The Play in Plato

by Chris Mercogliano

Let me clue you in on a little secret: the ancient Greek words for education/culture (paideia), play (paidia), and children (paides) all have the same root. I say "secret" because, if yours truly has spent the past thirty years trying to unite the above terms within the four walls of a school and yet only just uncovered this source of my life's work, then I figure I must have company.

I stumbled upon the above etymological gem while researching the philosophy of Plato for a new book. In the process I learned that the evidence for a classical link between education and play is considerable. For instance, L. Brandwood in A Word Index to Plato lists over sixty citations in the Republic alone to paideia, paidia, and paides.

Then consider the following conversation in the Republic between Socrates and Plato's brother Glaucon:

"Well then," Socrates begins, "the study of calculation and geometry, and all the preparatory education required for dialectic must be put before them as children and the instruction must not be given the aspect of a compulsion to learn."

"Why not?" asks Glaucon.

"Because the free man ought not to learn any study slavishly. Forced labors performed by the body don't make the body any worse, but no forced study abides in the soul."

"True."

"Therefore, you best of men, don't use force in training the children in the subjects, but rather play. In that way can you better discern toward what each is naturally directed."

Mind you I am no devotee of Plato. He and I part company on many an issue. His ponderings on justice, morality and government, however, have had a profound and lasting influence on Western thinking. So what happened to the notion that learning should be firmly rooted in play? And how is it that you and I were never told about it? The answer, hopefully, will fill up a book. Suffice it to say for now that the educational model the West holds so dearly was a repressive one right from the start, beginning with the Victorian men who dreamed it up. They considered play to be learning's very antithesis. Or as Jane Fonda was fond of saying in her exercise videos, "No pain, no gain." Pleasure was never part of the equation.

Which isn't to say that enlightened ideas don't occasionally slip through our education system's suppressive filters. But when they do, they always meet resistance, sometimes resolute, sometimes subtle.

Take Friedrich Froebel, for example. His series of experimental schools for children based on the belief that learning should be grounded in play and natural discovery—that every school should be a garden of children—so threatened Prussian society that it shut them all down. The United States then borrowed from Froebel's philosophy, but in a circumscribed form he never intended: as an optional year of fun and games before the real work of education begins at age six.

Today, thanks to the relentless hype of the standards-mongers, play is even disappearing from kindergarten. Old Plato must be turning over in his grave.



The Directory of Democratic Education		Everywhere All the Time



How to Grow a School		In Defense of Childhood



Making It Up as We Go Along		Teaching the Restless