Maria Montessori speaks of the child coming into the world as an absorbent mind, ready to expand out and embrace the universe within them, these genetically inherited capacities. If the world damages them, if they're not given the safe space but are damaged or traumatized, they close up into a tight defense against a world they can't trust. So you're going to get an entirely different structure of knowledge of a world, a much impaired neural development and an impaired interactive ability, the child will not be able to interact with his world because they will be defending themselves against it all the time, against a world they can't trust. Organized play such as teams against other teams or competing against other teams crop up somewhere around 11. There's no doubt of that. If you just watch as the child before that period will be playing other forms of group activity, but not competitive. The competition comes in around 11 or 12 as a pre-puberty and puberty form of activity. You can't keep children from that period, from grouping together in some form of competitive activity. They'll create their own sports.

Now to take a highly stylized, rigid specific form of action in which winning and losing is everything, everything, in which sensor plays a heavy role, in which error dogs the child at every single breath and put it into that period and say this is going to make them part of a social team is ridiculous. They will end up largely crippled in their ability to cohere as part of a social group because it's wrong with possible error, possible failure on every hand. And competition, as any organized sport is like that, it's always competition. One competing against the other. At this stage is completely out of keeping, it's inappropriate to the stage of development itself. A child only their own, naturally, will never play in that fashion. That isn't play again. When the minute we come in with organized sports, with adults calling the shots, the rules and regulations, doing all the training of the kids and all, you have conditioning. You don't have models. The adult is not modeling. The child is not following the adult model. The adult is conditioning the child in certain forms of behavior. And so from that kind of intervention or interference, the natural intelligence of socialization in its first form is not going to unfold. 

MM: Competition implies winning and losing and losing isn’t safe. By this definition competitive activity, and that means sports, isn’t real play.

J: there simply were no games of that nature in the 7 to 11 period. The play we did was let's pretend, let's pretend this, let's pretend that, playing cowboy and Indian, or any of these games, or war, whatever the games were we were playing, which were group activities, but always this let's pretend inside, projecting it on the external world.

Organized play such as teams against other teams or competing against other teams crop up somewhere around 11. There's no doubt of that. If you just watch as the child before that period will be playing other forms of group activity, but not competitive. The competition comes in around 11 or 12 as a pre-puberty and puberty form of activity. You can't keep children from that period, from grouping together in some form of competitive activity. They'll create their own sports. You'll find it in very primitive societies, what we think of as pre-liberate societies. The children of that age began to divide off and compete. Before that they don't because it plays no part in the natural agenda of building their world structure. And around 11 or 12 it's going to start and play more and more of a role because you're moving up into the whole gene pool activity of competition, your males, the winner and the hierarchy of losers that forms around them. That's a natural part of the system. But if you try to impose that prematurely, then you're acting very inappropriately to the whole development of the child.

MM: So it is quite natural for young people to organize themselves, band together in groups and make up rules. I remember the neighborhood pick-up games. But now that is all gone. Now the adults do all the organizing.

J: But when we moved in, first of all on that play period of the sandlot baseball, sandlot football, and so on and so forth with adults and organized it in little leagues, then of course we upset the entire purpose of it with children. We just would spontaneously get together, spontaneously form sides, spontaneously compete, form their own rules and regulations. Only by forming their own rules can you have a game. A game is simply acting out the boundaries set by rules, unless the rules are agreed upon, then they're no boundaries for the game, there can be no game. And young people work all that out on their own. It's allowed. And that's the critical part. Now you're getting very specific in your socialization. It's very generic from 7 to 11. Now it becomes extremely specific. We're going to even hammer out our rules and regulations for getting along together in this competitive period we're going through. So you take adults and they come in there and they make all those rules and regulations. They do the setting up of the teams and so on, you've literally wronged from the young person, their capacity to spontaneously form more specific rules regulated social structures. 

But then two more things happen. You take that very same idea on the part of the adult and impose it on the 7 to 11 year old child, in the operational stage, when they're in their generic global social stage, you're going to impose this much later stage on them from an adult standpoint. So now they're doubly damned in effect. Then you, the final part of it is, that the adult, they're actual role models, coach that you're counting on, who's become father in affect, becomes the seven million dollar a year professional t.v. player. They've become the model. So you've abstracted out of any concrete reality an almost impossible to obtain kind of a superior non-real kind of a model and that then begins to become the dictate right down the line to the 7 years olds.