Play - Where the Real Learning Happens

By Michael Mendizza

(This article was published alongside The Homework Myth by Alfie Kohn)

The distinction between work (as in homework) and real learning is best appreciated by distinguishing between knowledge, with its implicit conditioning, and intelligence, which expresses naturally in the state of authentic play.

Each age and stage of a child’s development, and therefore the goal of real education, is the awakening and expanding of the capacity to express ever wider and richer realms of intelligence. Knowledge can be viewed as the imprint intelligence leaves in the body and brain, like the patterns left in the sand as the wind blows. The wind is alive, moving. Knowledge is static, fixed, conditioned, a mechanical pattern. Knowledge is habitual, reflexive. Intelligence is moving, unconditioned, always new and unexpected. 

Is the body and brain responding to the present challenge in a state of creative intelligence or is its response mechanical, prejudged (prejudice) and reflexive? This is the litmus test to determine if real learning is taking place or is the activity simple conditioning. Is the activity dulling the mind with mechanical repetition or is it challenging and awakening the full spectrum of a child’s capacity to discover? Is it fun, not to be confused with entertaining, but is it fun like the thrill of diving into a clear mountain river or climbing to the top of an unknown hill simply to see what the world looks like from way up there?

Placing value on whether the experience is dull or fun is perhaps more significant than the subject being explored. Real learning and Pavlov’s conditioning are ‘state specific’. The state we are in as we do the activity represents as much as 95 percent of what is being learned. If we are anxious of failing a test then anxiousness is what we are learning as we take the test. Understanding profoundly that learning and performance are ‘state specific’ reprioritises the importance, meaning and value we give to an experience. Optimum states result in optimum learning and performance, naturally. Worrying about optimum performance never results in optimum performance.

The optimum body-mind state for the expression of real intelligence is generally what we call play. Play is not an activity, such as baseball or piano. Play is the relationship we have to these activities. Any activity can be play and any activity can be work depending on our relationship. One can play the piano or one can practise the piano, which usually means work.

Practice can, however, be filled with wonder and discovery. In the book, Mastery, George Leonard, describes practice as the key to mastery in any field. Children skip rope by the hour, or at least used to. They build castles by the sea only to have it washed away, so they build again and again. I chalked up over 1000 consecutive hops on a pogo stick. Painters practise with paint, musicians with sound, dancers with movement. Each note radiating from the piano is an opportunity to discover greater nuance, tone, pitch, harmony or the lack of it, if childlike wonder and attention is there, observing, sensing, probing. It is not the activity but the state that counts.

Homework, tests and drills are often boring because they are mechanical. Rarely do they demand, engage or express a child’s true intelligence. The more often the brain is conditioned by boring repetition the more boring and repetitive the brain becomes. Repetition is fine, natural and necessary. Repetition allows the body-brain to habituate new skills, turn them over to automatic pilot, which frees perception to engage ever wider realms of creative intelligence through play. Repetition without this spirit and state of play dulls the body and the mind. 

Play and intelligence are two sides of the same coin. The state of authentic play embodies wonder, curiosity, imagination, trust, inquiry, flexibility, willingness to risk, affection and humour, all natural traits of children (before real play is replaced by the cultural idea of competition). When a child expresses these qualities we say they are playing. When an adult expresses these qualities we say that he or she is a genius. True genius isn’t about how much knowledge one has. True genius is measured by the fresh perceptions one has ‘playing’ with knowledge like a child plays with blocks. Remember, it was Einstein who said, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge’. Rational imagination is a state, the coherent free play of the mind exploring fresh and novel ways to live in harmony with nature, which is our nature. Is the activity we call homework developing this capacity, not as an idea, but the experience, the feeling of it, now? That is the key.

As a species we have long grown past the value of ‘repeat and drill’ for the sake of memorising new data. The next frontier in education is in cultivating optimum states for learning and performance, carrying forward and expanding the childlike qualities of genius into adulthood. Homework that fails to embody this optimum state with its wonder is not only out of date but dangerous.  

See also The Homework Myth by Alfie Kohn

Michael Mendizza is an educational and documentary filmmaker, writer, photographer and co-founder of Touch the Future. The organisation’s objective is to optimise learning, performance and well-being by cultivating an awareness of the way ‘states of relationship’ impact human development, at any age, in any field. www.ttfuture.com

Published in Kindred, issue 21, March 07