12. Would you expect fifth-grade children to grow in appreciation of poetry by having them commit to memory selections from Milton's Paradise Lost? Why?
13. Why is it important to allow children to choose the poems that they commit to memory, or the pictures which they hang on their walls?
14. Why would you accept spontaneous expression of approval of the characters in literature or in history, rather than seek to control the judgments of children in this respect?
15. How may teachers prove most effective in developing the power of appreciation upon the part of children?
[IX. THE MEANING OF PLAY IN EDUCATION]
All human activity might be classified under three heads,--play, work, and drudgery,--but just what activities belong under each head and just what each of the terms means are questions of dispute. That the boundaries between the three are hazy and undefined, and that they shade gradually into each other, are without doubt true, but after all play is different from work, and work from drudgery. Much of the disagreement as to the value of play is due to this lack of definition. Even to-day when the worth of play is so universally recognized, we still hear the criticism's of "soft pedagogy" and "sugar coating" used in connection with the application of the principle of play in education.
Although what we call play has its roots in original equipment, still there is no such thing as the play instinct, in the sense that there is a hunting instinct or a fighting instinct. Instead of being a definite instinct, which means a definite response to a definite situation, it is rather a tendency characteristic of all instincts and capacities. It is an outgrowth of the general characteristic of all original nature towards activity of some kind. This tendency is so broad and so complex, the machinery governing it is so delicate, that it produces responses that vary tremendously with subtle changes in the individual, and with slight modifications of the situation. What we call play, then, is nothing more than the manifestations of the various instincts and capacities as they appear at times when they are not immediately useful. The connections in the nervous system are ripe and all other factors have operated to put them in a state of readiness: a situation occurs which stimulates these connections and the child plays. These connections called into activity may result in responses which are primarily physical, intellectual, or emotional--all are manifestations of this tendency towards activity. All habits of all kinds grow out of this same activity: habits which we call work and those which we call play. Man has not two original natures, one defined in terms of the play instinct, and the other in terms of work. Most of the original tendencies involved in play are not peculiar to it, but also are the source of work. Manifestation results in making "mud pies and apple pies"; physical activity results in the kicking, squirming, and wriggling of the infant and the monotonous wielding of the hammer of the road mender. The conditions under which an activity occurs, its concomitants, and the attitude of the individual performing it determine whether it is play or work--not its source or root.
Much, then, of what we call play is simply the manifestation of instincts and capacities not immediately useful to the child. If they were immediately useful, they would probably be put under the head of work, not play. Many of the activities which seem playful to us and not of immediate service do so because of the conditions of civilized life. Were the infants living under primitive conditions, "in such a community as a human settlement seems likely to have been twenty-five thousand years ago, their restless examination of small objects would perhaps seem as utilitarian as their fathers' hunting."[13] Certainly the tendency of little children to chase a small object going away from them, and to run from a large object approaching slowly, their tendency to collect and hoard, their tendency to outdo another engaged in any instinctive pursuit, would under primitive conditions have a distinct utilitarian value, and yet all such tendencies are ranked as play when manifested by the civilized child.
Other tendencies become playful rather than useful because of the complexity of the environment and of the nervous system responding to it. In actual life we don't find activity following a neatly arranged situation--response system. On the contrary, a situation seldom stimulates one response, and a response seldom occurs in the typical form required by theory. It is this mingling of responses brought about by varying elements in the situation that gives the playful effect. In a less complex environment this complexity would be lessened. Also experience, habit, tends to pin one type of response to a given situation and the minor connections gradually become eliminated. For example, if a boy of nine, alone in the woods, was approached by another with threatening gestures and scowls, the fighting response would be called out, and we would not call it play, because it served as protection. If the same boy in his own garden, with a group of companions, was approached by another with scowls, a perfectly good-natured tussle might take place and we would call it play. The difference between the two would be in minor elements of the situation. Some of these differences are absence or presence of companions, the strangeness or familiarity of the surroundings, the suddenness of the appearance of the other boy, and so on.