AS Neill
top
to
Index
PLAY
Why children and kittens play I do not know. There have been theories
about play, the one generally accepted being that the young play in order
to practise activity for later life, so that when a kitten chases a string
it is getting ready for the subsequent mouse. This postulates a purpose
in the kitten’s makeup, or alternatively a divine power that fashions
the animal’s behaviour so that later a divine purpose will be fulfilled.
If one rejects both assumptions one has simply to believe that a kitten
or a puppy plays because it is built that way. It is a matter of energy.
In the case of children the energy is chiefly somatic energy. It may be
that energy is a constant factor all through life, and if it is, we have
to ask the question What happens to the energy of the adult? I can only
speak for myself. A little of my somatic energy goes into my golf, into
handwork, into pottering about making paths and repairing walls. Most
of my energy goes into my work, and, alas, interviewing too many enquiring
visitors; into writing and lecturing, conversation, reading. How much energy
goes into love and affection I do not know, but guess that it depends on
glands and age to a large extent.
Granting that childhood is playhood, what do we do about it? We ignore
the fact; we forget all about it, because play, to us, is waste of time.
hence we erect a large city school with many rooms and expensive apparatus
for teaching, hut all we offer to the play instinct is a small concrete
space with not a single fitting or object that suggests play of any kind.
I am not taking into account playing fields and organised games, for I
am thinking of play in terms of phantasy and not in terms of football or
hockey. Organised games involve skill, competition, team work, but child
play usually requires no skill, little competition and hardly any team
work.
Summerhill might be defined as a school in which play is of the greatest importance. Some children play all day, especially when the sun is shining. Their play is generally noisy. Noise like play is suppressed in large day schools. One of our old pupils who went to a Scottish university said: “The students make a hell of a row in classes, and it gets rather tiresome, for we at Summerhill lived that out when we were ten.” I recall an incident in that great novel The House with the Green Shutters, where the students of Edinburgh University played John Brown’s Body with their feet, in order to rag a weak lecturer. Noise and play go together, and it is best when they go together at the age of seven to fourteen. One could, with some truth, claim that the evils of civilisation are due to the fact that no child has ever had enough play, or, to put it differently, every child has been hothoused into an adult, long before he has reached adulthood. Our school subjects are adult affairs, in the main foreign to the interest of the child. Last week in Copenhagen I met a girl of fourteen who had spent three years in Summerhill, speaking perfect English. “I suppose you are at the top of your class in English,” I said. She grimaced ruefully. “No, I’m at the bottom because I don’t know English grammar,” she said. I think that is about the best commentary on what adults consider education.
Fear is at the root of adult antagonism to play. Hundreds of times I have heard the anxious query: “But if my boy plays all day how will he ever learn anything, how will he ever pass exams ?“ Very few will accept my answer. If your child plays all he wants to play he will be able to pass Matriculation after two years’ intensive study, instead of the usual five, six, seven years of learning in a school tat discounts play as a factor in life. But I always have to add: That is if he ever wants to pass Matric; he may become a ballet dancer or a radio engineer; she may want to be a dress designer or a children’s nurse. Luckily we in this country are not so fanatical about exams as all Continental countries, where, apparently one cannot sweep the streets without passing an exam. Yes, fear of the child’s future deprives children of their right to play. There is more in it than that; there is a vague moral idea behind the disapproval of play, a suggestion that being a child is not so good, a suggestion voiced in the phrases applied to young adults . . . “Cry Baby !“ “Don’t be a Baby.” To the adult child play is a waste of time. It took me a long time to get over my impatience with children because they never want to work in a garden. So far we do not as a rule have an economic excuse for encouraging children to work instead of to play: our incentive therefore must be moral. There are people who say: “I don’t see why kids should have so much play and leisure. When I was their age . . .“ They are less neurotic than those who are envious of youth without being aware of it.
One of the biggest problems in all education is the gulf that separates youth from age. For over thirty years now I have lived with childrens noise. As a rule I do not hear it consciously; an analogy would be living in a hammeredbrass factory; one becomes accustomed to the perpetual clang of hammers. Those who live on busy streets come to be unaware of the roar of traffic. One difference is that hammering and traffic are more or less constant sounds, whereas the noise of children is ever varied and strident. It “gets on one’s nerves.” And I must confess that when I moved out of the main building to live in the Cottage some months ago, the peace of the evening was most pleasant. I have to hear the noise of over fifty children, while the average parent has to deal with the noise of two or three only, but then it is my job, and when a man’s job is in an office or a shop, his children’s evening noise too often irritates him. There has to be a certain amount of sacrifice on the part of the adult if children are to live according to their inner nature. Healthy parents come to some sort of a compromise agreement: unhealthy parents either become violent or they spoil their children by allowing them to have all the social rights. I thought that some American parents overdid the freedom idea, as when a boy of thirteen said to his father: “Dad, give me the Cadillac key, I want to go for a ride.” “O.K. son,” and father handed over the key. I always felt nervous in Maine on a Saturday night because so many teenagers were out driving the family cars. I think that too many Americans are trying to bridge the gulf in the wrong way. Still, even the wrong way is better than the pretence that the gulf does not exist, for every school curriculum shows that adults fail to see any gulf between their own interests and those of their children.
The late Caldwell Cook wrote a book called The Play Way, in which he told how he taught English by means of play. It was a fascinating book, full of good things, yet I think it was only a new way of bolstering up the theory that learning is of the utmost importance, so important that the pill should be sugared with the play way. This notion that unless a child is learning something it is wasting its time is a curse, a curse that binds thousands of teachers and many school inspectors. Learn through Doing was the watchword fifty years ago; today it is Learn through Playing . . . the activity method. Playing is thus only a means to an end, but what end I do not really know. If a teacher sees children playing with mud, and he thereupon improves the shining hour by dilating on river bank erosion, what end has he in view? Who cares about coast or river erosion? It isn’t nearly so important to humanity as soil erosion due to commercial exploitation of good land, due also (according to Sir Albert Howard) to the use of artificial manure. The truth is that the belief obtains that it does not matter what a child learns so long as it is taught something. And of course, with schools as they are, massproduction factories, what can a teacher do but teach and come to believe that teaching matters most of all? I am not decrying learning: learning should come after play, and it should not be deliberately seasoned with play to make it palatable. Learning is important . . . but not to everyone. Nijinski could not pass his Matric in St. Petersburg, and could not enter the State Ballet without passing. He could not learn, or was too stupid, so they faked an exam, giving him the papers plus the answers, so a biography says. Indeed it almost looks as if great men and women are seldom great because of their learning .
Shakespeare (little Latin and less Greek), Van Gogh, Charlie Chaplin, all creators, a most arresting statement, even if it is a platitude. Our learned men become professors, teachers, clergymen, but seldom creators. Creators learn what they want to learn in order to have the tools that their originality and genius demand, and we do not know how much creation is killed in the classroom with its emphasis on learning.
Here I think of the obvious retort . . . “Dear Neill, you have had your school for thirty years and you have allowed the pupils to play to their hearts’ content. Good. How many geniuses, or to be less extreme, how many creators has Summerhill produced ?“ So far no geniuses. A few creators, not famous so far: a few bright artists, some clever musicians, no successful writer so far as I know, an excellent furniture designer and maker, some actors and actresses. Some scientists and mathematicians who may yet do original work. I think that for our numbers, about fiftyfive pupils in the school at one time, a generous proportion has taken some kind of creative or original line. However, I have often said that one generation of free children does not prove anything much. Even in Summerhill some children get a guilty conscience about not learning enough lessons; it could not be otherwise in a world in which examinations are the gateways to some professions, and also there is usually an Aunt Mary who exclaims: “Eleven years old and you can’t read properly !“ The child feels vaguely that the whole outside environment is antiplay and prowork.
It is intriguing yet most difficult to assess the damage done to children who have not been allowed to play as much as they wanted to. I often wonder if the great masses who watch professional football are trying to live out their arrested play interest by identification of selves with the players, playing by proxy as it were. The majority of our Summerhill old pupils do not attend football matches, nor are they interested in pageantry. I think that few would walk very far to seesaya royal procession. Pageantry surely has a childish element in it; its colour, formalism, slow movement have some suggestion of toyland and dressed up dolls, and maybe that is the reason why women seem to love pageantry more than men do. As people get older and more sophisticated they seem to be attracted less and less by pageantry of any kind, and I doubt if generals and politicians and diplomats get anything out of State processions except boredom, but it is possibly unfair to form any judgment, because, personally I cannot easily share crowd emotions, loyal or disloyal, religious or pagan, political or unpolitical, and in every judgment the subjective will always lend some colour.
There is some evidence that children brought up freely and with the maximum of play do not tend to become massminded. Among Summerhill old pupils the only ones I can think of who could easily and enthusiastically cheer in a crowd are the ones who came from Communist homes. Again I cannot get away from the idea that crowd emotion has something to do with the repressed play instinct. I had that impression strongly when, in I stood in an enormous crowd in the Tempelhof in Berlin when Hitler made a speech. The hilarity of the crowd gave a schoolpicnic feeling. Only children seek a leader, but free children do not. It almost looks as if free children become rank individualists, in spite of their years of selfgovernment in school. Certainly most of my old pupils never seem to want to set the world right; not one has tried to set up a school that will follow, and then better, Summerhill. I am neither surprised nor worried. Mass enthusiasms in youth stem from outside, from adult fashioning or at least inspiration whether they be Hitler Jugend or Boy Scouts or Young Communist Leagues.
The world is moving towards Socialism of some sort. As an educationist I am interested primarily in the happiness and balance and sociability of children, while being aware of the fact that the future of children depends on what we term politics and economics. The mass of teachers in any country might agree to think only of the future of children, yet a few politicians and profit merchants could launch a war that would kill the children. They have the might, and the teachers have no power at all. And we all know that each kind of society fashions its educational aims so that a new generation will serve and preserve that society. That was clear when the Public Schools produced the master and diplomatic and military caste, while the elementary schools produced the proletariat; it is still clear, for, in spite of changes against a class education, education still has a gap between the haves and the havenots. One still hears tales of some candidate for a municipal or State job being rejected because of his Cockney or Liverpool accent. So long as there are pedestrians and owners of £3,000 cars, there will be differences between educational systems. But I am not going to write about politics or parties; I am trying to look beyond them for they are only means to an end. The end, for all parties, is to make human life more tolerable, more comfortable, more secure, but too often politicians think in terms of material things . . . more production, better housing, better education, a higher standard of living ... all good things to aim at, all necessary to a happy world. My complaint is that the politicians stop there. When a politician uses the word freedom he generally means liberty, thus, any young Communist will talk eagerly about Freedom for Poland or China, when he means freedom from capitalism. I have yet to meet the young Communist or Capitalist who will get enthusiastic about freedom for children, or freedom to love, or freedom to regulate their own lives.
The adult attitude to play is quite arbitrary. We, the old, map out a child’s timetable . . . learn from nine till eleven and then ten minutes’ break, then lessons till one, and an hour for lunch, and again lessons until four. Summerhill has shown that from the child’s point of view the timetable is the other way round. A free child, if asked to make a timetable, would almost certainly give to play many periods and to lessons only a few. My own opinion is that a sane civilisation would not ask children to work until the age of eighteen at least. Most boys and girls would do a lot of work before that age was reached, but it would be play work, uneconomical work from the parents’ viewpoint. I am so tired of this demand for work from youth. When I had my school in Hellerau, Dresden, the headmaster of the German Division at every parents’ meeting began his speech with the words: “Hier in dieser Schule ist a gearbeitet (Here in this school work is done).” I feel depressed when I think of the gigantic amount of work students have to do to prepare for exams in most Continental countries. Someone once told me that nearly fifty per cent of students broke down physically or psychologically after their matriculation exam in prewar Budapest.
After all where does all this work lead? I studied English at the university and my line is psychology. I think that the only thing of value I got from my university came from mixing with other young men and women. Yet I am glad to say that when one of my old pupils applies for a job and gives my name as reference, most business firms appear to be more interested in character than in examinational success. One firm demanded that its employees should have passed matriculation. I wrote: “This lad did not pass any exams, for he hasn’t got an academic head. But he has got guts.” He got the job. I say that most of the school work that adolescents do is simply a waste of time, of energy, of patience. It robs youth of its right to play and play and play; it puts old heads on young shoulders.
When I lecture to training colleges and university students I am very often surprised, shocked at their ungrownupness. They know a lot; they shine in dialectics; they can quote the classics in debate, but many of them are infants in their outlook on life. They have been taught to know but not to feel. I recall one young man, who, after listening to me for an hour, asked “Do you believe in corporal punishment ?“ Students are friendly, pleasant, eager, but something is lackingthe emotional factor, the power to subordinate their thinking to their feeling. I can make an audience of students enthusiastic, partly, I think because I can make them laugh, but mainly because, as one man put it, I talk to their guts; I talk to them of really important things, things that their schools and universities never touch. The truth is that I talk to them of a world they missed and go on missing. Their textbooks do not deal with human character, with love and freedom, with selfdetermination. And even in the realm of mere learning they fall short. After lecturing to about three hundred students in an emergency training college, I sat with the principal in the local. “Tonight,” I said, “I mentioned Freud a few times. How many of them ever heard of him?” He answered: “Oh, I should say roughly ten per cent.”
And so the system goes on, more or less aiming at standards of book learning that might have been valuable in the days of Milton, goes on in an age of radio and motor engines and cinema and a thousand new trades and professions. The system goes on separating the head from the heart. It is known that when youth has an emotional outlet work is much better done. A man with a sex life is a better worker than one who is sexually repressed, and not only a better worker but a happier, more balanced person. Yet in all educational establishments love is taboo. I lectured to coed training colleges in America but have seldom lectured to any in this country. How many coed team games are to be seen in Britain? But here comes in the question of coed games of any kind. In my school boys do not generally play with girls. Boys play gangsters, bicycle touch; they make huts in trees, they dig holes and trenches. Girls seldom organise any play. The timehonoured game of playing teacher or doctor is unknown among free children. Smaller girls play with dolls, but older ones seem to get most fun out of contact with people, not things. We have often had mixed hockey teams, and card games are usually mixed. Indoor games, arranged by one of the staff or an older pupil, are always mixed also. It seems to be clear that boys and girls have different ideas about play. Boys play much more than girls do. Sometimes a girl appears to substitute a phantasy life for play, but few boys ever do. The sixyearolds, ZoE and her pals, play the whole day long, play with phantasy. To a small child reality and phantasy are very close to each other. When a boy of ten dressed himself up as a ghost the other night, the little ones screamed with delight; they knew it was only Tommy, they had seen him put on his sheet. But as he advanced on them they one and all screamed in terror . . . and of course Tommy was choked off by various people for doing a silly thing. I have never been able to discover where the border line of phantasy begins and ends. When a child brings a doll a meal on a tiny toy plate, does she really believe for the moment that the doll is alive? Is a rocking horse a real horse? When a boy cries, “Stick ‘em up,” and then fires, does he think or feel that his is a real gun? I am inclined to think that children do imagine that their toys are real, and only when some insensitive adult butts in and reminds them of their phantasy do they come back to earth with a plop. No sympathetic parent will ever break up a child’s phantasy.
If I had any business sense I think I should open a toy shop. Every nursery is filled with toys that are broken and neglected; every middleclass child gets far too many toys. Most toys that cost more than a few pence are wasted. Zoë got a wonderful walking and squeaking doll from an old pupil, obviously an expensive toy. At the same time she had a small cheap rabbit from a present pupil. She played with the doll for half an hour, but she has played with the rabbit for weeks, taking it to bed with her nightly. Firms like that of Paul and Marjorie Abbatt have gone far to make toys more creative and less possessive, and yet I personally feel that there are far too few creative toys on the market. Constructive toys, yes, many on the lines of Meccano in metal and wood, but creative, no. Here I confess that I could not invent a creative toy of any kind, and have no suggestions about what they should be; I just feel that the toy world is awaiting the arrival of some wizard who will get nearer the heart of a child than any toymakers get today. Constructive toys are like crossword puzzles or mathematical riders; someone had made them and therefore the solution can never be original. Now that Zoë is six I find myself buying her drawing books and pencils and colours rather than toys.
I perhaps should not bring in children’s books when I head a chapter Play. They ought to be brought in somewhere. Like many parents I have had to read a bedtime story for a few years, and, much as I love my daughter, I must confess that these evening readings have been a misery to me. There is one dreadful story that makes me feel murderous, Zoë’s favourite: I have had to read it fifty times. Luckily few of these books point a moral directly; indirectly many do, for their children are so good and pure, the illustrations show how angelic and joyous their faces are; how mannerly these children are, how obedient, how thoughtful of their parents. They make me sick. Granted that to write a book for babies is difficult; granted that it is nigh impossible to write a book that will interest a child and at the same time the parent who is reading it aloud. I am playing with the notion of having a try to bridge the gulf. If a child’s book could have just enough humour to tickle the adult reader the problem might be solved. I tried some years ago with my Last Man Alive to write a book that would capture ten year olds with its phantastic adventures and at the same time make the adult reader chuckle at the humour. The book is out of print; it never really caught on, never sold like the books of... no, I refuse to advertise any writer of children’s stories.., not until Zoë can read her own books. To be fair to our story writers it must be acknowledged that they have abolished the horror story; in Zoë’s collection of scores of books, there is not one that I bypass because of its fear component. No parent should ever read stories of cruel giants and wicked witches. Some hesitate to read stories like that of Cinderella, on the grounds that the story has the wrong moral . . . be a drudge without the ability to rise above cinders, and a fairy godmother will give you a prince for a husband without any merit or industry on your part. Well, well, what harm can Cinderella do to a healthy child? What harm does Peter Pan do? I took Zoë to see the play a year ago and was interested to note how much it had dated. When, to save Tinker Bell’s life, the juvenile audience had to cry Yes when asked if they believed in fairies, the Yes was rather feeble, and I could see fond parents nudge their offspring vigorously to make them cry at all. Peter Pan is an adult’s play; children want to grow up, and it is too often their unfulfilled parents who sigh for the Never Never Land of childhood.
My knowledge of pantomimes is limited now that I live in the country. I took my daughter to see a pantomime on ice the other day. She got tired of the excellent skating (as I did) and her criticism was that there wasn’t enough funny stuff in the show. The jokes were above the head of most children, and it is probable that this goes for most pantomimes. Children have a sense of fun rather than one of humour, although traces of real humour can be seen in quite small children sometimes. Better than plays or pantomimes is free play in the nursery or the garden. Children have the knack of inventing their own phantasies, a knack which they lose, and when grown up they have to pay men to write and stage their phantasies in book and theatre and cinema. Indeed the plethora of books on the market would appear to show that the power of individual phantasy is lessening in the masses. The percentage of crime stories on any railway bookstall is a high one, and when a boy of sixteen shoots a policeman, a million or two readers do not see that he is living out the kind of phantasy they read about and enjoy. The thriller denotes our inability to play, to phantasy, to create; fundamentally it touches our repressed hate and desire to injure and to kill. By the way I marvel at the way thriller writers can go on hook after book making characters who never live; I seldom have read a thriller in which anyone had any personality. It puzzles me, for in the few attempts I have made to write novels, I found that I had no control over the characters; they simply took the bit between their teeth arid said and did all sorts of things I never intended them to say or do. Maybe they did not live enough, for the books never saw the light that shines in publishers’ offices. Most men can do one job and one job only. I draw pen and ink landscapes that are not art, I can make a brass bowl that is not good enough, I can dance with good rhythm but I am no Fred Astaire, and I can write about children. But my efforts to write plays and novels fall flat. Funnily enough I have no conscious conceit about my work as an educationist, but if some rash person admired one of my sketches I should feel very proud, meaning that a man is conceited about his weakness and not his strength. I make the guess that Sir Winston Churchill would be much prouder to be hailed as a painter than as the man who rallied Britain in the war, yes, very likely, because to him painting is play and rallying his country hard work. Play is the ultimate winner. Charlie Chaplin is loved by millions because he pushes aside reality and gives us all nothing but play. The arresting and sad thought arises that, if we were all allowed to play as children to our hearts’ content, a Chaplin might not appeal to us. We laugh nay, we roar when Chaplin manipulates a moving stairway, but if a generation of children had the free run of an Underground moving stair, to tumble up and down as much as they liked, would these children laugh at Charlie? If we had not been taught table manners, would we laugh at Charlie in City Lights when he mixes up streamers with his macaroni? It could be, but I hope not. It is good to end this chapter on this note, on Charlie, the greatest playboy the world has seen, the debunker of dictators and travelling factory bands and solemn men who unveil statues with words that mean nothing, in short he is the man who puts work in its true place.
Can the Hard Way Cure?