ABSTRACT
In many tribal cultures festival play is sacred play. Excesses of behavior are decreed—as appropriate to certain seasonal or religious ritual occasions (Turner, 1984). In modern civilization, however, we tell ourselves that play is not a sacral and an obligatory performance whether it is excessive or not; rather, it is a profane and optional one. At least that has been our general message since the advent of industrialism. When in 1695 John Locke discouraged his readers from allowing their children to play in the streets and urged that they were better off inside the house with their alphabet blocks away from the company of raucous children, he initiated what was to become a new distinction. Now there was to be educational play. In the course of the next few centuries, and in the hand of Pestalozzi and Froebel and their successors, this was to become a new kind of sacralized play at least amongst a minority of educators, particularly those concerned with preschool children. In the present century social science studies have gone way beyond this by suggesting that educational play is directly related to how children learn, how they solve problems, and how they become creative. The present book is itself an illustration of the emergence of the research-based view that schools have a great deal to gain by basing their curriculum on children’s play. What we are left with then in modern life is the notion, not of one kind of play that serves to unify the tribe, but of two kinds of play, an educational one that is somewhat sacred, or fast becoming so, and another more festive kind that we hope to confine to the playground, but that often has a tendency to sneak into the school and upset our lessons, whereupon it is termed “illicit” play (King, 1982).The contemporary situation is complicated further by the fact that even this distinction is too simple. Modern organized sports have also achieved a kind of international sacralization in this century. And given the rapid and massive expansion of the toy market in the past two decades, together with its accompanying literature assuring us of its educational value, one can assume that it too might in time acquire a similar odor of virtue. When one considers the agitation against war toys, it is quite possible to envisage a time when the toy industry is completely domesticated by conservative public opinion and can take on the ideal status that already is granted by us to such “educational” activities as number games, word games, and game simulations of everything from geography to the marketplace. One can see that even the cartoons today are much more domesticated than those of just 20 years ago. Whereas Bugs Bunny and Road Runner were quite violent characters who were constantly undergoing transmogrifications of their bodies and identities, the typical modern cartoon (e.g., G.I. Joe), though it is full of massive explosions and property violence, carefully veils from us the death or dismemberment of particular individuals, and the cast of characters always displays a proper balance of the sexes and minorities. The cartoon is on the way to the kind of idealization that the jigsaw puzzle has had for 100 years.
