Tuesday, August 05, 2003

Kane on Education "The last obvious policy is in education. There is already a gathering counter-consensus in the UK around educational reform, led by voices like Tom Bentley of Demos, CreativeNet and the Scottish Council Foundation: they want to stop "factory schools turning out factory minds". The creative child can imagine new problems (rather than have them handed down to them); mingles ideas easily from one realm to another; makes mistakes, as long as they lead to more interesting solutions, and focuses on goals with all their powers of attention. That's a text-book list of the psychological attributes of play. Yet creative education should be about more than producing fodder for the "creative industries", or a better class of info-worker. The democratisation of creativity could save lives - or at a minimum, turn those lives away from self-destruction. If the play ethic means anything tangible, it is about occupying the gap that drug culture occupies in our poorest communities. And that gap is created by the distance between "work" as it stands - job-seekers allowances, McEmployment of all kinds, the spiritual tedium of "workfare" Britain - and the individuals who cannot (or will not) conform to its dictates. Drugs, you could say, are the dream-seekers' allowance: the most expedient way to boost your sense of human potential, when all the official routes heading towards that end seem rubble-strewn, or impossibly long, or depressingly unrewarding. This also explains the traditional hot-link between narcosis and pop culture. If your chemical dreams spur you to activity, then dancing, socialising and fucking - or making other people dance, socialise and fuck - is often the most gratifying way to make your mark on the world; to align your inner state with your outer reality. What Ibiza has really "uncovered", for all its reckless, oafish hedonism, is an inarticulate but deeply-felt rejection of the false dignities of contemporary labour. "I’m largin' it" should be taken literally: it means, My precious self is bigger than this mousy, pointless social role. An education for creativity which wanted to be truly “inclusive” would have to listen to this elemental and popular desire for playfulness. It’s an unruly vigour which has its subterranean link to an earlier, more carnivalesque Britain, evidently not entirely swept away by industrial capitalism. A time of "happy Mondays" and "the soul's play-day", when 18th century Gloucester bishops complained about "loutish mobs that are drunk with the cup of liberty". Teachers would have to find ways to tap into these disruptive energies, and turn them into a repertoire of usable life-skills. That means, among other new approaches, that the much-abused "media and cultural studies" would at last get its proper curricular due. Bringing context and history to pop songs, computer games and tabloid tv could provide kids with an exit route from the cul-de-sac of these escapisms, into richer areas of cultural tradition and understanding. From Big Brother to George Orwell (or from Ibiza Uncovered to Epicurus) is surely a worthwhile educational gambit. Economists who've read their Marx often talk about education as part of the "reproduction of labour" - the place where the character of the good worker is made. The play ethic wants an education which aims at the reproduction of creativity, the nurturing of the good player’s soul. Children should leave schools feeling motivated, in command of their faculties, and capable of expressing themselves in forms and behaviours which both please themselves and others. Why would such a child choose the temporary utopia of drugs, over the actual joys of skilful self-creation? Why would they not choose to play?" If you woke up and found that you were 8 again and had to go back to school, how would you feel? Would you not want a school that was more on Kane's lines than the one you send your kids to now? 8:29:36 AM    comment []

Play versus Work - Maybe the thought of a lifetime of "work" is putting boys off school? Here is an extract from Pat Kane's body of Work on Play - Thanks to Ross Mayfield for the link "Yet why believe in work, when work doesn't believe in you? The constant watchwords of the new capitalism are flexibility, creativity, self-improvement. Workers are urged to "get up to speed" with a runaway world: we must become mobile and tensile, enterprising and capable. We must harness our chariots to the sun of intense global competition. Yet these injunctions come from companies which hire you for a year, six months, maybe even less; who might be taken over at any time in some City of London or Wall Street manoeuvre; who try to wriggle out of long-term entanglements like pensions, wage and holiday agreements; and who shed labour whenever their position in the global marketplace shows the slightest competitive disadvantage. Trying to excel for companies that are themselves transient, provisional and unforgiving might come to seem like the grandest folly. When that realization comes - that is, when the work ethic crumbles before your eyes - then an intellectual vacuum opens up at the heart of contemporary capitalism, which desperately needs to be filled. Over the last decade, a procession of not-big-enough ideas have tried to fill the space - "downshifting", "work-life balance", all those slackers and idlers. None of them with much success or distinction. They all try to speak to our deep common anxiety: that if we keep up our loyalty to the work ethic, in a world where competition, mutability and innovation rule supreme, we will destroy ourselves. The LSE's Richard Sennett calls this the "corrosion of our characters" - where the acids of the new capitalism eat away at the old industrial virtues of self-discipline, sacrifice and duty. We need a new, similarly powerful social ethic for these hyper-demanding times. Some other world-view that can give a coherence to the frenzy of activities and interests that we scatter across our busy lives. Something - anything - that could make all these demands for "creativity" and "achievement" even worth the effort. I PLAY, THEREFORE I AM Welcome to the play ethic. First of all, don’t take “play” to mean anything idle, wasteful, frivolous or even necessarily childish. The trivialisation of play was the work ethic's most lasting, and most regrettable achievement. This is "play" as the great philosophers, and recently mind scientists, have understood it: the experience of being an active, creative and fully autonomous person. “Man plays only when he is in the fullest sense a human being“, said the great German Romantic Friedrich Schiller. “As man apprehends himself as free and wishes to use his freedom, then his activity is to play", agreed Jean Paul-Sartre. The classic 20th century psychologists - like Jean Piaget, Donald Winnicott and Erik Erikson - all understood play as our most effective way of mastering the complexities of our world, rather than submitting to its routines. And now that we can watch the very synapses of our minds perform, through medical neuro-imaging, the powers of play are even more confirmed. Those who clear space in their lives for activities that are pleasurable, voluntary and imaginative - that is, for play - have better memory, sharper reasoning, and more optimism about their future. As the dean of play studies, the University of Pennsylvania's Brian Sutton-Smith says, "the opposite of play isn't work. It's depression. To play is to act out and be wilful, exultant and committed, as if one is assured of one's prospects". So to call yourself a "player", rather than a "worker", is to immediately widen your conception of who you are, and what you might be capable of doing. It is to dedicate yourself to realizing your full human potential; to take an essentially active, rather than passive stance towards your environment; and to be constantly guided in this by your sense of fulfillment, meaning and satisfaction. The play ethic is what happens when the values of play become the foundation of a whole way of life. It turns us into more militant producers, and more discriminating consumers. It causes us to re-prioritise the affairs of our hearts, to upgrade the quality of our emotional and social relationships. It makes us more activist in our politics, but less traditional in their expression. And most of all, the play ethic forces us to think deeply about how we should pursue our pleasures - and how we reconcile that with our social duties. So, like the work ethic, the play ethic is a set of feelings and principles about how we should be active in the modern world. But the difference between the two is huge. Work is always (to coin a phrase) the involuntary sector - the realm of compulsion and necessity, where men and women have to do what they have to do. But as Sartre says, play is what you do when you feel at your most free, your most voluntary. When every positive decision you make about your life carries both a risk, and a promise, of something new and challenging taking place. This is why the play ethic isn’t “the leisure ethic”: the last thing it involves is slumped relaxation." This is an extract from a 4,00 word piece and a wideranging site with tons of material 8:18:47 AM    comment []