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"The Intelligence of Play" has been a unifying theme for Touch the Future for many years. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) released a new report entitled The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds.
http://www.aap.org/stress
The AAP states: "Play is essential to development as it contributes to the cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being of children and youth"; and |
Play is so important to optimal child development that it has been recognized by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights as a right of every child. This birthright is challenged by forces including child labor and exploitation practices, war and neighborhood violence, and the limited resources available to children living in poverty (p.2); and
Play is important to healthy brain development. (p.3;).and
Ideally, much of play involves adults… (p3)
Quite simply, play offers parents a wonderful opportunity to engage fully with their children (p.4).
Most assume that play is what you do when the important things in life are done, reading readiness, math skill and positive discipline for example. Play is recess, entertainment. Educators, parents and therefore children are under tremendous pressure. There's no time for goofing around.
There is another view, a deeper perspective.
(What follows is a brief passage from a personal interview with Joseph Chilton Pearce on The Intelligence of Play. Please download the full transcript. It's fabulous. mm)
 You can't have real learning with a child unless they are playing. Real playing is how real learning takes place. You can have conditioning and a Pavlovian conditioning of his dogs, or behaviors modifications through other means which we look on as very serious, and we generally call learning, but it's not learning. It's conditioning.
Real learning takes place by what Maria Montesorri would call the absorbent mind of the child. Simply absorbing their universe, absorbing it, becoming it, and they do this through play. Play can be the most serious undertaking of a child's life. It is the most serious undertaking. They are completely entrained in play. Mind, the three parts of the mind; thought, feeling, action, the body, every aspect of the child's self entrained solely focuses totally on the activity of absorbing their world. Absorbing their environment. It is the most serious active to their life because they're literally building their construction of knowledge of the world, of themselves, of the relationship between the two and laying down all the foundations for the later forms of intelligence.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
I was introduced to the importance of play, not by a preschool teacher or pediatrician, but by David Bohm, a world class scientist, by Ashley Montagu, the author of over fifty books on human development and by Joseph Chilton Pearce, whose collected works encourage us to play with the boundaries that define our lives.
Bohm described how a "free play of the mind" was essential for true science. He and philosopher J. Krishnamurti observed that the mind however was rarely free. They distinguished between thought, the daily chatter of the mind, which they described as a conditioned reflex, and insight-intelligence. A preoccupied mind is not capable of true observation or inquiry. The mind must be free from its own conditioning if it is to truly see. The goal of many spiritual practices is to empty or free the mind of its conditioning so that mind can reflect true intelligence. Bohm's "free play of the mind" gives new meaning to Einstein's famous statement that "imagination is more important than knowledge.
In his book "Growing Young," Ashley Montagu, describes how this free play of the body and mind is woven into our biology. Biologically we are never intended to grow into the dull, conditioned, petty, prejudice, miserable adults many become. We are designed by nature to retain our playful, childlike countenance lifelong.
In our book, Magical Parent - Magical Child, Joseph Chilton Pearce and I suggest that parenting and education, in there highest forms, are expressions of true play. Play in this regard is not a game or even an activity. Play is a "state" of body and mind free from the boundaries, limitations and categories imposed by cultural conditioning.
A clown puts on a big red nose to indicate that he or she is free to experience and express life outside "the box." We don't need make-up or baggy pants to be free, passionate and rational. Each of us can begin by observing carefully the way our body and minds are held in predictable, repetitive patterns. Then turn to the children and watch with wonder how their innate curiosity, flexibility, humor, trust, feeling of place and belonging keep them free and how hard we try to stuff them back in the box.
Please download the full transcript of the interview.
We will be adding new material on the Intelligence of Play.
Coming Soon, Stuart Brown, MD, on play in nature, its role in human development and its relationship to violence.
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