Play/Learning

Applying the Intelligence of Play
An Invitational Symposium

Play and Development / Learning or Conditioning?
Joseph Chilton Pearce
Summary
Our approach to education and to athletic instruction is based on conditioning rather than the true Intelligence of Play and at a devastating price to individuals and to society. Joseph Chilton Pearce is the author of numerous books including The Magical Child, Crack In the Cosmic Egg, and most recently, Evolution’s End, and is internationally recognized for his vision of human development and learning.

Howard Gardner, the Harvard professor know for his investigations into learning and intelligence, once said, “the child never played with never learns to play.” The key is “played with”, not “taught”. Play, like language, is natural to the child abut it cannot be taught. The infant responds with automatic muscular movements to the sensory experience of his or her mothers use of language and does so well before birth. The developing fetus cannot be taught to make these movements. Denied accesses to language however, no such movements and learning can take place. Just as the nature, quality and character of the language model for the infant determines the nature, quality and character of the infants language, so it is with play.

Played with, the infant and child mirrors the play. The well-known ”play-stance,” found throughout he mammalian world, communicates and activates a primary, high-alert, safe-learning state. This safe-learning state entrains body-brain-mind and heart unifying thought-feeling-action. Profoundly deeper than simple concentration, this focused attention to one’s actual relationship with the environment remains global and open. All energy entrains into a fluid, non-conflicted flow which the child and later adult experiences as a natural state of euphoria. Learning becomes spontaneous and non-defense. A non-selective, high neocortical patterning emerges which incorporates all lower neural structures into its service. In this regard, simple child’s play becomes one of the highest, and most natural learning states possible.

Conditioning, initiated through the startle-response of threat and centered in lower brain structures, also brings a high-alert focus, but one tightly confined to the source against which one must defend. In play the child or adult is one with the world. In conditioning, one is set apart from and threatened by the world. The adrenals are involved in both conditioning and play, just as they are in love-making and fighting, but hardly in the same way. The adrenals produce DHEA, considered the master hormone which, when produced too frequently or for any length to time, is seriously toxic and a major cause of disease and aging. Designed for use only in brief bursts, cortisol alerts and entrains the brain-mind-body towards ancient survival instincts in preparation for violent action. Under threat vision and awareness telescope, muscles tense, heart and breath speed up, blood pressure constricts, thymus activity - core of our immune response - shuts down until an “all-clear’ is given by the autonomic nervous system.

Today the saber-tooth world has been replaced with insecurity and testing, confusion and anxiety, free-floating fears, without targets, where resolution can’t take place and not “all-clear” can be given. Cortisol production continues by default. In infants and in children, overproduction of cortisol can bring various degrees of shock, from a general numbing of sensory intake to withdrawal of awareness entirely.

When conditioning replaces play, attention shifts from the higher regions of the brain to the lower sensory-motor areas with their instinctive, hard-wired responses. Learning then, not only by-passes the higher intellectual functions, it suspends them. In cases of social testing, as found in schooling and athletics, the saber-tooth is ever-present in the guise of parents, coaches and mentors who are supposedly protectors. Ambiguity and confusion run rampant in the child’s mind.

In its natural state the nature of play changes according to what is to be learned during the child’s stage of development. From the earliest game of peek-a-boo, any interaction with an adult is an invitation to play, particularly repeated acts - such a throwing a spoon from a high-chair, over and over. Much early play is imitative, spinning out of story-telling, which stimulates and develops the latest evolutionary structures of the brain. In this metaphoric play, one thing stands for another, which becomes the foundation for all higher forms of abstract thought, reasoning, computation and logic.

Play to the four-to-seven year-old is largely a private world where internal images are projected onto objects, through which the child learns that his or her power to imagine can literally change the world itself. The play of the seven-to-eleven year-old extends this power to a shared social scene; where the child’s own body becomes the object of projection. Tree climbing, running, jumping-rope, ball catching become exhilarating and absorbing as the child “comes down from the dream state and into their bodies,” to use Rudolph Stiner’s term. Group games such as hide-and-seek, and cops-and-robbers, involve bodily action and create high-alert excitement in a non-threatening “safe-space”. To the “non-conceptual” middle-child, concepts such as organized sports and winning and loosing never arise spontaneously, but are introduced by adults, at which point real play ends.

The later, pre-puberty-child enters into team play, somewhere after eleven, only because group organization is necessary for throwing balls, hitting, catching, running etc. Teams dissolve and reform casually as different members drift in and out. Interdependence grows in importance as each player “lives” for his or her turn or chance at the ball.

Competition, of a sort, arrives with puberty. The power of this “gene-pool” necessity is clearly in evidence in our nightmare commercial world wherein eternal adolescents compete on ever more deadly terms for nebulous prizes. With adolescence, team organization at its best should be fluid and casual, developing a growing sense of order and form as players spontaneously add organizational requisites to enhance judgment, equity and fairness, all issues to be “debated-through” by participants. Social responsibility grows through such “formal play,” as restraints on the private world of the child are accepted and given over to the needs of the larger group.

Virtually all current concepts of “teaching”, particularly the “coaching” of children and adolescents in athletics and sports, indeed even the notions of athletics and sports, involve and reflect fear-based incentives: hope for approval, acceptance and well-being, with its counterpart, fear of failure and loss, complete with the deadly alienation of not belonging. That the Greeks institutionalized play into sport or athletics, carried to macabre extremes by the Romans, grant such deviancy no evolutionary or spiritual sanction. As a conditioned people however, locked into low-cortical fear-response based reward-deprivation, these disruptive interventions are given a high priority. We can’t even think in any other way, even though the social and personal price is devastating. Since we can’t change the system we must exhort parents and coaches to change attitudes and approaches.