The Times Magazine: Have children really forgotten how to play?
By David Rowan
In a chaotically vibrant East London playground, nine-year-old Rebecca is busy nailing a persistent myth of modern childhood. "I went to a Chinese restaurant, to buy a loaf of bread ...," she starts to sing, her wide eyes concentrating intensely on the boisterous clapping routine she is practising with her classmate Muhima.
"... He wrapped it up in a five pound note, and this is what he said said said:
'My name is Andy Pandy, sugar and candy,
Dad's had a baby, mum's gone crazy;
Do me a favour - get lost!'"
The two girls break apart giggling, proud of a performance that has had to compete with a cacophony of football yells and a multilingual playground scramble of bulldog charge. "We changed the words so that it was dad having a baby," Rebecca explains with a subversive grin. "It makes it seem funnier. We're always making things up like that."
It is morning breaktime at Gainsborough Primary School, a dauntingly Gradgrindian edifice in Hackney Wick surrounded by bleak industrial warehouses and battle-worn council estates. Officially, this is one of Britain's most impoverished neighbourhoods - yet the riches on show during playtime today would confound any index of childhood deprivation. From improvised reality-television games at one end to traditional hopscotch at the other, the anarchic chaos of the playground turns out, on closer inspection, to be a seething but curiously ordered grid of self-devised distractions. It may escape the patrolling teachers' attention, but here the children are resolutely in control.
They have been playing Spider-Man and Scoobie Doo, hula hoops and a joined-hands running game they call "octopus king" (its object: to tag the individual "fish" who cross their path). In a sheltered area framed by wooden benches, half a dozen younger children are ending a breathless game of "off-ground touch", with only the benches offering them protection. The repertoire includes improvised Lord of the Rings role-play, Eminem-style rap duels, and simple old-fashioned cops and robbers; a small group of girls is skipping, unaware that their chant is perhaps a century old. With almost 50 ethnic and national groups represented here among just over 300 pupils, they are evidently also learning from each other - from Caribbean skipping songs ("Jenny was a baker, Living in Jamaica ... Drop out tha' window, broke her little finger..."), sung here by both black and white girls, to old "naughty" rhymes suitably updated to amuse the mobile-phone generation:
"What's the time? Half past nine.
Phone your uncle on the line.
If he falls, break his balls
Take them up to Santa Claus."
It is a common complaint nowadays that children have "forgotten how to play", whether because electronic toys and screens are inducing a relentless passivity, or through wider threats to traditional games. Often the blame is put on local authorities' excessive caution in this litigious age: a report from the Children's Society and the Children's Play Council three years ago claimed that some schools had banned daisy chains, tag and yo-yos for fear of spreading germs or causing injury. Another widely reported study by Keele University echoed concerns that conkers were being banned as "offensive weapons", skipping ropes confiscated after minor accidents, and even football kicked out of one primary school in two. The current obesity panic is only adding to these worries, along with children's ever-growing technological sophistication.
But have today's PlayStation-owning and text-messaging nine- and ten-year-olds really lost the art of creative, imaginative play? The Times Magazine decided to investigate by visiting primary schools across Britain to watch and listen. I went in search not of the songs or activities taught by teachers and parents, but of the uncensored rhymes and self-generated games that children pass among themselves. The brief was simple: to discover whether the 21st-century playground retains any of the variety and vitality documented so thoroughly in Peter and Iona Opie's classic 1959 survey, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren.
Collectors have documented children's lore for centuries, often to record what they considered a dying culture. When William Newell published Games and Songs of American Children in 1883, he described his material as "an expiring custom" whose oral tradition was "perishing at the roots". A decade later, when the English folklorist Lady Alice Bertha Gomme published her 964-page Traditional Games of England, Scotland and Ireland, she hoped that her work would help preserve the games' "civilising" influence.
. . . ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE . . .
In a chaotically vibrant East London playground, nine-year-old Rebecca is busy nailing a persistent myth of modern childhood. "I went to a Chinese restaurant, to buy a loaf of bread ...," she starts to sing, her wide eyes concentrating intensely on the boisterous clapping routine she is practising with her classmate Muhima.
"... He wrapped it up in a five pound note, and this is what he said said said:
'My name is Andy Pandy, sugar and candy,
Dad's had a baby, mum's gone crazy;
Do me a favour - get lost!'"
The two girls break apart giggling, proud of a performance that has had to compete with a cacophony of football yells and a multilingual playground scramble of bulldog charge. "We changed the words so that it was dad having a baby," Rebecca explains with a subversive grin. "It makes it seem funnier. We're always making things up like that."
It is morning breaktime at Gainsborough Primary School, a dauntingly Gradgrindian edifice in Hackney Wick surrounded by bleak industrial warehouses and battle-worn council estates. Officially, this is one of Britain's most impoverished neighbourhoods - yet the riches on show during playtime today would confound any index of childhood deprivation. From improvised reality-television games at one end to traditional hopscotch at the other, the anarchic chaos of the playground turns out, on closer inspection, to be a seething but curiously ordered grid of self-devised distractions. It may escape the patrolling teachers' attention, but here the children are resolutely in control.
They have been playing Spider-Man and Scoobie Doo, hula hoops and a joined-hands running game they call "octopus king" (its object: to tag the individual "fish" who cross their path). In a sheltered area framed by wooden benches, half a dozen younger children are ending a breathless game of "off-ground touch", with only the benches offering them protection. The repertoire includes improvised Lord of the Rings role-play, Eminem-style rap duels, and simple old-fashioned cops and robbers; a small group of girls is skipping, unaware that their chant is perhaps a century old. With almost 50 ethnic and national groups represented here among just over 300 pupils, they are evidently also learning from each other - from Caribbean skipping songs ("Jenny was a baker, Living in Jamaica ... Drop out tha' window, broke her little finger..."), sung here by both black and white girls, to old "naughty" rhymes suitably updated to amuse the mobile-phone generation:
"What's the time? Half past nine.
Phone your uncle on the line.
If he falls, break his balls
Take them up to Santa Claus."
It is a common complaint nowadays that children have "forgotten how to play", whether because electronic toys and screens are inducing a relentless passivity, or through wider threats to traditional games. Often the blame is put on local authorities' excessive caution in this litigious age: a report from the Children's Society and the Children's Play Council three years ago claimed that some schools had banned daisy chains, tag and yo-yos for fear of spreading germs or causing injury. Another widely reported study by Keele University echoed concerns that conkers were being banned as "offensive weapons", skipping ropes confiscated after minor accidents, and even football kicked out of one primary school in two. The current obesity panic is only adding to these worries, along with children's ever-growing technological sophistication.
But have today's PlayStation-owning and text-messaging nine- and ten-year-olds really lost the art of creative, imaginative play? The Times Magazine decided to investigate by visiting primary schools across Britain to watch and listen. I went in search not of the songs or activities taught by teachers and parents, but of the uncensored rhymes and self-generated games that children pass among themselves. The brief was simple: to discover whether the 21st-century playground retains any of the variety and vitality documented so thoroughly in Peter and Iona Opie's classic 1959 survey, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren.
Collectors have documented children's lore for centuries, often to record what they considered a dying culture. When William Newell published Games and Songs of American Children in 1883, he described his material as "an expiring custom" whose oral tradition was "perishing at the roots". A decade later, when the English folklorist Lady Alice Bertha Gomme published her 964-page Traditional Games of England, Scotland and Ireland, she hoped that her work would help preserve the games' "civilising" influence.
. . . ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE . . .
posted by David Rowan at Saturday, May 21, 2005
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