Dewey’s general position on the process of human learning implies a very strong role for the experimental method, considered in a broad sense, which he discusses in chapters 11–13 of DE in particular. The thrust of Dewey’s position is that learning through the experimental method implies engaging in activity unconstrained, where possible, by the requirements of others. This is particularly true of its employment in the early years, when it is important that children learn to appreciate the constraints and affordances of various materials without adult intervention through engagement with them as an end in itself. It follows that play will be an important medium for this kind of experimental activity. Dewey wants to argue that what we call “play” has an important pedagogical role in schooling and consequently its worth should be recognized on the curriculum. Play is the primary example of unconstrained experimental activity in childhood and is an essential forerunner of adult modes of engagement with the world through thoughtful activity.
Both involve ends consciously entertained and the selection and adaptations of materials and processes designed to effect the desired ends.
The discussion of play is thus central to Dewey’s concern with education as a preparation for adulthood and for what he is to call a vocation or course in life freely chosen by an individual. This link will become clearer in the chapter on vocational education. In addition, play forms a link between the formal and informal aspects of education that Dewey thought it vital to maintain, even within modern formal public education systems.
To avoid a split between what men consciously know because they are aware of having learned it by a specific job of learning, and what they unconsciously know because they have absorbed it in the formation of their characters by intercourse with others, becomes an increasingly delicate task with every development of special schooling.
Work and Play
Although there is a distinction between work and play, it is not easy to make philosophically. Traditionally, school has been assumed to be a place where children work to acquire knowledge and know-how as well as character attributes. Dewey wishes to question this by asking whether the distinction between work and play is really so clear cut and raises the question whether or not some at least of what should go on in school should be more properly characterized as play rather than work. He is particularly interested in the absence of pre-established constraints on children’s activities that may put them at the work rather than the play end of the spectrum of agency. Engaging in undirected activities, together with activities done for their own sake rather than for an ulterior motive, Dewey suggests, may be of greater educative value in some areas than engaging in directed, instrumentally oriented ones. The focus of his discussion of this topic is directed particularly to practical and aesthetic subjects. In this chapter the nature and persuasiveness of his distinctions and arguments will be examined.
Work, Play, and Games
Attempts to provide Socratic definitions of work and play are fraught with difficulties. The same goes for the related concept of “game,” famously the subject of some of the early sections of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Just as an easy definition of “game” eludes us (Suits Reference Suits1967; Ellis Reference Ellis2011),Footnote 1 so the same seems to apply to “play” and “work” and the boundaries between them. Work, it is sometimes said, is serious and play is non-serious (Moyles Reference Moyles1989). Those who think this are either not aware of or have forgotten the soccer manager Bill Shankly’s remark that “football is not a matter of life and death. It’s much more serious than that.” One might think that work is concerned with employment and play with leisure, but the soccer example again poses difficulties for that claim. A further claim, to which Dewey appears sympathetic, is that work has an end, whereas play is self-contained, with the end to be found largely in the activity itself, rather than in an ulterior purpose.
The difference between [work and play] is largely one of time-span, influencing the directness of the connection of means and ends.
By this Dewey seems to mean that play activities are associated with immediate realization of the end, through, for example, the enjoyment derived from a game of hide and seek. Work can also lead to gratification, even through the work itself being enjoyable, but it can also bring about enjoyment through deferred gratification, for example the realization of a completed project or the arrival of pay day. Dewey’s account seems, therefore, to permit a continuum of activities from play to work and vice versa or even some overlap between play and work as in the soccer example above or where an author is playing with ideas before final drafting of his story.
The examples of competitive play such as games and pointless work such as breaking rocks in prison both cast doubt on the claim that there is always a clear distinction between work and play. One might argue that play is unstructured, whereas work is structured, but examples of structured play and unstructured work are not hard to find. Finally, one might try to characterize work as a duty and play as pleasure, but pleasurable work and obligatory play activities are not hard to find. A neat definitional distinction looks hard to make, yet we have no difficulty in distinguishing between play and work in everyday contexts. Dewey’s position on the distinction appears to be a compromise. One can describe the distinction between work and play, but there are no watertight boundaries between the two and work activities and play activities can exist on a continuum.
At least part of the reason why this is so concerns context. What determines whether or not a given activity is play or work concerns the circumstances under which it takes place, for example as part of one’s paid employment or as part of one’s leisure. It is noteworthy that although schools are not places of paid employment for pupils they do have a serious purpose. The organization of the school day and, to a more limited extent, the curriculum, are predicated on a parallel work/leisure distinction. What, then, is Dewey’s point? He is not particularly concerned with making a philosophical point about the distinction between work and play, but rather with employing that distinction to make a point about pedagogy and the curriculum. It remains, however, to be seen whether or not the play/work distinction is really needed in order to make Dewey’s educational claims.
Dewey on Play and Kerschensteiner’s Conception of Productive Work
Dewey’s tendency to describe human activity in its unconstrained form as problem solving has parallels in the thinking of other writers, notably in the work of his contemporary in Germany, Georg Kerschensteiner. Kerschensteiner’s (Reference Kerschensteiner and Rutt1906) concept of “Produktiver Arbeit” or productive work has parallels with Dewey’s account of activity and both emphasize the importance of play as an originary form of characteristically human activity.Footnote 2 Kerschensteiner is interesting to study in relation to Dewey, because he draws somewhat different conclusions from similar premises.
Thus both emphasize children’s play as a prototypical form of human activity. Both also emphasize the self-directed nature of play activity and its foreshadowing of independent adult action. Finally, both draw attention to its articulated nature as the formation, carrying out, and reflection of plans, even if these plans do not receive the kind of formal representation typical of planning in the workplace.
Persons who play are not just doing something (pure physical movement); they are trying to do or effect something, an attitude that involves anticipatory forecasts which stimulate their present responses. The anticipated result, however, is rather a subsequent action than the production of a specific change in things. Consequently play is free, plastic.
Kerschensteiner, like Dewey, is happy for children to experiment with materials as an essential element in play. Indeed, Kerschensteiner is clear that understanding their properties is an essential part of learning to carry out activities with those materials and that play is very often a suitable means of doing so. We will shortly see how they derive different conclusions from these reflections.
Let us first of all look at what Dewey draws from his reflections on play. His claims can be set out as steps 1–5 below.
1. It is difficult to make hard and fast distinctions between work and play.
2. Play, like work, involves complex intentionality and articulated activity.
3. Play often involves free experimentation with the materials used in intentional activity.
4. A hard and fast distinction between work and play in school is difficult to maintain.
5. Play should not, therefore, be constrained by guiding or instructing children in the use of materials.
A comment on premise 1 is needed. Dewey does think that there is a distinction between work and play, but he contests that it is hard and fast. Work may shade into play and vice versa. He does not claim that the distinction depends on context.
From these claims it is possible to construct an argument that supports Dewey’s position. From 1 and 2, 4 seems to follow. From 3 and 4, 5 seems to follow. Dewey’s position can therefore be represented as a two-stage argument, ultimately resting on three premises: 1, 2, and 3, which he would regard as uncontroversial. If we accept that the two arguments are valid, then any weakness in Dewey’s position will lie in the plausibility of the premises, so it is worth examining them in more detail. I will focus on 1 since both 2 and 3 seem unexceptionable, except that we might wish to add the qualification “some play” to take account of the range of activities that fall under this term, rather than treating them as universal propositions. If we did this then we would have to ensure that the range of play mentioned in 1 and 2 is the same as that mentioned in 4. However, this does not seriously affect Dewey’s account.
Premise 1, that it is difficult to make hard and fast distinctions between work and play, deserves further scrutiny. The earlier discussion of attempts to distinguish between work and play seems to give qualified support to Dewey’s position. However, neither Dewey nor anyone else has maintained that there is no difference between work and play, and 1 certainly does not imply any such proposition. Dewey’s view is that there is a clear distinction between work and play, but it is not always possible to adjudicate definitely in any particular case whether an activity is work or play. Yet the argument from 1 and 2 to 4 seems to imply the view that the distinction is not hard and fast, since Dewey’s claim seems to be that it is improper to distinguish between work and play in the school context. This would be in keeping with his view that the amount of time between means and realization of objectives is important in making the distinction, and a short elapse of time between activity and realization of its objectives should be a feature of many school activities. Since we know, however, that work and play can be distinguished, there must be some criteria, formal or informal, for making that distinction. Since it cannot be made universally, it must be made in particular instances, such as according to the context in or the purpose for which it is made. This seems like a promising line of enquiry and so we will pursue it.
Work and Play at School
We have little difficulty practically in distinguishing between work and play in the adult world in general. We distinguish between employment and leisure activities in one context, for example, but over the weekend, when a wife asks her husband to stop playing a computer game and to fix the garage roof, then the distinction emerges again in a different context. Something similar happens when we make the contrast between school and out of school activities. In school, a child is supposed to be working, whereas time at home is free for play. However, time at home can itself be divided into homework and free time or doing domestic chores and playing. Likewise, at school itself we usually distinguish between time spent in class working and recreational periods.
Even within the class it is possible to distinguish between a time (perhaps at the end of term) when the class is permitted to bring games to school and the period where lessons take place. And of course children may well play at home with clay, wood, and other materials on self-generated projects. They will also do so in school, during craft or woodwork lessons, for example. To many children such lessons may seem like play, particularly if they have a fondness for pottery or woodwork, while others might find them a chore. However, the context of doing pottery at school and playing with clay at home is very different. At school, getting children to manipulate clay, whether or not such activities are structured, takes place within a formal education system, with its own values, aims, curriculum, pedagogical principles, and means of assessment. One cannot understand why a child is playing with clay at school without understanding this context. Dewey is committed to the view that play leading to significant learning can be individual or may occur with other children (see chapter 1 of DE). School, as a social environment, helps to make this possible.
It is the business of the school to set up an environment in which play and work shall be conducted with reference to facilitating desirable mental and moral growth. It is not enough just to introduce plays and games, hand work and manual exercises. Everything depends upon the way in which they are employed.
The point of these reflections is that although we can agree with Dewey that the distinction between work and play is not hard and fast, it is not difficult to make contextual and purpose-related distinctions between the two. So we have no difficulty in distinguishing between the purposes of playing with clay at home (for the child’s own self-amusement) and playing with clay in a pottery lesson at school (where the fact that it is unstructured is itself a pedagogical decision on the part of the teacher, who has a pedagogical aim in mind). The role of the teacher should then not just be considered in terms of direct instruction, but in creating situations in which productive learning can take place, in this instance through the unstructured manipulation of clay. And this is the point, that the way in which the school pottery lesson is carried out is a pedagogical decision, made because the teacher considers that playing with clay is the most effective way of getting a child to understand its properties and thus to become effective at pottery and, more generally, at problem-solving. The teacher might be right or wrong about this, but it is a pedagogical decision made in relation to the aims adopted and the curriculum followed. It does not follow, therefore, that one can make a normative decision about pedagogical methods on the basis of premises about the distinction between work and play, along the lines of conclusion 5 that play should not, therefore, be constrained by guiding or instructing children in the use of materials above. If this is right, Dewey would need to justify the non-structured employment of materials on grounds independent from 1 to 4.
What has then gone wrong with the 1–5 argument? As mentioned before, the problem lies with premise 1. It is false if taken to mean: It is difficult to make hard and fast distinctions between work and play independently of context and/or purpose.
But if this is what Dewey is claiming, then a critical premise in the argument cannot be used to sustain the conclusion and 5 does not follow from 1 to 4. It does not of course follow that 5 is false – this would require further argument. However, it does imply that 5 will need a separate argument to sustain it. There is a further complication, namely that if 5 is true, it is true within a context of curricular and pedagogic progression. Thus 5 may be true in the early phases of the pottery curriculum, because there may be compelling pedagogic reasons to allow students of pottery to understand the properties of clay through free-form exploration. Play in this context would be within the context of the work done to fulfil the curriculum, thus exemplifying the fluid boundaries between work and play within the context of progression within a curriculum and more generally within the context of schooling. Evidently though, it does not follow from this argument that there should be no progression from free-form exploration of the properties of materials to the more structured and instructional forms of working with clay. It is here perhaps that the differences between Kerschensteiner’s and Dewey’s approaches to practical education become most evident as I shall clarify below.
Practical and Vocational Education
According to Dewey, early experimentation requires free-form exploration of the properties of materials. Many would agree with this. According to Dewey, whether or not it constitutes play depends on whether there is an ulterior motive, an end that the agent has in mind that is clearly distinct and temporally separated from the means employed to realize it. For teachers this is probably true as they have curricular progression in mind, while for the child it may not be.
Dewey also seems to object to the imposition of structure on the activity by the teacher. But the objection lies in its claimed pedagogical ineffectiveness, rather than on the fact that it leads to the activity being work rather than play. The claim is rather that play activities are more effective in promoting desirable intellectual growth than work activities in the earlier stages of the practical curriculum. On this, Kerschensteiner would probably agree. We will see in the discussion in chapter 23 of DE, that Dewey adopts an expansive concept of vocational education, which is probably more like what we would now call “education for autonomy.” Kerschensteiner’s view is more restricted and he would see vocational education, both at school and in the workplace, as a preparation for work, albeit work that involves both a choice of Beruf or occupation and a considerable degree of independence in the workplace.
This turns out to mark a critical difference in the two philosophers’ attitudes to play activities at school. Dewey’s view is that all education is vocational education but that it is not directly related to employment. Kerschensteiner maintains that practical knowledge of the constraints of the workplace is a necessary part of anyone’s education and that paid employment is probably the destiny of most people for at least a part of their lives. Preparation for a Beruf, (an established and socially recognized occupation) is, therefore, in this sense an important part of education. Whereas Dewey considers paid employment as an option within one’s life choices, Kerschensteiner tends to think of it as one of the major options in the lives of most people.
For Dewey, therefore, it could be argued that the play–work transition is less pressing, as it will depend on teachers’ judgements about the growth of a young person’s problem-solving abilities and there can be a wide range of discretion as to when this transition should take place, that is, when young people should engage in longer term projects which involve a relatively structured approach. For Kerschensteiner, on the other hand, since the objective is ability to practice a Beruf (albeit with moral and civic awareness), the transition to the “operational conditions” of the workplace, where considerations of safety, cost, time, quality of product, welfare of colleagues, are all important, needs to be carefully planned for and handled. This in turn means that the young person needs to be introduced to project management earlier and in a more structured way than Dewey would probably be prepared to allow. We need, therefore, to see the Deweyan emphasis on play in the broader context of what Dewey takes to be one of the aims of education, namely the development of an ability to choose and to pursue a course in life. This becomes clearer in chapter 23 on “Vocational Education,” where Dewey deliberately broadens the concepts of vocation and occupation to include the central aspects of human activity and the direction given to a human life, which includes, but is not exhausted by, paid employment. Play is a foreshadowing of the experimental approach to life adopted by someone who is occupied by their vocation in the broadest sense.
Concluding Remarks
We can see how educational aims can affect a philosopher of education’s views on the role of play in schooling. Dewey’s emphasis on the pedagogical significance of play depends, to a large degree, not on the difficulty of making a hard and fast distinction between work and play, which, as we have seen, is indeed difficult to make, but rather on a judgement about the appropriate means to adopt in order to secure the intellectual development of children and young people to secure the means for choosing and pursuing a course in life. Dewey’s point therefore is largely a pragmatic one, concerned with the claim that a considerable amount of play is the best means to such an end. To the extent that he attempts an a priori justification for the importance of play, we can see that there are problems with such an approach. However, to justify the pedagogic role of play in the curriculum will need evidence about its efficacy at different stages of education, and this will have to be based on available evidence. It would fall to the Deweyan advocates of play as part of the curriculum, therefore, to provide the evidence for the educational value of play at different stages of the school curriculum, as opposed to, say, structured training in the properties and use of certain materials. The justification for play in the curriculum and for maintaining a shifting boundary between work and play would, then, have to be made piecemeal. But such a justification would be no worse for that.
