Sunday June 30, 2002

Play All The Way

This spring I overheard a tremendous conversation among students regarding their friends who attend conventional public and private schools, and some of the comments they make about Fairhaven School. Among the remarks: “You don’t have to do anything there”, “No tests and no grades, how can you learn anything” and “Fairhaven’s a school for dummies” (note: one of these quotes came from a child who is now attending Fairhaven).

However, one of my favorite observations was, “I heard all you do is play VIDEO GAMES all day!” to which our bright young student replied “That’s right!”

Video games made their first appearance at Fairhaven early in the 1998-99 school year, when an older student brought in a Playstation and a Tomb Raider CD. The resulting spectacle of approximately twelve male students piled around a small television, each one simultaneously informing the operator the correct way to negotiate the level, was a singular sight. Beginning in January, Nintendo N64 systems began making their way to school with increasing regularity, and by the end of the school year, video games had become the social activity of choice for much of the Fairhaven culture.

The popularity of video games at Fairhaven at year’s end, while not particularly surprising, has been ironic. At admissions interviews and Talkabouts, the subject of video games at school had become well known as a “button-pusher” for many parents prior to Fairhaven’s opening in September 1998. In fact, the development of video gaming as a hot topic in our society has grown in step with the popularity of the medium over the last 20 years.

Critics have long singled out video games as a destructive element in our society, blaming them for everything from epileptic seizures to the collapse of the nuclear family. The debate in our culture over the value of video gaming has been rather one-sided, with the proponents silently voting with their (and their parents) pocketbooks.

While cases will certainly continue to be made as to the relative merits of video games, there is really only one reason why Fairhaven is a school in which students can play them: That children are experts at knowing what they need to do, and the best thing the rest of us can do is to get out of the way.

So, what needs do children have that video games provide for? Well, they’re the experts, so the rest of us will just have to speculate:

Need For Play

Children instinctively need to play long and hard; depriving them of that play is harmful. Our society is producing a generation of workaholic children. By abruptly pulling them out of the sandbox at age four or five and shoving them in a classroom, we are depriving them of noisy and soulful play that they cannot grow up without.

While the benefits of forcing children at an ever-younger age into a regimented classroom environment are debated by researchers, the drawbacks are clear: our culture’s obsession with putting children to work not only robs kids of their imagination and creativity, but defers their development into adults.

Much of what takes place at Fairhaven every day is play; play that includes, but is not limited to, video games. The world of child’s play, which may seem to adults to be purposeless, is a complex world of fantasy and imagination. The freedom of all-day play at a Sudbury School provides an environment designed to promote the intense stimulation and rapid development of the high level of imagination and creativity that today’s child will need to succeed.

Much of the play that is lost when we force a child to sit down and shut up is not gone; it’s merely deferred. The play-deprived child may excel in a highly structured primary/secondary school, but is likely to need to catch up on her playing in college and/or her entry into the workforce. One former Sudbury Valley School student spoke of being shocked, upon entering college, by the sheer amount of constant “partying” by her classmates, and how they did not seem fully prepared to get down to the business of learning.

Need to Mix It Up

Children today need much more of an opportunity to develop and master complex social skills at a younger age. In their book, Raising Cain - Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, Dan Kindlon, Ph.D., and Michael Thompson, Ph.D. point to the rapid escalation of violence in our country’s schools, and conclude, quite simply, that the children, and most notably, the boys of our society are “emotionally (and socially) illiterate”.

By segregating students by grade, separating them into classes, and inserting them into an environment where practically the only real social interaction takes place for thirty minutes a day on the playground, the proponents of conventional schooling have made it clear that the social and emotional development of our students is far less important than intellectual development.

This preempting of social development is increasing the social intelligence gap in our culture, resulting in legions of youth ill-equipped to exist with others.

All-day every-day play at Fairhaven gives children the opportunity to test themselves and others socially, to “try on” different ways of behaving and relating, and to develop a finely tuned awareness of their own feelings and the feelings of others.

Video games, which are primarily a group activity at Fairhaven, has given students exposure to myriad social dynamics: the benefits of group play vs. solo play, adept vs. beginning players, the rights of the individual vs. the community.

One such complex situation encountered by gamers this year reads like a case study: One day a younger student who owned the Nintendo he and other students played with on the school television every day decided he was tired of multiple-player games and wanted instead to concentrate on single-player games. A group of older students, who possessed a Playstation and a small television, retaliated by reserving the room with the school television the entire day (one hour each student - perfectly legal), and then “allowed” the Nintendo owner to use their Playstation on the school television in exchange for them using his Nintendo on their small TV (under the threat that they would monopolize the school TV and not allow the Nintendo owner to play anything). Finally the Nintendo owner tired of the perceived extortion and ceased bringing the Nintendo to school, ending the situation.

Whew!

Need to Be Thine Own Master

Children cannot learn to be enterprising, self-starting entrepreneurs when it comes to work, if we don’t allow them to be enterprising, self-starting entrepreneurs when it comes to play.

We stand at a point in our society’s evolution where the type of people needed to lead and drive our culture are highly independent and imaginative visionaries. The problem is, our country’s system of conventional schools was not set up to produce highly independent and imaginative visionaries. Our educational system was set up, shortly before the turn of the century, to produce technically competent conformists to work in the thousands of factories that were springing up at the dawning of the Industrial Revolution.

Over the past half-century, our society has changed from one that values unthinking, machine-like factory workers to one that values vivacious and inquisitive professionals. In an attempt to keep up, the core curriculum of conventional schools has evolved, somewhat, into a survey of humanities and sciences; however, schools’ fundamental approach of external discipline and coercion has not evolved with it.

We cannot expect our children to go through fourteen years of being externally motivated and externally disciplined, and then, upon entering the college or the workforce, magically become internally motivated and internally disciplined.

At Fairhaven School, we believe that the most important thing a child can learn is to be a self-starter, and that the best way for a child to learn to be a self-starter is to be a self-starter all the time, whether it’s work, or play, or in-between.

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