Important developments of a different kind are taking place outside the classroom, writes Sean O’Connor
What games did you play as a child? My father describes a schoolboy game called bok-bok with misty eyes. Teams of players stood in line, leaping onto each other’s backs: cowardice was mocked and in-juries were common. The game was banned long ago. My own choices were limited to handball, cricket, soccer, marbles, hide-and-go-seek and running red rover. As teachers, we witness many of the same games we used to play. Watching them triggers memories of our own schooldays. When looking into the playground, we’re comforted by the fact that some things stay the same. Consider hopscotch: a thread through time, a grid our mother’s mother’s feet hopped and swung over.
Published in a more innocent age, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren by Iona and Peter Opie first suggested the playground was a site of a unique cultural activity. They detailed the ancient origins of many playground games, showing how they spread between continents, through succeeding generations who adapted and transformed the rules, inventing new variations.
Slang, rhymes, counting games and other rituals are hallmarks of a distinctive playground culture. However, children are seldom given credit for maintaining and protecting this vibrant culture. Perhaps it’s time for adults to reconsider the importance of the playground. As children we understand the playground’s value, but by the time we’re adults or teachers, we often see the playground as providing simple relief – stated in the name “break” – from the demands of the school day. “Break” implies that schools have serious responsibilities, whose importance trivialises socialising and play. Typically perceived as a place to cool off, a pressure valve for the institutional tension that threatens the sanity of any school, playgrounds are often seen as refuges from the classroom. But they are complex places worth deeper investigation.
The playground is not just about exercise, a vital aid to learning. It is a place owned by children, where emotions are expressed without being conditioned by an adult gaze. Most playgrounds present a diverse set of spaces where learners interact on their own terms, working, bending and breaking rules in order to fulfil developmental needs. It is also an important place for commerce and trade, where identities are forged and furthered beyond the confines of the classroom. Roles are learned and played.
Social interaction establishes hierarchies and oppositions. Groups of two or three children are common configurations: friendships and alliances are formed, often the most enduring and cherished aspects of school. These are routinely prevented from developing in the classroom, where interaction is monitored and evaluated. With outcomes-based education, personality has become something that is formally assessed.
Physically, co-ordination and athleticism find expression through primal encounters in the playground; chasing, running, mock-fighting, wrestling, jumping, skipping and catching help establish gender roles, while rougher or gentler pastimes test and establish different facets of individual identity. Socially appropriate behaviour, courage, determination and teamwork are learnt. Group membership, rumour, social information and discussion are all-important aspects of growing up, and they can only happen furtively inside a classroom. In the playground, they are given full rein.
Every society needs its counter-cultural forces, and many of them begin in the playground. Many playgrounds thus present the opportunity for subversion: for smoking, swearing, fighting, even theft. The fact that the playground provides a semi-controlled environment to learn this behaviour – and more commonly reject it – threatens school authority. Patrols by pupil leaders, prefects and staff, while undoubtedly providing re-assurance to vulnerable learners, represent the face of authority, trying to control a zone that’s not their own, and never will be.
Despite being an essential part of any school, playgrounds are often undervalued: little is done to improve them, except perhaps for durability. Benches and any other features placed in the playground invariably get broken. Principals despair at the destructive power of schoolchildren, and eventually withhold spending on them. Many playgrounds have an air of being abandoned.
They also provide a real or symbolic boundary to school property. However, in many instances, playgrounds do less than that. Where schools are threatened by crime, the playground is often the place that provides this nexus, a corrupted space.
Many schools have to wrap their playgrounds in razor wire. Many can’t afford this drastic measure. In these cases, the playground is a truly threatened zone, prey to the horrible influences of the outside world, saved only by the creative power of schoolchildren to make a place their own.
The fact that learners manage to preserve and transmit the unique rituals, games and traditions of the playground, despite the way that playgrounds are usually undervalued or threatened, is a true marvel. Adults often say children can be cruel: indeed, the playground is not an innocent place, not just a space for undeveloped adults. Children are their own people, and this is the space of their culture.
– The Teacher/M&G Media, Johannesburg, December 2001.