Child's Play

For the last month I’ve lived across the street from the University of Chicago Laboratory School, a K-12 institute founded in 1896 by John Dewey. If one’s theories are educational, I suppose it’s fitting that one’s laboratory is a school. According to Dewey, its founding “was animated by a desire to discover…how a school could become a cooperative community while developing in individuals their own capacities and satisfying their own needs.” The attempted development of such a school would teach us adults as much as the children—Dewey suggests that a school so-conceived would shed light on a more general social problem, the “problem of the relation between individual freedom and collective well-being.” His tenure as schoolmaster was short-lived—Dewey left Chicago in 1904 due to challenges attendant to cooperation (a long-standing struggle with the university’s first president, William Rainey Harper).

The turn of the century school gardening movement was a regular part of the curriculum at the Laboratory School.

Today, the Lab School boasts of its top ranking among Illinois private schools, and as with many such institutions, gaining admission is like winning the lottery (except, if you win this lottery, you owe $44,592 annually). Fortunately for me, if I want to learn a thing or two about childhood cooperative communities and their moments of crisis, I need only open my office window around midday. As students pour out into the schoolyard for daily recess, I can see, and good heavens can I hear, cooperation and crisis in perfect incubation.

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The schoolyard, in this case, is really nothing but a yard. All that distinguishes it from any other plot of grass is a centrally-located, makeshift octagonal playpen, no more than a foot and a half high, about twenty feet across. Pens are designed to keep the penned in, but the children are old enough that its height presents no problem, young enough that its telos doesn’t either. Its intended function has been replaced by its imagination as an arena. They’ve constructed some game or set of games whose rules I haven’t made the effort to decipher; I know it has a kind of rotational basis—cued children enter the arena to participate, exit to serve as spectators, cheering or jeering when the situation suggests. I don’t need to know the rules, however, to know when they’ve been violated. Disputes are loud, and despite not being so procedural, the arena momentarily transforms into a tribunal. Play cannot resume until there is at least a defeasible settlement. The settlement surely leaves some unhappy, but not unhappy enough that they cannot continue playing in reciprocal respect of its conditions.

It's in light of observations like these that Jean Piaget, in The Moral Judgment of the Child, gave game-playing a central moral-developmental place. Unlike with parents and teachers, children can stand alongside their peers on their own terms, on their own two feet. When children play games with each other, it opens up for them a novel relation to a field of norms. Norms authored by authorities are marked by constraint—when a rule is issued from the authority to the child, they are to stand as an obedient, even if kicking and screaming; the child must put on the seatbelt, must hold hands while crossing the street, must not cause ruckus during class’s reading hour, about this there is little to nothing to negotiate. The relations of children to the rules of their games are, conversely, characterized by cooperation. This is a field of norms over which they have control, applicable to themselves and their playmates, applicable on conditions of mutual respect. The rules of the game are not rules of the game if players do not recognize them. The rules are a result of deliberation—often children don’t know the rules entirely and so must invent them together, or perhaps the traditional rules get stale, and so the children take up the project of altering them. Tic-tac-toe in a four-by-four, rock-paper-scissors with additional weapons (the World Rock Paper Scissors Association calls the available employments ‘weapons,’ though one may not feel so threatened by paper; the association recognizes five-, seven-, nine-, eleven-, fifteen-, twenty-five-, and one-hundred-and-one-weapon variations). Children have to justify their desired rules to others, and challenge justifications that seem against their interests or not quite right. After all is said and done, children are held liable to assessment by their fellows in light of the decided rules, assessment licensed by commitment and mutual respect. The playground is the child’s primitive moral community, a superficially supervised space of reasons.

Primitive moral community, maybe, but certainly no paradise. It’s true that the sun shines and the children smile, that the grass is still green in autumn. Alongside laughter, encouragement, celebration, I hear wailing, frustration, petty gossip around the tree, and chants of tribal favoritism directed at the popular few. The Lab School, I’m sure, is doing a terrific job, but so long as children are human beings, the first expressions of collective freedom are sure to be not only glorious but brutal. Even successful cooperation is sure to be accompanied by ambivalence, annoyance, disappointment—the myriad dissatisfactions that are all too familiar in compromise. One is to bear these, if they are indeed bearable. But the real trouble comes with breakdowns of the cooperative system.

Helpfully, Piaget’s examination of the playground distinguishes two sorts of rules,

those that are constitutive and render possible the exercise of cooperation, and those that are constituted and are the result of this very exercise…The rules of the Square, of the Coche, etc., which are observed by children 11—13 are “constituted” rules, due to mutual consent and capable of being altered by general opinion. The precedence given to justice as opposed to chance, on the other hand, of effort over easy gain are “constitutive” rules, for without this “spirit of the game” no cooperation would be possible.

When children play games together, they agree to play by some rules, but this agreement and its meaningfulness is itself based on some rules of a higher-order. Here we see also two sources of potential conflict: those arising over rules of the game and their violation, and those arising over rules of the spirit of the game and their violation.

Ideally, the former can be settled within the cooperative system. If children are confused about the rules of the game (or find them otherwise objectionable) and conflicts arise, so long as they’re of the cooperative spirit, they’ll do their best to clarify them; if a child violates these rules under temptation of the riches of victory, and is at the same time dedicated to the spirit of the game, she should be compelled by objections that she did not make good on her commitments—You can’t do that! We said no taksies-backsies! Children are far from perfect in working these issues through, but the hope, at least, is that all will come out in the wash.

Now, conflicts over rules of the spirit of the game and their violation are wont to make players question whether there’s to be any fun at all; they are conflicts about the nature and value of the cooperative enterprise itself. These are peculiarly troubling—what of their nature? And what have we to say to those who snub their noses at the sense of justice, to those who prefer bullying to negotiation, deception to genuine commitment? What have we to say to ourselves when we are those? Coercion and fraudulence are found far afield from the schoolyard. Children may run to the parent or the schoolmaster to settle the score—we are not so lucky.

Developed rules in social life seem to take analogous form to those of the child’s game: rules concluded through deliberation and that depend on mutual consent, and rules which are necessary conditions of this deliberative activity. If my spouse and I speak at some length to establish the extent of privacy, and each agree never to read the other’s journal, we’ve formed a kind of rule of the game, violation of which is an afront. The rule could be otherwise, but it was formed in a deliberative space defined by rules which could not be. Less formally, we might consider cultural mores as rules of the game—what precisely makes for an afront may be vastly different in content in Tehran than in Tokyo. It may be offensive in some circumstance, even morally, for an Italian to brush the underneath of their chin with an outward sweep of the fingertips, and yet be completely meaningless elsewhere. Nonetheless, the little Kant in my head compels me to say, the spirit of the game, the higher-order moral rule—the imperative to respect the dignity of others, to justify my acts before their reason—remains constant. As Piaget and the little Kant in his head would have it, the “method of verification and reciprocal control in the intellectual field, of justification and discussion in the domain of morals,” suggested by relations of cooperation (and first in the child’s game), will come to have “the right to be applied to everything.” 

Somewhere behind the little Kant though, or perhaps across the schoolyard hurling insults at him, is a little Nietzsche, insisting that even the rules of the spirit of the game are indeterminate, up for grabs. Don’t you see? Difference and disagreement are so entrenched that there is no principle that is not debatable. But so long as it is debatable, it is not; the ‘method…of justification and discussion’ that renders the debatable possible recurs. What of the point where communication itself breaks down? The child who insists on discussion gets punched in the nose and his spectacles shatter, Thrasymachus has his way. But eventually, so long as he is a human being the bully will talk (as “the strongest is not strong enough to be always the master”), perhaps he will even demand tolerance of his ways (he must “transform obedience into duty”, might into right), and formulation of such a demand is not possible without assumption of all those practical concepts which support the logic of toleration itself, ‘respect,’ ‘justification,’ &c. Once he assumes them, (if all comes out in the wash) he’ll have to pay for what he’s done—he’ll have to reckon with what he was, inside and out.

These are tired arguments, as familiar as they are formidable, and though they should speak to the bully, they should speak to the baser versions of ourselves, they struggle to. What we need, I’m convinced, is a Kantianism of the heart; he’s spent more than enough time in our heads. Trust me, kid, I speak here from experience: becoming the bully, or the fraud, leaves you broken. Shattered spectacles and bloody noses are ugly, fraudulence is cringing, cowardly, paranoid, always on the verge of being found out; to become these is to accept and unduly accentuate a strife inside you, one that, if time or heaven permits, will pull you apart. Any advantages you’ve gained will become intolerable reminders of guilt and shame and grief. You will feel the eyes of others resting on you uneasily. You will feel the same in the mirror. You will crave with pathetic desperation that you could take it all away, that you could somehow replace it with honesty and respect and love. And you will always have the choice of negation, to negate any principle above you including those you’ve accepted with others, and even those that made this acceptance possible—this is itself a testament to the law of your freedom, a law written on your heart which you cannot efface, and whose continued contradiction and rejection is the turmoil of your existence—choose wisely.

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Where to go from here? The clock has struck twelve again, and the sound of shouting children recalls my attention to this piece. Once we’ve accepted the cooperative system, the spirit of the game, how do we live in it, meaningfully? How do we, as Dewey had put it, live as individuals, with our own needs and interests, in a collective? Any answer is an exercise in casuistry, in the grand, dated sense of the term, and I’m not hopeful that I will be able to take even casuistry as far as it may go. A complete solution to Dewey’s problem is, in the process of social development, the project of many lifetimes, and yet I still think we stand to learn from those who’ve had the least time to sort it out.

Sometimes I notice, especially the younger children, playing with no game at all. They run around the schoolyard like bees swarming, and though there is no discernable rationale they’re somehow responsive to one another, and gleeful for it. They run at each other, around each other, tag each other, tumble on the grass, giddily. Children play toy soldiers (unfortunate as this may be), toy soldiers who spontaneously adopt the capacity for flight, with the assistance of a player’s hand, swooping in and knocking over thirty good men. The response is the immediate invention of some forcefield technology deployed over the rest of the battalion, which while it does not bar the introduced capacity for flight it handicaps its weaponization. All this happens in the blink of an eye—no procedures for rule-proposals and justifications, no stopping for agreement, just a relaxed, spontaneous advance of desires and interests, received and responded to by a like advance of the other. This is not game-playing, this is free play.

Free play is a more primitive form of game-like interaction. This play is in some sense pre-rule, at the very least pre-‘rules of the game’ construction. There is a kind of personal skill, I think, that’s being developed in the child’s free play, that of the exercise of the imaginative faculty that will later construct the content of rules. Play is adventuresome, one is trying things out. Sometimes this is undertaken in total solitude, sometimes with others. The reciprocal field of trying things out has a lot to offer. It can be unionizing, one can acquaint oneself with the style, the dispositions, the concrete preferences of another with ease, because in lieu of the usual procedures and rules for advancing one’s interests, in play one more readily expresses them. The shortcoming of play as a shared activity is that when it goes awry, when players come to a head, they have no means to adjudicate the dispute. There is nothing to turn to, no agreement, no body of rules of the game. Because play invites adventure, invites the new, and one is not sure how the other yet feels about the new, disputes arise all-the-more frequently. And despite the frequency of this failure, demands for justification, charges of unfairness, have nowhere to go. The child takes the introduction of the forcefield to be an overstep—it effectively makes the battalion untouchable—it’s not fair! Who said so?! You can’t do that! Why not?! Children cry, children quit. As the predominant form of interaction, players are let down by play and turn to games, and its exactly in making up for this failure that games represent the space of justice and justification.

But despite it no longer being (for lack of a better phrase) the only game in town, free play survives. And there is a social function that play performs that gaming still struggles with—a certain kind of unionization, a fluency with the individuality of the other, an ease of spontaneity of expression, of advancement of the novel. And herein lies also a contribution for constructing the rules of the game together: not only does familiarity with the other clarify deliberations, but rules are sometimes altered through play. A child given the requisite space tries something new, and it’s taken up. The first child to introduce a new ‘weapon’ in rock-paper-scissors, off a bender of twenty games (slowly descending for the players into tedium, boredom, and finally indifference), likely just threw an unknown hand contortion, come what may. Trivial as it may seem, this act contains the principle of the vitality of cooperative social relations.

Harry Frankfurt noticed an important, linguistic sort of play, one which survives development, one by which development survives. In his rather unfortunately entitled essay “On Bullshit,” he considers in brief (and in contrast to the namesake phenomenon) our practice of shooting the breeze. Much of conversation is convention-controlled, and much of our regular social agency is supported by this. Discourse of a usual, rational sort depends on rules, on relevance, on expectations of considered, truthful representation. In sessions of breeze-shooting, much of these conventions are let-up, suspended. Shooting the breeze is characterized by its being “in a certain respect not ‘for real.’” We say things we may not believe, we joke, we tease. At the bar amongst friends, we try on thoughts and attitudes that our bellies give rise to—we see how they feel, how others feel about them. We enjoy “a certain irresponsibility,” when the usual connections between what is said and what is meant are severed. Something we try on might end up fitting nicely—and we adopt in our character something we may have been without, had we not the moment to take a long breath in healthy distance from usual demands.

Indeed, sometimes in shooting the breeze the semantic content is wholly irrelevant—what we communicate is dispositions and styles, we embrace flourishes, we make the form the content, we flirt, we play. We get to know the styles of the other, we dance, no choreography and no sequences, we express and respond. We have sex, and we do so before we know, all that concretely, our partners sexual preferences. And we learn them, not often procedurally, but by playing. What is desired and what is off-limits is not always clear; there is danger in this, we proceed with some care, we pay close attention. And over the course of a sexual relationship, norms develop (concerning the off-limits and the desired), they may enable a terrific and sustainable union, but that may also breed stasis and they become stale, they may not change with us, at least, not until another bout of play. We may struggle to even formulate what it is we want without the reciprocal field of trying things out. Sometimes we fail, falling into the danger, sometimes it’s an honest mistake and others it’s through negligence or a fault of our own. We overstep in the bedroom, we take shooting the breeze too far, we tease where we shouldn’t have. It is essential to be careful, essential not to abuse the extent of irresponsibility afforded in play. Otherwise, one will not deserve the goods attendant to it. It is also essential to be understanding, to see someone’s playfulness for what it is, and not what it would be were we not, in fact, playing.

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Flourishing, meaningful, cooperative relations involve something of this equilibrium and disequilibrium. Something of coming to understand ourselves and others in spontaneous expression, and of coming to figure out, more deliberatively, how we can stably live with them. This is a developmental process, one that recurs, unfolds in spirals. We can learn from developing children, I submit, because we are developing beings, of a certain sort. As Piaget put a related point,

any being that sciences attempt to hold fast dissolves once again in the current of development. It is the last analysis of this development, and of it alone, that we have the right to say ‘it is a fact.’ What we can and should then seek is the law of this process.

I contend that Dewey’s hope, that Lab School instruction might itself prove instructive, might shed light on the nature of individuality in collectivity, is premised on a conception of the human being as a progressive being, in John Stuart Mill’s famous formulation.  According to Mill, this formulation is derived from Wilhelm von Humboldt, Dewey’s progressive-educational predecessor, perhaps most famous for pioneering a model of higher education which bears his name (Humboldtsches Bildungsideal). This model would become that of the modern Western university system, first instantiated at a university that also bears his name (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin).

Humboldt took the true end of cooperative social associations to be “human development in its richest diversity,” and the true end of the individual “the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole” (this while avoiding one-sidedness, “retaining coherence without sacrificing variety, richness, diversity…giving the various aspects of one’s nature their due”). These are inviting principles, whether or not one accepts the invitation. What Humboldt understood that made their expression possible is that there is no such thing as individuality in independence of sociality. Here too he hopes to avoid one-sidedness, as all “thinking in man is bound essentially to social existence; man needs, quite aside from all bodily and sentient relationships, for his thinking alone a ‘thou’ corresponding to his ‘I.’” Individuality meets with “manifold social diversity” and results in “originality,” this is the process of self and social formation.

The sometimes spontaneous and sometimes deliberative development of a personality occurs only in social forms of certain sorts. And these social forms are in turn reconstituted by the developing characters combined in them; the richer the characters, if harmony can be achieved, the richer the collectivity. The tension of individual and collective development, the interests and needs involved in each of them, can be, though not resolved, at least best cared for, in the analogous striking of a sensitive balance of free play and games, of spheres of relative spontaneity and lawfulness. The former must be accompanied by carefulness and understanding, the latter by compromise and commitment. We see this in children readily, not because their activity is so much more intelligible, or their disputes so much more soluble. It’s because they’re so foreign to us. Our own versions of these spheres, and what is necessary to navigate them, are so close that they’re hard to see. Taking up Dewey’s task is in one sense a most challenging project of our species; in another sense, its child’s play.