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Issue 2
The Playground of the Mind
Sally Jenkinson, author of the Genius of Play, explains why imaginative play is essential for children's healthy development.
"Imagine a mountain," says the teacher, her eyes sparkling with inner vision." I can't," says the child looking worried, "I don't have a video."
This anecdote, and there are others, suggest that excessive use of visual media can interfere with children's internally driven imaging. It is a disquieting thought that heavily visual technologies, saturated as they are with bright, fast-moving, eye-catching images, might alienate children from their own imaginations.
The tradition in the Waldorf kindergarten is to tell stories rather than show videos or even use picture books. Children and teacher enter a story-state where they journey together through the narrative, creating inner imaginations as they go. This process is continued, of course, when we sit down to enjoy a good read as adults. Without self-created inner pictures, the words alone offer little to capture the imagination. During the telling of the story, Waldorf teachers have the experience of watching the children's imaginations at work as their faces betray the liveliness of the inner images; they are both creating and watching.
The phenomenally successful Harry Potter books grip older children precisely because J.K. Rowling has a gift for generating lively inner pictures. However, when each new film of the book rolls out - beautifully produced and fun to watch though they are - the delicate characters of the personal imagination gradually fade, as the big screen replicas muscle their way into the imaginative space. My own Harry Potter has been lost this way to the screen actor who plays him, which is sad because I preferred mine! Such is the power of the media and its influence upon our inner life.
Our imagination allows us all to be individual visionaries, seers of the inner world that we create for ourselves. Without it, we would have little to bring of what lives within us - our inspirations and intuitions - to the world we share with others. We are image-makers; it is a quality that defines human beings. Imagination underpins all forms of art and design; it is the wellspring of literature, poetry and music; the foundation for science and engineering; a necessary element in all religious and ritualistic behaviour and it is present in most other areas of human activity. We need to be able to see something before it exists in physical form in order to bring it into being. The tool of the imagination must create the chair before the chisel can shape the wood to fit its image. In our personal lives, we are always busy imagining possible futures for ourselves - from the next few moments to our lifetime tasks. We constantly play through situations and try out alternatives in our minds before we live the reality. When we lack understanding of a certain kind, others will tell us knowingly to 'use our imagination,' to think what we may not have thought. If we neglect to anticipate something, we acknowledge it as a failure of our imagination, and when we lack imagination, there is a certain dullness to our being. 'Imagine how I felt', we say when we want people to understand us. We read a harrowing newspaper report and imagine what it might have been like for those involved, as we move in imagination from our own self-centre to the experience of the other.
We also dream. Hidden in the deep folds of our imagination, magical wisdom still inspires and sustains us. It is our imagination, said Henry James, which helps us stay connected to the 'authentic tidings of invisible things.' Children too, know the secrets of this hidden world, but to hear what is being spoken, a quiet mind, an open heart and an unspoilt imagination are needed.
A colleague told me that his little three year-old daughter was playing in the garden once, talking to, what she later told him, was a fairy or a nature being. Watching her, what impressed him was that she would first speak animatedly to her invisible companion, then sit still for some time attentively listening to the reply.
In play you forget yourself and merge with the game. This can be likened to a mystic union, a communion.
An artist slips into the persona of the person he or she is painting to make the portrait speak of the subject. A poet or writer does the same thing with words. In play, children slip into the characters they are creating in order to represent them in a faithful way. This slipping into another is only possible through imagination and its precursor, imitation.
In tribal societies where television is still a novelty, it has been described as 'the big ghost', because it steals the night - the traditional time for the imagination and sharing of stories. For children, it can also steal the day. Marie Winn, author of The Plug in Drug, persuasively argues about the significant difference between adult and child media-viewing experiences. When adults watch TV, she says, they refer to 'a vast backlog of real life experiences', but for children there is no such store to draw upon and this fundamentally changes the nature of the activity.
"As the adult watches television, his own present and past relationships, experiences, dreams, and fantasies come into play, transforming the material he sees, whatever its origins or purpose, into something reflecting his own particular needs. Children, however, do not have this background of real life experience and for many of them, TV becomes the primary activity."
Memories become memories of programmes previously watched, rather than lived experiences. When children become passive spectators rather than doers, real life - engagement with all the senses, with physical matter and with others - is put on hold. Conversely, play situations, which are often powerfully motivated by the unreality of the imagination, allow children to be fully active in the creation of a part of their own lives as they direct and structure the action and experience the outcomes of their freely chosen play.
The National Association of Early Childhood Specialists in America issued an endorsement of play, giving the following reasons:
- Play is an active form of learning that involves mind, body, and spirit.
- Play reduces the tension that comes with having to achieve or needing to learn.
- Children express and work out emotional issues through play.
- Children permitted to play freely with others develop skills to see situations from the point of view of others.
- The development of children's perceptual abilities may be hindered when too much of their experience is through television, books, worksheets, etc.
- Children who are less restricted in their outdoor play gain confidence in moving through the outside world.
Point five suggests that perceptual abilities may be at risk when the amount of mediated experience begins to outweigh children's direct sensory participatory engagement with the world. A bird's song is easily missed when your ear has been bombarded with loud noise. Losing yourself, on the other hand, in the world's delights with its abundance of richly differentiated smells, tastes, surfaces and sounds to thrill, and sometimes disgust the senses, can stimulate perceptual abilities and provide wonderful food for the imagination.
A recent exhibition in the USA, The Secret Spaces of Childhood, reminded adults how much children like to build places for themselves, away from grown-ups. Building a secret space can be a means of 'sheltering the imagination and hopes' of the individual. The creation of a little world physically is a form of metaphor for the existence of an inner-self later. Finding a home, a place to be a new, different self in, is a central feature of much early childhood play, as the following story illustrates.
Two young girls lived on a smallholding in a rural area. They played outside for most of the day in the company of assorted farmyard animals. The girls were fascinated by the chickens and in particular by the mysteries of the hen house. One day, when it was fairly cold, but not yet cold enough to stay inside, the sisters were in the yard, each wearing a red hat, pointed at the top with flaps hanging down over the ears. Perhaps it was the hats, but the idea seemed to come to them both simultaneously: today, they would enter the inner sanctum of the hen house.
Ruffling their feathers, clucking and scolding at the intrusion, the startled hens watched, as two small girls, heads bowed, crept through the low door, into the warm, dimly-lit, straw-scented interior of the hen house. With some effort, the children managed to manoeuvre themselves onto the birds' perches. "We sat there, legs folded beneath us, feet balancing on the beams, in total silence. With our red hat-flaps dangling, and arms wrapped wing-like to our sides, we immersed ourselves totally in the feeling of being hens. I remember the smell, the straw, the quiet noises of the birds scratching and settling themselves down to roost. We were in a timeless realm."
Some time later the girls' father came home, and in the gathering dusk was unable to find the children. Following a hunch, he walked up to the hen house and slowly opened the door. There, in the half-light, steeped in the fullness of sleepy animal silence, crouching motionless on their perches, were two little red-hooded, bird women - his lost daughters.
It was an experience the sisters never repeated, there was no need. Nor was it ever forgotten. The magical play transformation the girls had undergone in the hen house that day, lived on in their imaginations, seeding rich thoughts and feelings right on into their adult lives.
Left to themselves most children have a healthy instinct for choosing the right thing in their play; selecting what they need in order to develop themselves as unique individuals with unique experiences and memories. Mass entertainment, by definition, pays no attention to the sometimes quirky needs of the individual, and has no scruples about invading the defenceless territories of the childhood imagination.
This short piece is a call to resist the relentless encroachment of the media into early childhood. It is a plea to let children loose on the world; to let them live their lives directly, so that they can make their own worlds, real and imaginary, and dream their own dreams. Technology, with its magnetising colour and visual wizardry, will wait. The commercial market will see to that. The mountains, angels, unicorns and endlessly fascinating creatures of the imagination, however, need the long play-filled days of childhood to find their places in the secret corners of the playground of the mind.
Sally is the author of the Genius of Play - Celebrating the Spirit of Childhood, £9.99, Hawthorn Press. She is currently researching a book for children and speaks, lectures and runs workshops on early years issues.
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© Juno Magazine 2007 |
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