Education by plays and games

Front matter

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THE

Preface

The study of which this book is a revision was begun at Clark University and published in the Pedagogical Seminary in 1894. Since then the writer has been in very intimate and almost constant touch with children. His interest in child play, awakened years ago and kept active by observation and personal contact with children in clubs, play schools, school playgrounds, and the home circle, has been encouraged by numberless requests from teachers for the little study published ten years ago. Largely in response to these requests this revision has been undertaken. It is earnestly hoped that the book may help promote a wider and higher appreciation of play and of its value in education, and add somewhat to the sum of child happiness in the world.

The discussion of the meaning of play, of the relation of play and work, and of the history and application of play to education is by no means full. It can scarcely do more than give the point of view. The discussion of the periods of childhood is a bare summary, but is sufficient, it is hoped, to make clear their relation to the Course of Plays and Games. Of the course itself it may be admitted that it is perhaps too condensed. The whole study is valuable, if at all, mainly for its suggestiveness.

The games that are described in the course have been selected from a thousand or more. The reader should not lose sight of the fact that the variations of children’s plays

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Vlll are well-nigh infinite, yet the essential features are few. The games described cover quite fully the whole field many times, and are, it is believed, wholly adequate in number. The games selected are the older ones, as a rule, and an effort has been made to retain the older names. Most new games will be found upon examination to be modifications of old ones. The descriptions of games are brief, but they are full enough to give sufficient directions for playing. The essential features of the games have been kept prominent, and they are the groundwork upon which the ingenuity of the teacher can build to suit her peculiar needs.

The greatest omissions are in those portions of the course that suggest the informal plays for the different periods, as the constructive, nature, collecting, imitative, dramatic, and musical plays, puzzles, riddles, and the like. These might well require several volumes to present them fully, yet it is hoped that even here the course will prove very suggestive.

Attention should be called to the fact that, while some minor differences will naturally appear in the plays of boys and girls all through the course, practically no differentiation is intended in the games of boys and girls before the fourth period, and then in the rougher games only. While many of the games common to boys are generally not played by girls, the reason lies rather in custom than in any real differentiation of the sexes up to the close of this period, at about twelve years. Girls will instinctively avoid some games, but the attitude of the parent and teacher should be to extend the field of plays and games for girls throughout all the periods.

A word remains to be said in regard to the aim of the Course of Plays and Games. No one will make the error of supposing that the course is intended as a substitute for

PREFACE

IX courses of study, nor will any one be likely to suppose that the course should be strictly followed. It is designed to help the parent and teacher to utilize play in the nurture and training of children, by suggesting types of activity especially adapted to the needs of the child at the different periods, and to the kinds of knowledge being acquired at the time. Games and plays should rarely be dictated; they should often be suggested, sometimes taught, by the parent and teacher (for children welcome a leader in their games), but it is on the environment largely that we should place the stress of our efforts.

It is true that some of the plays and games suggested will, after all, be only “ devices ” when correlated with school work, yet the activities suggested belong for the most part to the spontaneous plays of children, and may be taken advantage of without destroying the essential elements of genuine play. When we know more about evolution, when we know more about children, and particularly individual children, we may so arrange courses of study that earnest, interested zeal will abide with the child through all the years of his learning. Not that hard work will be eliminated. Play involves the hardest of work, a greater output of energy than drudgery, just as service does more work than slavery ; but the drudgery will be swallowed up in the interest, in the earnestness of the zealous soul, for drudgery is in the mind and heart much more than in the amount and kind of work to be done.

It would be hardly possible here to make full acknowledgment of the indebtedness I sincerely feel to the many who have in some way aided in the preparation of this book, to teachers, vacation-school assistants, parents, photographers,

X and others. I owe much to writers on child study, and especially to writers upon play, — to Guts Muths, who anticipated much that I have tried to do; to Froebel, the creator of the widespread interest in child play ; to Groos, who has given us a new point of view ; to Gulick, who has noted the significance of play at each successive period of childhood ; to Lee, who has given a clear vision of the need of play in the social betterment of city children ; to Hall, who with comprehensive insight sees the relation and significance of all ; and to not a few others also. To President Hall I am under great obligation, and to Dr. William H. Burnham, who, not only in the initial study but also during all the years since, has been a source of unfailing help and inspiration. To Dr. C. F. Hodge and to Dr. Louis N. Wilson I owe much in the way of material aid and suggestion. To all these I express gratitude, knowing that without their interest and help the book could not have been written.

A Suggestive Course of Plays and Games

Period One (Ages 0-3) 83

Period Two (Ages 4-6) 86

Period Three (Ages 7-9) 94

Period Four (Ages 10-12) 155

Period Five (Ages 13-15) 205

BIBLIOGRAPHY 223

INDEX 229 xi

Introduction

We have here at last a curriculum of plays and games, graded by age from infancy to middle teens, and also analyzed so as to show the chief mental and physical activities involved in and developed by each of them. Not only age and sex but season as well is taken into account. It is essentially a new book with a field of its own. Within the past decade the literature on plays and games has grown to formidable proportions. Anthropologists have collected and described hundreds of them as found in China, Japan, and India, in Europe and America, in towns and cities, and among savage races. The history of many of them has been traced back to dim antiquity, and some have been shown to be survivals of forms of ancient rites, initiation ceremonies, types of industry long superseded, etc. From Herbert Spencer to Groos the theory of play — its origin, meaning, and educational value — has been a theme of steadily increasing interest, and there are various theories by no means as yet harmonized. It was reserved, however, for Superintendent Johnson to make the results of these studies practical for teachers and parents. Some ten years ago he spent a year in gathering nearly a thousand of the most important and widely diffused plays and games, of which he then eliminated more than half to find those that were most representative and important. These he carefully analyzed in order to show

what muscular activities, limbs, parts of the body, what

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EDUCATION BY BLAYS AND GAMES psychic qualities (such as reason, memory, attention, skill, accuracy, honor, emulation), and what kind and degree of knowledge of mathematics, language, geography, history, etc., each developed ; graded and marked them, as it were, upon these scales, and thus determined at what age and stage of development each was capable of its maximal edu-

-cational value. Since this work began he has shown great tact and originality as a school superintendent, in using portions of this choice repertory of plays and games to supplement and also to stimulate school studies by organizing playgrounds, clubs, rooms, hours, courses ; and here we have the results of both his study and experience combined and practically correlated with the studies and grades of school work.

It goes without saying that such a manual should be read by all intelligent teachers and parents, and that to openminded educational leaders it suggests important modifications of school work, which when made will tend to greater economy of mental effort, and, by turning on the great motive power of the play instinct, give increased efficiency to instruction and to learning, and will make headway against fatigue, perhaps the greatest of all obstacles in the child’s pathway.

Clark University Worcester, Massachusetts

G. STANLEY IIALL

EDUCATION BY PLAYS AND DAMES

Part I

THE THEORY, HISTORY, AND PLACE OF PLAY IN EDUCATION

Chapter I

The evolutionary point of view. Ritter, the great geographer, somewhere likens the earth to a seed. When the world was launched into space, a mighty, flaming atom of the universe, it contained within it the germ of all life now upon it. Of the physical life upon the earth we know this is literally true. Verily out of the dust of the earth was man created.

The idea of the gradual unfolding of life upon and out of the earth in an ever-ascending scale is one of infinite suggestion and inspiration. This idea is plainly suggested in

the Bible, where the account of the creation describes the evolution of the life upon the earth, — first the waste and the void, then the earth covered with water, then the dry land appearing, then the beginning of plant life, then animal life in the waters, then the monsters of the deep and birds and creeping things of the land, then the beasts of the field,

and finally man. This is an ou time in general of the claims of scientists regarding the development of life upon the earth. It is the story of evolution, the story written everywhere in the rocks, the soil, and the life of the earth, the story of man created out of the dust of the earth, yet fashioned into the image of God, the divine breath of life in his nostrils, becoming a living soul.

Now biologists tell us that every new human life recapitulates in a general way the whole scale, from the lowest forms up to the human child born into the world ; that each individual life begins in a unit cell which divides, then multiplies, the organism advancing in an ever-ascending scale to man.

Instinct and education. Up to a certain point nature provides for the full development of the offspring independently

Imitation

Photograph by Mrs. E. E. Trumbull

THE MEANING OF FLAY of any care or training on the part of the parent. Many insects spring into existence fully equipped for the struggle for life. Their education, if we might so speak of education, is hereditary and is transmitted in the form of instincts.

A little higher in the scale of animal life development is not complete at birth, and there is a period during which not only bodily growth hut also organic and structural development continue while the offspring is protected and fed, if not trained, by the parent, as in the case of birds. Here also education is largely a matter of inheritance, and such habits and knowledge as are acquired follow largely the dictates of certain instincts.

Advancing a little higher in the scale of animal life, we find still greater helplessness at birth and a still longer period of bodily and structural change before maturity and ability to cope with the world alone are reached. During this period of immaturity the young instinctively exercise in playful ways the growing powers by the use of which their ancestors have survived in the struggle for life, as in the case of the fox or the cat. Here education is largely the result of instinctive reaction to environment and of playful practice of the powers by which the animal is to maintain life in its maturity. One readily observes this in the play of kittens.

Advancing to the human infant, we find even greater helplessness at birth and a still longer period of immaturity. Here, as in the case of the lower animals, we find instincts prompting to activities allied to those by means of which our ancestors survived. This activity is known as play, and, up to a certain point in the development of civilization, has been the chief factor in conserving and training the powers necessary in maturity.

Not until this century, says Chamberlain, did the meaning of the helplessness of the human infant become apparent ; it has taken long to appreciate the full significance of the prolongation of human infancy. It takes the cat one year to reach maturity, only one twelfth of its lifetime ; it takes the dog two years, one tenth of its lifetime ; it takes the horse four years and a half, one seventh of its lifetime ; it takes man twenty-five or thirty years, fully one third of his lifetime. Just as the longer gestation period was necessary for man to pass through the stages of development, because of its wider range, than was the case with the lower animals, so the longer period of development after birth was necessary for the completion of postnatal evolution and of education for life.

Biology and self-education. lip to a certain point, then, the young have within themselves the impulse for self-education, but this education is fundamental and not accessory, — it tends to aid perfect biological development during postnatal evolution rather than to prepare for higher social relations. Hence arose the recognition of a need of conscious instruction of the young. Now from the time that man first began consciously to instruct his offspring there have been

TIIE MEANING OF PLAY these two factors in the development of the individual child, — heredity and conscious education. Nature always strives to conserve the needed powers of the child and bring to fullness every promise of strength ; but nature’s gifts have been greatly improved and the advance of the race greatly aided by the addition of conscious training. Nature, or heredity, and conscious education join hands in bringing man to his best and fullest development. Development depends first upon nature, or heredity, but it reaches its best and fullest possibility coincident with and partly because of conscious education. Child culture then has two offices : first, to conserve the biological succession under the best physiological conditions, thereby conserving desirable hereditary traits and powers and effecting the best possible organic development; second, to devote those powers to the acquiring of such knowledge and such habits as will best further the man’s social usefulness and individual happiness. Emphasis has invariably been laid upon the second, in our conscious education of the child, with im-

Imitation — Reading to Bab y Photograph by Mrs. E. E. Trumbull punity under certain conditions of environment, disastrously under others, as in the crowded districts of our larger towns

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and cities.

Civilization frequently tends to thwart nature’s efforts to do her part in the full development of the child, and often we, in our efforts at conscious training, have aggravated the difficulties civilization had already placed in nature’s way, and unwittingly defeated the very end we had in view. We have lost sight of the biological side of education in our earnestness for the sociological. In planning our school systems we have snubbed nature. My plea for a wider recognition of play in education is this, that the more successfully the child passes through the biological stages of development, the more complete will he be as a man.

Play is our best great ally in bringing up our children. Play bears the same relation to the biological development of the child that education bears to hereditary gifts, and it would be as absurd to despise a child’s natural and inherited gifts and attribute all to education as to ignore the relation of play activities to child development.

An explanation of play. We must seek for the explanation of play in the study of evolution. The general principles of evolution are now universally accepted, and each year finds some new emphasis laid upon the value of the doctrine of evolution in determining educational principles, each emphasizing the value of play in education. Just what play

TIIE MEANING OF PLAY is we shall know when we know just what evolution is. We make the study of evolution the basis for the study of the child, and again we make child study the basis for a study of evolution. Play is interpreted in the light of the known facts of evolution, both the evolution of man and that of

Keeping House

Photograph hy Mrs. E. E. Trumbull institutions, and again the study of the evolution of man and his institutions are made a basis for the interpretation of play. Even the student of children and child play is amazed at the amount that has been written during the last few years upon the subject of play by writers in anthropology, biology, folklore, education, child study, evolution, and social reform.

This tends to show how evolution, child study, and play are inextricably interwoven in the minds of students of education of to-day, and this alone would justify the attempt to make more familiar a subject still so unfamiliar to people generally and yet so vitally associated with educational work.

Without attempting at this point to review the history of play in education or the theories that have been advanced in explanation of this phenomenon of childhood, although such would lend dignity and authority to the discussion in hand, let us outline briefly the main established points of evolution directly and practicably applicable to education and generally recognized by students of education.

It is generally accepted that the child, in his development, epitomizes the development of the race ; that there are more or less clearly defined epochs, or stages of growth, in the physical, mental, and moral development of the child ; that development progresses from that which is oldest in the development of the race to that which is newest, from the control of the trunk, for example, to the control of the arms and legs, and thence to the control of the finer coordinated movements of hands and fingers ; from the fundamental mental operations, as of perception and memory, to association and reasoning ; from cleanliness of person, observance of truth, and obedience, to altruistic motives and devotion.

It has been found that when young children are compared with adults there is a greater difference in the control of fine or precise movements than in the control of the trunk and larger movements of limbs. At the age of five or six a child is able to walk with ease and grace, but his precision of movement of hands and fingers, for example, is only about three fifths of that of a boy of sixteen. This difference in

TIIE MEANING OF PLAY control of fundamental and accessory movements is strikingly illustrated in feeble-minded children, the control of the finer movements corresponding to a higher degree of intelligence being very deficient. Comparisons made between the lower animals and man show the same increase of disparity in the power of man over that of the lower animals as we pass from the fundamental to the accessory. The muscular arrangements of the monkey’s hand and that of man, for

Expressmen example, are very similar and offer no adequate hint of the disparity in the movements of which they are capable.

Since muscular movement is the expression of nervous activity, we should expect that a study of the development of the nervous system would show a corresponding order of development. Dr. Hughlings- Jackson, the English pathologist, made application of the evolutionary theory in the treatment of mental diseases, conceiving three levels or centers to the nervous system, the lowest level controlling the reflex and involuntary movements, the middle level the higher more complex movements, and the highest level being the center of universal and complete coordinations. The threelevel theory is now the accepted basis of diagnosis in the treatment of epilepsy.

Dr. Frederick Burk, in his very able study of the development of the nervous system, draws with apparent justness the folio whig conclusions.

The order of development of the independent parts of the physical and nervous system is, as a general principle (subject doubtless' to minor exceptions), from that which is oldest in the racial history towards that which is most recent.

In an extremely loose sense, — clearly recognizing the principle that the organism develops by parts, each of which has a different time of beginning its development, a different rate of ripening, and a different period of reaching maturity, — nevertheless, we may regard the period of infancy as one of predominating nascencies of the oldest fundamental activities largely in control of the lowest level of the nervous system ; the period of childhood, from two years to puberty, as the period of predominating nascencies of special senses and their associations one with the other ; the period of adolescence as the period of the predominating nascencies of the higher form of associations, i.e. those which have been developed in the history of the human race.

Others have further gathered up the material of child study and set forth clearly and definitely the main periods of childhood, noting their^sign ifi can ce and value in relation to education, and many others still have contributed in some particular to the knowledge of the physical characteristics, growth, play, imagination, imitation, emotions, drawings, ideals, purposes, fears, ambitions, and interests in many lines, of children, all of which have their bearing upon the discussion of the problem.

Play and instinct. The relation of play to instinct is fundamental and takes a large place in the discussions of play, and while I do not mean to stop to present at any length the relation of instinct to play, it is important to notice one or two points of great interest in this connection. With the unfolding development of the child, accompanying the “nascencies,” arise the characteristic native tendencies and interests.

The experiences of the nervous and muscular systems of man in the long period of action and reaction of evolutionary development have made natural, if not irresistible, certain modes of conduct under certain conditions. These impulses to definite reaction to given stimuli reecho the historic activities of the race, and may be called instinctive. Some are intimately associated with organic functions which constitute our physical life, others with the activities which have made for the preservation and enrichment of life. It is the manifestation of these impulses which gives rise to the phenomenon of play in children. Play might then be defined as the expression of awakening instincts. To understand its full significance in child development it is necessary first to understand the significance of instinct.

James, in his chapter on Instinct, has incidentally thrown light upon the office of play in education. Many instincts, he says, are transient. If, during the period of activity of any instinct, the environment is favorable for its manifestation, a habit is formed which survives after the instinct has faded away ; but if the environment is unfavorable for the manifestation of that instinct, the instinct will soon fade and no habit will be formed, however favorable the environment may afterwards be. A chicken which has not heard the call of its mother during the first eight or ten days of life will never give heed to the call. Yroung ducks kept from the water for a certain period lose their instinct for swimming. Yroung squirrels confined in cages, failing to find soil in which to bury their uneaten nuts, soon cease all efforts to bury them.

Leaving the lower animals aside and turning to human instincts, we see the law of transiency corroborated on the widest scale by the alteration of different interests and passions as human life goes on. . . . In all pedagogy the great thing is to strike while the iron is hot, and to seize the wave of the pupil’s interest in each successive subject before its ebb has come, so that knowledge may be got and a habit of skill acquired, — a headway of interest, in short, secured, on which afterwards the individual may float. There is a happy time for fixing skill in drawing, for making boys collectors in natural history and presently dissectors and botanists ; then for initiating them into the harmonies of mechanics and of the wonders of physical and chemical law.1

“ The natural conclusion to draw from this transiency of instincts,” says James, “ is that most instincts are implanted for the sake of giving rise to habits, and that, this purpose once accomplished, the instincts themselves, as such, have no raison d'etre in the physical economy and consequently fade away.”

The play impulses of children then, we may affirm, have one all-important office of giving rise to habits and permanent

1 James, Psychologjq Vol. II, p. 400.

interests. There is a time when boys love and must learn to play ball, swim, and skate, for example, or be deficient in such sports and the particular training they give all their lives ; so there is a time when the habit of activity, that is, the habit of work and of enjoyment of work may be formed, and its opportunity lies in forming the right connection between

The Store

Photograph by John Boyd play and work at the right time. The opportunity of play is the opportunity of work.

Again, the trend of all these studies is to show that there is a practically definite growth and development of the child, physically, mentally, socially, morally, along lines more or less parallel with the development of the race, and that one familiar with these facts of child development can gauge with considerable assurance of accuracy the interests, aptitudes, and needs of children of a given age. In other words, there is a law of child development which has to a degree been determined. Now since children unfold or develop in a general way according to a definite and universal law, we find

Eskimos

Photograph by Dr. C. F. Hodge occurring all along the line certain characteristic reactions to stimuli and environment, and these characteristic reactions — pleasurable reactions, which may be with general accuracy foretold — are the plays of children. Some make them reecho the historic activities of the race, harking back through the countless generations of human evolution ; others make them look forward, preparing the child for future serious activities of life. Of some of these theories of play brief mention will be made later. Let it suffice here to say that whatever view we adopt, so far as the practical teacher and parent are concerned, all views tend to emphasize the importance of play and continually to enlarge its field. We may rest assured of its vital relation to the evolutionary process, and, as Chamberlain has well put it, “ play is concerned with everything ; emotions, feelings, acts, thoughts, imaginings, speech, — all begin their career in its subtle shaping influence.” And in this discussion of play which is to follow along a very practical line, I hope, let us think of play as the child’s conforming to the law of his nature. All along the line the child’s pleasurable response to his environment is his play.

Play and work. What has been said seems to indicate that play is very inclusive of the activities of child life and rather outside the ordinary limitation which makes play barren of any object or end outside the activity itself, a view

A Trolley Ride Photograph by John Boyd

with which I cannot agree. Play may achieve an end which is not only in the mind of the parent or teacher but in that of the child as well ; and this fact has a most significant bearing upon the transition from play to work in education. I hope to show that work and play (that is, play in the generic sense, however it may be in the popular use of the term) often shade off so imperceptibly in the case of the child that they cannot be distinguished. It is a mark of genius to love one’s work, to enjoy it in the doing, but it might be a matter of common occurrence. All play involves work, and children sometimes love to work, even to work for a definite result, as they love to play. This is a matter of observation time and again. I hold that it is one of the chief ends of education to develop a habit of joyousness in work. The fear that love of play will interfere with love of work is the most groundless of fears. The more a child loves play the more likely will he be to love work. The sneers that are made at the “ sugar coating ” of school work are made by those who do not understand what play is, or else are made at the efforts of those teachers who have violated play in ignorant attempts to utilize it. I have no plea for sugar-coated tasks, if they really be sugar coated, but to sweeten work with a real joy in the doing is the high art of the genius in teaching.1