-
Foreword
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
ix FOREWORD BRIAN SUTTON-SMITH,ScholarinResidence,StrongNationalMuseumofPlay Anna Beresin’s analysis of the play life of children on the playground is a bit like reading about the Marxist revolution or even more powerfully about seeing the proletariat fighting for its rights while being slaughtered by the governing classes. In my thirty years as a university doctoral supervisor in psychology, education, and folklore, I have seldom if ever seen such a massive collection of data regarding what children are trying to do for themselves as human beings within their playgrounds and how teachers and other authorities are trying to interfere in the process. This book is an earthshaking anthropology of the injustices being done to children by the abolition of recess, particularly among disadvantaged economic and racial school populations. It is also an implicit critique of the current idealization and rationalization of individual child development, as if any such located sociology is not relevant. Psychology ’s general focus on the idealization of children’s solitary Kantian imagination is implicitly focused on individual children in their solitary playrooms with their solitary computers and personal television sets. The model is that of desk work in the middle-class work world. But what is rewarding in this book about a modern nightmare is the account of the many ways in which these children nevertheless make a mockery of the school’s and academic world’s requirements by making up “abnormative” play forms within which physical skills, rhymes, and songs are rewarded. These forms of play, which authorities often try to x Foreword ban, are often the only way in which these children come to terms with their confined school lives. They love to explain how well they can manage the game of wall ball or sing to stepping songs that challenge adult prudery. Here you find the only place where they can harbor a real pride in their own accomplishments. Thank you, Anna. ...