Kids Don't Play by the Rules
That’s the way it should be.
- John Ebbert
A while back I made a sculpture. It was an intimidating sculpture, for some. Some people thought it was downright dangerous.
My sculpture was about 30-feet long and 7-feet wide. It was a sidewalk of sorts. A slab. Concrete framed in wood about 8-inches thick. I installed it in the woods at a sculpture center near New Paltz, New York.
Obviously, people don’t normally think of sidewalks as dangerous—especially in places where there is no traffic. For the intimidated, though, it wasn’t the sidewalk itself, but what was on the sidewalk, that made the sculpture dangerous.
On the sidewalk was a game of Hopscotch.
Yes, Hopscotch, that deadly game of prancing madness. Well, you do throw stones, don’t you?
Here are the rules for the game of Hopscotch that I included on the lid of the box of sidewalk chalk I’d installed alongside the sculpture:
Still doesn’t seem so dangerous, does it?
Okay, there was one potentially dangerous aspect to my Hopscotch game: The numbered squares were on casters—swiveling wheels.
The wheeled squares were strung together by a sliding rope with a handle, kind of like a pull toy.
When people imagined themselves playing my Hopscotch game, they envisioned their feet flying out from under them; they contemplated cracked tailbones, twisted ankles, snapped wrists, broken crowns.
Of course, having played the game in my studio, I knew it was possible to play without getting hurt. In fact, with a little athletic ability, for a youngish adult, the game wasn’t really all that difficult.
Still, they called me irresponsible. They asked me how I could even think of putting such a thing in a place where children came for summer programs. They envisioned children with cracked tailbones, twisted ankles, snapped wrists, broken crowns.
The adults who looked at my sculpture had projected their concerns for their own well-being, forecasting them as like concerns for the well-being of children. How could they not? It’s only natural that we want to keep our children safe. With our experiences of lives lived, we believe that we know what’s best for our children—how to keep them from danger, how to teach them to view the world in the ways we see it.
The thing is: Children do not see the world the same way adults do. They see it with fresh eyes. Children do not perceive things from within rule-dominated contexts. They make up their own rules. Children tend to engage directly with the world around them, not through theoretical constructs of possibilities and probabilities.
We must remember this when we think about educating our children. We need to ask way more than we tell—especially with children of very young ages. We need to find out more about what they are looking at, what they are experiencing, what they are reaching out for when they try to understand. It’s through this interaction with our children that learning to learn begins, and I’m not just talking about the children learning to learn.
Children learn faster than adults. They are equipped at birth to begin to engage with the reality that surrounds them. They recognize faces. They mimic. They expect. They learn from concrete experiences of interaction: how objects and beings act based upon appearances and motions. They learn bodily, with their senses. Children are much more active in the creation of their knowledge, than adults give them credit for. They are active receptors, not just passive absorbers. Adults often try to explain away childhood by insisting on lessons taught as abstract ideas meant to model surroundings into concepts that cohere with potentials about outcomes, and blah, blah, blah. Children, though, just need to do to learn.
When children interacted with my sculpture they ignored the rules. Good for them. They dragged the rope by the handle, pulling the carts together like a train; they sat on the wheeled squares; they hopped on them in ways that fit their bodies; they saw the sidewalk as a canvas for doing chalk drawings. The kids played inventively, as children do.
The little girl in the picture above would now be in her mid-twenties. I wonder what she would think of the same project, if she came across it today.
We have lots to learn from children. Perhaps the most important of these is to relax and to see things again with fresh eyes. Screw the rules! If we once again approached some of our problems and concerns without all the theoretical modelling and misleading statistics, perhaps we would come up with more creative solutions.
Seems kind of peaceful, doesn’t it?
dooleyglot books
info@dooleyglot.com Greenville, NY 12771 www.dooleyglot.com