Spontaneous and Supervised Play in Childhood (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

Excerpt from Spontaneous and Supervised Play in Childhood

Most books on play have been concerned with the spontaneous activities of children in fortuitous environment, or with the description of the more formal games that children play. The author has not described games nor has she discussed the informal play of children as it may be observed ordinarily in the home, schoolyard, and vacant lot. but has given a picture of children at play in a planned environment. If the main task of civilization is, as Wallas suggests, to produce a new environment whose stimulation of our existing dispositions shall tend toward a good life, then the chief office of education is to provide an environment whose stimulation of the predispositions of children shall tend toward a good life. This is just what the author has done. She planned an environment adapted to stimulate the play tendencies of children toward right responses. The original nature of children is conceived by the author not as antagonistic to but as favorable for the development of those qualities, physical, mental, and moral, which we desire for mankind generally. Human nature as exhibited in children has nothing that is not available for the good life, if only the sequence of conduct be started in the right direction - it has no quality we can afford entirely to lose. But it is in the wisely planned environment alone that human nature and the good life are wholly consistent.

Now education has all too commonly made this mistake - it has been concerned over-much with the adjustment of children to the existing environment.

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