so spoiled suddenly and obviously as to bring torrents of indignation, not at the cheating but at the spoiling of the game. The girls soon learned the fun of good ethical sportsmanship, which is higher than the mere obedience to rules. They climbed high enough in social organization to demand perfect impartial justice. They all administered justice, not an abstract justice, but justice with mercy added in a stern and impartial way. It was justice, not a siding with one or two.

Out of the experience of playing games even young children then to formulate rules for behavior. There is the example of the child who wants all the turns. The teacher or play leader does not grant this demand but the child who has prestige among the children may be chosen for desirable roles in excess or exchange of other children. Free to choose their successor for a leading role, they tend to choose the child of prestige. When the leader permits freedom of expression, the children who are not participating members of the monopoly are likely to protest and call out: “It isn’t fair to always choose only your friends.”

This behavior is a long-term demonstration of social justice and ethical moral behavior. Social justice can be imposed if the experience following proves its worth and merit. Even when this proof is not immediately forthcoming and is far removed in time and different circumstances as to be unrecognized by the children as cause and effect, the justice of it may be accepted as fair and reasonable.

Thus through play, the child lives in a community he understands, which he can influence and whose rules he can accept. He learns to adapt himself to a social pattern, sometimes by imitation, but eventually only as he evolves. He experiences happiness and unhappiness – the very reactions that year after year have gone into the making of the ethical social pattern of the world. The child becomes social unconsciously. It comes as real change as the reactions become habitual and not as “New Year’s Resolutions”. He falls into ethical ways unconsciously as ways of acting successfully and as being socially approved under various conditions and situations.

Because true child education, not mere learning, must permit experimentation on the part of both adult and the child, it follows that both will make mistakes, take the consequences, be held [responsible] for changes and for the correction or such amends as are possible. This can be a happy experience or an unhappy one depending on how it is carried out.

One can hardly imagine either an adult or child for whom much of education is not necessarily experimental and if so, it must also allow for mistakes and correction. If this is true, educational methodology must accept experimentation and mistakes as the right of the experimenter. To teach children to refrain from acting until they know the correct way to act is to deny them the right. Action must take place experimentally and the mind kept open for new experimentation.

If schools and other organizations which are in continued association with children create rules to prevent errors, these prevent freedom to experiment and hence to learn precisely what not to do as well as what to do. Were this done, it would take away the child’s responsibility of acting upon his own judgment and taking consequence. Only through the policy of leaving the child free to experiment do children increase their ability to make sound judgment. A child cannot develop self-judgment and conscience unless he has freedom to act experimentally and judge and be judged on the basis of results. Properly educated, the young child will have been held responsible for the consequences of his mistakes in such a way that the will be happy in making reparations when possible.

To condemn, punish a child of any age for his mistakes tends to prevent his satisfaction in self-correction. Punishing a child for wrongdoing is at best a negative from of treatment more likely to invoke fear of wrong action than to help the child to desire and carry out right action. Punishment might serve as a penance and thereby weaken moral courage. Combined with other punitive forms of treatment it may produce fear, hatred, and revenge. At best, children are punished with the intention of improving them or correcting their behavior. Yet the punishment of children almost invariably creates a conflict between punisher and the punished and right doing under authoritative compulsion in making corrections militates against the child’s desire to do right.

Correction of undesirable behavior is best carried on via self-determined action in a coordinated activity by action, which permits the child to formulate moral judgments and conclusions. One is perfectly safe in saying that children like to do right and even be made to do right when they are unable to make themselves do so but they must know that it is right. If the adult has in mind building up the child’s conscience and integrity to follow his own judgments he will, with love in his heart, help the child make his own judgments, work out reparations and correct his misconceptions or mistakes. The child can be held responsible for much of his behavior and denied common privileges when he violates the right to these, and they should be taken away or the child should be helped to correct his behavior.

Uncovering a child’s shortcomings and mistakes openly or covertly is likely to impress them in his consciousness even thought they cease to function openly, and may cause him to fear their return. For instance, when a child steals cookies he does so secretly and feels he is doing wrong. It is possible that his parents would be satisfied were he to cease stealing cookies and might punish him to effect the reform. Fear of punishment may have deterred his stealing cookies in the home, but not in a store or elsewhere. When the parents merely stop the child’s stealing in instances as they occur, they may be aiming at curing the child’s propensity to steal. They may have impressed in his consciousness the blameworthiness of his stealing behavior and possibly the fear of punishment in the home that it may build up resistance to stealing at some future time.

The making of a decision on the part of child may involve prestige. It may even so be made on the basis of right and wrong. Since so much pressure is brought to bear for the wrong action it would seem only fair to bring pressure for the right action.

For example, May and Janet had carried their playthings out of doors and played with them together. Janet later refused to help May carry their playthings into the house. The aunt of the children brought pressure for what she was reasonably sure Janet knew was the right action. She said to Janet, as follows:

“You helped bring out the playthings and you played with them. Don’t you think it is right for you to help put them away?”

“Yes, but I won’t.” Janet replied. The aunt then said, “I have found we all have to do what is right no matter how big or little we are.”

“I know, but I won’t.” was Janet’s response.

Janet’s father chanced to hear the last emphatic “I won’t” and was about to initiate and intervene authoritatively, but was quietly checked by the aunt who said, “Janet and I are working this out.”

Gently but firmly and repeatedly the aunt insisted that we all have to do what is right. Gradually, the child’s “I won’t” grew weaker and finally she dashed off to help May, not only to carry in the playthings but afterwards to help clean up the scraps of paper with which they had earlier littered the floor of the playroom.

To expect a child or adult with a past of deviant behavior patterns to transform verbally presented dictum [sic] of social conformity is questionable methodology in either education or reeducation; both must be achieved primarily by the child’s own social behavior. That social behavior must eventually give him sufficient satisfaction to orient him toward socially acceptable behavior and away from the specific deviant behavior. This change may occur in the unconscious but further advance experientially should bring the specific conflict of the deviant and correlative non-deviant behavior into conflict consciously. If, in the reeducation of the particular behavior the moral judgment rejecting the deviant and accepting its non-deviant counterpart as a preferential basis for action becomes an adhered to conceptual principle, the reeducation can be regarded as complete.

How the implications of a misdemeanor of which the person at fault is unconscious can be handled without his being identified with the misdemeanor involved is illustrated by the following incident. Compare the procedure with punishment as an alternative and one must note the difference in education value between either punishment or penance.

A ten-year-old boy who lived with his grandmother entered into an agreement with her that he would not go to a motion picture show without her consent. He confessed he had violated the agreement and apparently assumed that since he had confessed there was nothing further required of him. He had gone to a movie in the afternoon session of school and thus had missed a half-day of schoolwork. His grandmother called this fact to his attention. When he proposed that he stay after school to make up the work his grandmother asked if the teacher too had gone the movies. The boy deliberated and then suggested that since the teacher had to be in the classroom a quarter to nine in the morning, she might be willing to let him come early every day until he had made up the time he missed.

Conditioning

a) Positive Experience

Conditioning may be said to be healthy and normal. It is a normal aspect of organism-as-a-whole functioning. At any rate it is a fact, and advantageous in many phases of learning. It is not considered abnormal that poetry expressed in a song is more easily learned than without a song. The words of a poem set to music and sung by the learner may be recalled by him by hearing the tune. A new language is readily acquired by a child in connection with events that make it meaningful with other children who speak the language freely and coincidentally along with action, an event or situation which reveals the meaning. Lines learned in the drama are more easily learned and better retained if learned in the process of meaningful action than when they are committed to memory first and later combined with the action. Directors of the drama who take advantage of conditionality have their actors in the early stages of rehearsal read their lines along with the relevant movements and only after the integration of the spoken words and the movements takes place are the actors required to “bone down” and learn their lines. Getting into the action of the drama will bring the lines to the memory of the actor just as when unable to recall the lines of the poem the tune of the song will recall the words.

The teacher or leader who wisely included the emotional condition of the children in teaching or leading activities and creates a happy atmosphere is taking advantage of this normal conditionality. Happy associations are an advantage only when unhappy or deviant emotionality takes over and influences behavior unconsciously, [when they] divert or block normal functioning, they are harmful.

The past is highly significant as affecting the behavior of the organism-as-a-whole in which emotionality affects fixations and plays other tricks in the nervous system that divert and side track the reaction of the nervous system. How to unfix these fixations in human organisms in important.

Emotional blockages may be crated quite simply. When high emotionality occurs in conjunction with an event in the life of an individual, a recurrence of the event may be accompanied by emotionality similar to that formerly occurring in conjunction with the event. When the emotionality is so powerful that it dominates the nervous system it diverts the nervous current from completing the initial current and may continue to do so whenever the accompanying event recurs or even when it is only recalled imaginatively in memory. For example, a first grade child who was reprimanded for her inability to solve a mathematical problem. Although grown to adulthood and able to solve mathematical problems with ease, she experiences “feelings of terror and misery” whenever she uses mathematical symbols.

(b) Negative Experience

An unfortunate tradition prevails in many homes and schools that right doing is and should be painful or at least unpleasant. Tasks arising in the routine of everyday life in the home are administered by the parent with negative implication either in the form of arbitrary demands, or on the assumption that such tasks are disagreeable to the child.

In the school, children are punished by doing schoolwork, so-called recitations and examinations to tests, by tradition rather than by the teacher’s initiation, but too often followed nevertheless. It becomes something of a contest with the teacher trying to “catch” the child and the child fearing the possibility of making a mistake and being punished. Equally unfortunate is the child who attain a place on the honor roll as a reward for doing the best work, maybe not the best of which he is capable, which is what he should be expected to do. Such rewards tend to destroy the child’s enjoyment of good work.

Another unfortunate tradition prevails in many homes and schools in many areas of endeavor that learning “the right way” should be painful, and is good education although this would not possibly be admitted either by parents of the school. In a well-meaning school for the education of workers with youth organizations a slogan ran, “Do the hard right instead of the easy wrong.” Right doing is quite generally held to be hard.

Children are quite generally punished for misdemeanors rather than being disciplined for the purpose of prevention as well as correction. Correction of a misdemeanor can in general rightly be a happy experience if not in the total process at least in the end results, or at least be accepted either immediately or in retrospect as just and fair by the offender. It us unfortunate that too often not the justice but the harshness by which it was administered is remembered.

This does not call for shaping education for the individual on the basis of his failure to meet the requirements of the norm by treating his specific problem in itself as an entity but rather, by treating him as a dynamic unity capable in some degree of a positive build up development, however limited that development may be.

Play and Behavior Change

In the whole field of social work and that of education as well, there is urgent need of facts regarding the function of play and recreation in the education and reeducation of children, adolescents and adults. Experience with directed play applied in a wide field and covering a long period of years indicated that it has therapeutic values. More or less permanent changes are known to have been wrought in persons through [sic] play activities in school children, normal and subnormal, hospitalized children, in youth, mentally ill youth and adults. However, in spite of observations of the curative effects of play out of which the term “recreational therapy” has emerged, the therapeutic value must remain controversial until research supports its claims and application to the treatment of abnormal behavior must remain sporadic until accurate methodology has been established. Nevertheless, there are sufficient facts to prove the value of play to indicate that institutions caring for delinquent children, hospitals for children and adults especially those caring for mental patients should include play in their treatment program.

While play is of great value in institutions concerned with the treatment of problem and anti-social behavior, or deviant behavior it is also a value in bringing about behavior change in all children, youth and adults afflicted with personality problems. Play, particularly the playing of organized games, has proven to be a dynamic process at once correctional, disciplinary, and developmental. Since all true play is extroversive it involves expressive heavier in the players and therefore tends to prevent or remove blockages and in one process provides a counterpart of the blockage.

In organized play or social groups especially those of children and adolescent youth, many individual personality problems are revealed and resolved. Due to neglect and to various harmful past experience, fixations or blockages which lie buried in the child’s unconscious are likely to be released in play and revealed to the observer. An individual’s problem may possibly be revealed through it may be resolved without becoming obvious to the child.

Many individual children are helped out of some distressing condition by play. Play may result in a release of the blockages by replacing them, the child developing out of them, or by outgrowing them.

Problems may be solved better incidentally by a good program of play activities without intention to do so and possibly without awareness of the existence of such problems either by the playing group, or its leader, or the youth with problems himself.

This is a far cry from probing into the personal life in search for problem behavior, and then providing conditions to its overt unrestrained expression, or in attempting to change the problem heavier by punitive reprisals. Froe example, there is Wally, physically handicapped, who changed his anti-social behavior after having a play experience in dramatics. He later reprimanded the participants who behaved as he had previously.

Another example of behavior change through play activities is that of a young woman who, as a child received undue notice from adults as “cute” and became a “show off.” In a dramatic role there were difficulties in trying to get her to act in character in the role to which she was assigned in the play. Cooperation from the rest of the cast helped in this effort. Subsequently she did act in character and became very critical of a member who had the same difficulty she had previously.

While providing the individual with the kind of play experience that will correct faulty or problem behavior and compensate for the results of neglect or misadventure, guiding play experience of children or youth with problems is not psychiatric treatment. Disciplined by play activity, perhaps a game, which is free and unregimented, the unconscious is released in play and its deviant overt aspects are subjected to the social judgment of the other players which may or may not bring it to the consciousness of the child or youth in question, or it may be released and dissolved unconsciously in the healthy impersonal activity. Experience has shown such release and re-education to result in widespread and far reaching changes in both the so-called normal children and adults, in subnormal children and pathological adults as well.

The fact that a child may become conscious that he had in the past been guilty of bad behavior but now was not so, is different from the worker identifying him with such behavior at the time of its evidence. It is far better for the child to look back on his bad behavior after having overcome it. He is more apt to rejoice in his correcting and changing than in regretting the past and feeling guilty about it. Play tends to take the manifest and potential person forward not merely to correct his deviance.

Both work and play can be used therapeutically. In both work and play, the emotional satisfaction and the overt results achieved in each reinforce each other. In play, the player proves to himself and others what he can do. However, the play must be within his manifest ability and potentialities and also commensurate with his maturity. [GS4] [GS4]It might be expected that changes in the form of both kinds of activities, work and play, would be required to stimulate progress on the one hand, and to keep interest and satisfaction alive on the other. In mental illness as in normal health, work and play constitute two sources of satisfaction for both emotional and overt results.

Problem behavior falls into types and is related to age categories. Young children frequently reveal symptoms of problem behavior, such as too great dependency on eating, thumb sucking, use of pacifiers, etc. Rational development detracts from too great dependency on these habits. Various forms of play are conducive to lessening this type of dependence. Children to not suck their thumbs while listening to stories. Story listening is extroversive while thumb sucking is introversive.

Another type of problem behavior frequently encountered in play activities of children, youth and adults is that of self-reference, showing off, of the egotistic individual. Players with normal development and social experience progress in depth and expansion through both repetition and variety of play activities with freedom and order. Also what may be called personality or character attributes become increasingly stabilized in play. Bright children need not be made conscious of their mental superiority. Left alone, children in both family and school accept difference in various abilities without either self-aggrandizement of the bright or the self-depreciation of the less qualified. Brightness, dullness, or the slowness in children may show in either physical or mental behavior or in both but in any case, identifying a child with his brightness or dullness turns his thoughts to self and thereby narrows the scope of his outlook. No parent needs to fear to share accomplishments of either the bright or dull child when attention is centered in the achievement and not in self. Children so oriented or educated are prepared to find interest in one another’s achievements and in later childhood to give one another encouragement.

A young child whose parents induce him to “show-off” his “tricks” may be so taken over by the “show-off” pattern of behavior that he is never able to establish the organism-as-a-whole spontaneity or, if so, only with wise treatment of an adult an in association with other children whose behavior patters are spontaneous and free from exhibitionism.

Calling a child a “show-off” may prevent overt expression of exhibitionism but it will not help him in freeing himself from it nor in acquiring the organism-as-a-whole pattern. This latter pattern is an essential power in education.

Exhibitionism, even for a person of any age who has sufficiently established spontaneous organism-as-a-whole behavior patterns is likely to cause a person to try under this pressure to copy the pattern previously experienced. This too is an obstacle to the greater permanency of the desirable organism-as-a-whole behavior pattern.

Egoism, or “self-reference” often has its beginnings in early childhood by being encouraged to “show off” special talents and accomplishments. High grades and the honor roll in school made over-important, or in fact, any form of excellence given self-reference may contribute to egoism. An egotistic person finds difficulty in getting into play activities imaginatively. This difficulty in getting into active participation in social activities is particularly apparent in dramatics when he is required to “get into character”.

In attempting to re-educate the egoist child, games played happily by boys and girls of approximately similar age would possibly make the best beginning. Children can be freed from self-reference by playing games with other children. Children respond negatively to self-reference of another even though they may do so unconsciously. While in true play children almost invariably share in the joy of another who has made a good play, they are unlikely to accord similar goodwill to a “show-off”. No doubt any achievement that was evoked by wholehearted effort and unselfish purpose would go far in freeing a person from self-reference and receive the acclamation of the other children. While games are likely to be a good beginning in the freeing of children from self-reference, dramatization of stories and other forms of dramatic play would also be desirable, even though this more advanced play might require varied experience over a period of time.[GS5] [GS5]

The problem of re-educating the adolescent or adult egoist is likely to be far more difficult than that of a child. In either case, egoism is somewhat or wholly unconscious. A child can be developed out of it without being made conscious of it. This is wholly desirable. But the adult may require both treatment in the unconscious as well as in the conscious.

The egoist is often a person who excels in many activities and as a result is reluctant to undertake anything that portends less than that for him. This makes his re-education difficult. He interprets and justifies egoism as excellence and therefore clings to it.

It was observed that a person addicted to egoism had aspirations in the field of dramatics. She was assigned a leading role in a good play but it was discovered she could not get into character. Through the great skill of the director and with continued effort she ultimately not only got into character but also did excellent acting. The praise of a small select audience was overwhelming. An appeal was made for a repeat performance for a specially invited audience for the next night. This time the person in question was unable to get into character for she tried to imitate[GS6] [GS6] the acting she had done the night before. Apparently the high praise had no doubt given rise and vitality again to her egoism and the strange audience added to the result.[GS7] [GS7] What she needed was to act for a small group of sympathetic classmates in various plays over a long period of time until she overcame her self-reference and egoism and became master of her roles in the plays.

It is quite possible that sports might help in the re-education of a confirmed egoist, although it is not helpful to him to have his egoism verbally uncovered by other persons, rather this knowledge should come to his consciousness, if it does, in the process of re-education as he participates in the activities.

The egoist must always top another person’s account of an event by some form of self-reference. He may check himself by hearing this practice condemned or continue either consciously or unconsciously. Whatever the form of extreme egoism, it narrows down the outlook of its victim and limits creative experience that is the essence of play. When one’s motivation of a kind act to another, or other form of praise-worthy behavior is the reflective good to one’s self, it creates or is self-interest, self-reference.

Problem Behavior

There is urgent need for knowledge and education that equips teachers and all workers with children and youth to prevent problem behavior and/or treat it in its earliest appearance and stages. Many forms of behavior, which allowed to go on, would be likely to become increasingly serious can be changed unconsciously in both children and adults.

The term “build-up” best expresses the most effective treatment of some forms of problem behavior, in fact treatment of many forms. That is, the child is to be nurtured as a whole by a variety of developmental, correctional experiences, in the wholeness of character. Education suffers from the failure to equip teachers and workers with children to educate and work with the whole child, for the child will behave as whole since nature made him a dynamic while and therefore he must be educated as a whole. If teachers continue to be equipped for only the mental or academic education of the child and yet be held responsible for the child’s social and moral character, the whole of education suffers and the children with behavior problems will continue to be cases for psychiatrists, psychologists, judges, correctional schools and institutions and similar piecemeal forms of treatment to be dealt with.

It should be remembered that problem behavior of a serious nature in children and often in adults frequently is “outgrown”. Children and adults frequently grow out of problem behavior, just as the body renews itself. The term “out-grown” is used advisedly for only change in the inner life of the person is truly curative and corrective. When play activities are coordinated with the readiness of potentialities in children, correction and “out-grown” is brought about positively by the process of the actualization of potentialities.

Unwholesome habits, emotional blocks, abnormal conditions and other problems are “out-grown”, resolved in stimulating progress in healthy development and the process of play without the person himself even being conscious of his own problem. Play rightly used may be positive therapy administered without the subject’s being conscious of his abnormality or misdemeanor.

In re-education the deviant may be unaware or not conscious of his particular deviance. However, it may be brought to consciousness by various experiences and by understanding others and self.

Activity opens the way for growth and corrective experience. Condemning himself is killing the source of correction while condemning the action or particular behavior opens the way for its correction.

In re-education of the deviant it is important that there be a policy of keeping the recipient of treatment from becoming cognizant that he is undergoing treatment and abstaining from revealing this to him later. When deviant behavior is analyzed in an effort to make reparations or correction the offender’s attention is centered not in himself but in the offense or deviance and what to do about it himself. Punishment imposed by not matter whom likewise centers attention in the offender and contributes nothing towards the solution of the problem.

In the building up of severely deviant or underdeveloped persons, the less their deviance is verbally interrupted to them, the less they are conscious of what is occurring in the process of correction, the healthier the experience will be. It is quite possible and would seem to be a healthy completion of the experience for the person to retrospectively become cognizant of the benefit he has derived.

However, for another person to attempt to recall this experience to the person might make him resentful of being or having been manipulated for that determining tactics have been used by another. This is not to imply his observation of similar deviance in another might not make him retrospectively conscious of his own past deviance. This might occur subjectively or unconsciously through his own maturation and growth and/or insight, hindsight, or analogously through knowledge gained from fiction or other literature, or through other sources, rather than by verbalizes uncovering of his deviance by another person. Much harm can be done by such uncovering of past errors or problem behavior. In either case the person may condemn himself, and/or resent the person who makes him conscious of his past, or, like Jacob, he may be lifted above the past, and seeing the whole experience in a new light be freed from it. Possibly such an experience may be the stuff of which Jacob’s ladder was made.

The policy of building up or developing the whole person and providing situations and conditions conducive to strengthen the particular weakness and/or undermining deviance by positive experience results in change coming positively not negatively. In other words, to work for a positive build-up in a person with attention to specific weakness and/or deviance is suggested as the method to bring about behavior change.

In working to bring about a behavior change, we are building up not alone the person’s conception of himself, but what we want him to become. Acting upon the knowledge we have the dynamic organism-environment relationship and the dynamic organism-as-a-whole function of the individual, we do not need to know what precise condition is blocking the individual or causing the problem behavior for we are free to control and experiment to a considerable degree by controlling the environment. But so long as experimentation is based on static conceptions of these dynamic facts: that the organism environment relations are a two-way dynamic process, and that the individual functions dynamically as a whole, environment will inevitably be conceived as static and its potential as an activating agent will continue to be bypassed in the schools, in the treatment of problem behavior, and in the treatment of the mentally ill and mentally defective.

There are many factors involved in bringing about change in behavior. Changes in behavior may be so small or the problem so resistant that only perseverance and consistency will bring about a significant change.

Not only curricular activities and the actualization of potential but the dynamic character of consciousness in an adult taking a dominant role and position of authority in continued association with the same children will bring about change. Under this condition, children have day-by-day experience and responsibility in making judgments and maintaining justice under happifying conditions. It is the continuum by which repeated experiences become established as genuine characteristics. A teacher may personally get good response without changing a child’s character. She may personally influence a child and change his behavior overtly but it may not have reformed him. It is possible to educate children to deal with deviance as it occurs in school or in a playgroup in such a way that right and wrong behavior is brought into sharp contrast in consciousness. Such education or experience should develop conscience in the individual and social responsibility inn the group.

The social group can be a factor in bringing about change to desirable behavior. Schools, children’s hospitals and other agencies have proven that organized programs and well-selected play activities have been both preventive and corrective of deviant behavior in children. Lawlessness in children can best be corrected in social group activities.

In the association and the social activities of a group spontaneous and gradual build-up of new powers, resources and new attitudes occur. This is one of the unique values of an integrated group such as a club. In such a group, evaluation of the undesirable behavior character trait or other by either the group or an individual member, or even an individual in authority, may be motivated by friendly desire to help the offender, or it can be an unfriendly condemnation of him. When the motivation of the group is marked by friendliness to the offender and by negative appraisal of the offense or behavior, reformation is likely to be undertaken as a matter of course by the offender himself. This treatment, if gradual enough, tends to induce conformity and prevent conflict and can go far in bring about behavior change in the offender.

When youth incapable of contributing to a group are accepted as members with full rights and privileges they are thereafter encouraged to actually fulfill the requirements for such membership. The experience of being borne up and carried along by the momentum of a fairly large organized social group can be a great power in building up the deviant individual until his deviance is modified. When this comes without his having been made conscious of his deviance it can be a sort of face-saving therapy.

On the other hand, conflict created in the consciousness of the deviant individual by his experience in the group, without the verbal analysis imposed by others, may also be face-saving. When conflict in the consciousness of the deviant is allowed to incubate and develop at its own rate, it tends to force or push between his deviance and the developing build-up.

There is an important difference, therefore, between holding the offender responsible for the overt deviance and discussing it as an infraction of rules inherent in the activity, as against condemnation of the person. The bringing of such personal problems into the open by others can create self-condemnation, shame and/or resentment towards the other members of the group and discourage effort towards reform, behavior change, and the working out of his own problem.

A person tied into his club is subject to continuous influence by the group. In association with others in social activities the deviant is free and more open to influence than he is when under examination or treatment in a clinic. In his club he assimilates according to his total condition, attitude, feeling, sand identifies with what in the group is to him good. It is possible for the person who creates his own problems of behavior to work them out or to work out of them. Right desire can be a powerful influence for reform. To attempt to get such by precept or even by “talking it over”, is to defeat the higher purpose of working out the whole problem incident to being a young human being with deviant behavior.

Negative Influences in Play

While the values in play are many and play activities and the experiences therein are essential in the growth and development of children, play does not always bring good results. This is due to the fact that certain elements may enter which tend to negate the values in play. There is a kind of play that separates, sets us in conflict with each other in contrast to play that draws us together.

An overemphasis on winning defeats other possible values in play. Winning school children’s teams playing baseball have been beaten up by the losing team. In such cases winning has been overemphasized. Play is killed and then effort is often made to get back what was killed by authoritarian treatment or by preaching sportsmanship.

Stress put upon the structure and technique of a play activity by the play leader or teacher tends to prevent the release of organic elements essential to creativity and expression of any kind.

Extolling a child who has shown great ability or achievement, who left alone, might evoke emulation of his achievement, may create jealousy instead and make him a “show-off” as well. Thus the values in the play activity are destroyed for both his peers and the child himself. Giving a child praise or special privilege may evoke resentment towards him in others. Furthermore, this has importance in the development of intelligence for when one is being made the object of special attention; one is being distracted from the purpose of the situation to which he purports to be giving all his attention and effort.[GS8] [GS8]

The tendency of the adult to try to induce the child to copy particular personal characteristics or the character att