Lovely human play is like the play of the sun. There’s a worker for you. He, steady to his time, is set as a strong man to run his course, but also, he rejoiceth as a strong man to run his course. See how he plays in the morning, with the mists below, and the clouds above, with a ray here and a flash there, and a shower of jewels everywhere—that’s the sun’s play; and great human play is like his—all various—all full of light and life, and tender, as the dew of the morning.—John Ruskin.
(2385)
PLAY NECESSARY
The child has an artificial occupation named play through games. Having the food as raw material for the body, that food can be built into the physique only through the free play of the legs and arms, through exercise and fresh air. In Prospect Park we behold the maple bough pushing out a soft growth of one or two feet, and then the sap coursing through the young growth furnishes food; then comes the spring and summer winds to give the sap and the bough its exercise; playing with the leaves in the air, bending it, twisting it, hardening the young growth, until it can stand up against the storms of winter. And not otherwise does the growing child need its exercise. The little boy flings out his arm with the ball, and so stretches the arm. Then, when the arm is stretched, along comes the angel of the blood and drops in a little wedge, so that the stretched arm can not draw back. Thus the growth is permanent. This is the function of all the games for little children, to stretch the blood into the body and then by forcing the arterial blood into the extremities to make the stretching permanent. One thing, therefore, is vital, the playground. (Text.)—N. D. Hillis.
(2386)
PLAY, SIGNIFICANCE OF
When things become signs, when they gain a representative capacity as standing for other things, play is transformed from mere physical exuberance into an activity involving a mental factor. A little girl who had broken her doll was seen to perform with the leg of the doll all the operations of washing, putting to bed, and fondling, that she had been accustomed to perform with the entire doll. The part stood for the whole; she reacted not to the stimulus sensibly present, but to the meaning suggested by the sense object. So children use a stone for a table, leaves for plates, acorns for cups. So they use their dolls, their trains, their blocks, their other toys. In manipulating them, they are living not with the physical things, but in the large world of meanings, natural and social, evoked by these things. So when children play horse, play store, play house or making calls, they are subordinating the physically present to the ideally signified. In this way, a world of meanings, a store of concepts (so fundamental to all intellectual achievement), is defined and built up.—John Dewey, “How We Think.”
(2387)
PLAYFUL ATTITUDE, THE
Playfulness is a more important consideration than play. The former is an attitude of mind; the latter is a passing outward manifestation of this attitude. When things are treated simply as vehicles of suggestion, what is suggested overrides the thing. Hence the playful attitude is one of freedom. The person is not bound to the physical traits of things, nor does he care whether a thing really means (as we say) what he takes it to represent. When the child plays horse with a broom and cars with chairs, the fact that the broom does not really represent a horse, or a chair a locomotive, is of no account. In order, then, that playfulness may not terminate in arbitrary fancifulness and in building up an imaginary world alongside the world of actual things, it is necessary that the play attitude should gradually pass into a work attitude.—John Dewey, “How we Think.”