More press on the Play Ethic. I got the chance to summarise the book for the Independent on Sunday - see continued post link below - and there's also a semi-serious 10-step guide to playerhood which you might enjoy. Posted there is also a review from the Times Educational Supplement - which is happily positive. My publisher, Macmillan, has also built a site for the Play Ethic, which contains a good explanatory interview about the book from me. And the Times did a little blurb also, pointing out the parallel with Richard Neville's Playpower manifesto. Some more pieces to come over the next few weeks - will keep building up the archive here.
Independent on Sunday
12th September, 2004
State of Play
By Pat Kane
They seem like the most obvious and unambiguous pair of words in the language: work and play. What one is, the other is not. The first is the necessary, duteous labour that maintains our society’s wealth and stability. The second is the messy, trivial indulgence that we allow ourselves (and our children) when our labours cease. Isn’t this obvious?
Not at all. The truth is that, in the UK and Europe at least, our attitudes towards work - how we define, regulate and endure it - are in a state of acute crisis. Meanwhile, we downgrade and disregard our elemental human capacity for play - a capacity which, if properly understood, could provide us with a powerful new ethics: a way to revive our enthusiasm for the active life.
At the moment, work seems to be more about the inactive life. Recently, the Bank of England reported that half a million men had left their jobs in the nineties because of ‘generous long-term sickness benefits’. A Newsweek cover in August depicted a giant thumb squashing a office drone; the story related how business and governments are getting tough on Europe’s work-shy workers, whose long holidays and short daily labours are being blamed for the drift of jobs to more toil-friendly territories, like Eastern Europe and Asia.
Even when they’re in work, they’re slacking, if the recent French bestseller Bonjour Paresse! - Hello Laziness! - is any evidence. Its subtitle is ‘The Art and Importance of Doing As Little As Possible in the Workplace’.
The historian Niall Ferguson has recently been peddling the notion that Europe has an ‘atheist sloth ethic’, compared to god-fearing, work-loving Americans, who still retain the ‘Protestant work ethic’ of their Puritan forefathers. As we all know, our Presbyter General, Gordon Brown MP, has been conducting a seven-year war against sloth and for the work ethic (remember his recent, eye-popping assault on the ‘sickie’ culture in the public sector, and his consistent animus against the work-shy poor).
Yet what always startles me about this government is the sheer incoherence, even schizophrenia, of its vision for what motivates modern men and women. They call for ‘a renewed work ethic’ – but aren’t these the legislators who decriminalised dope and propose 24-hour drinking laws, who enable the digital transmission of a thousand trashy lifestyle channels, who loosen the gaming laws so that every community can potentially have its own casino?
In railing against the ‘permissive society’ and ‘yob culture’, did Fr. Blair notice that unleashing a nation of consumerist, hedonist, screen-watching leisureholics hardly helps his case? No wonder the Bank of England report on sick leave noted a ‘large increase’ in numbers citing ‘mental and behavioural disorders’. These schizophrenics are driving us crazy.
Confused politicians? That’s hardly news. But we should try to do better. The problem is that too many of us are happy to accept a crippling dualism in our lives. Our willingness to come together to make objects or services that enhance and improve our society shouldn’t be confined to the term ‘work’. And our inexhaustible human urge to express ourselves, to dream of different worlds and futures, to seek out new experiences and relationships - all this shouldn’t be confined to the realm of ‘leisure’ or ‘recreation’. How can we integrate these two human impulses - that is, our ability to produce, and our capacity to imagine?
I believe that play, and particularly the notion of the player, can be a new and unifying force in our lives. The first thing we need to do is to make our understanding of the term much more profound. We need to shrug off the Puritan legacy - ‘the soul’s play-day is the devil’s work-day’ – that has confined play to childishness at best, and deviance at worst.
The word ‘play’ itself has a surprising etymology. It comes from the Indo-European term -dlegh, meaning ‘to engage, to exercise oneself’. Play is essentially about active and energetic individuals, existing in a dynamic relationship with others. Hardly a trivial or silly definition.
Look at biology and psychology, and we can see how play is as essential to human development as work - arguably more so. It is through early play that we complex mammals build up the essential skills for survival and flourishing. And as our societies move further and further away from scarcity and into affluence, these core skills of play - communicating, interacting, imagining, experimenting - become more central and vital to our adult lives, not more marginal.
As much as we can look around us and see a work ethic in crisis, I think we can equally see a play ethic emerging before our eyes. Information technology is crucial in this. We are in the midst of a digital generation - I call them ‘soulitarians’ - whose attitude to technology is the opposite of ‘alienated’ and ‘oppressed’.
Unlike the old workers, these new players presume that the interactive machines in their lives - e-mail or mobile, Playstation or iPod, weblog or search engine - exist to connect them with others, or to enrich their experience, or to collaboratively create, not to serve someone’s strategic goal or bottom line. Business and organisations are struggling to harness the potential of these digital players - but when they do, the landscape of how we create products and services will be completely changed.
If play means ‘imaginative engagement with others’, then players can be found in many more places than the tech-sector. A play ethic could provide a positive case for the reduction of working hours, rather than the negative and defensive arguments that protect ‘life’, ‘family’ and ‘relationships’ from ‘work’.
A player with free time from production is a different prospect from a worker with free time. Rather than wearily plug themsevles into the ‘feelies’ of leisure and entertainment (so thoughtfully enabled by the current government), the player’s mentality is to be in the world, testing out possible schemes and initiatives with others, literally ‘playing their part’ in the drama of a community or city.
Forging your play ethic is very much about taking your own decisions, and making your own mind up, about your future direction as a productive and creative person (see ‘How to be a Player’) - which many people, as my book shows, are already doing.
But wouldn’t it be great if we had a government which really ‘joined-up’ its thinking about how to maximise the potential of its citizens? Rather than harangue them into work, and then befuddle them with leisure?
Then again, maybe a nation of active players isn’t exactly what a bunch of confused politicians would welcome.
Pat Kane’s The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living is out on Macmillan, for more see http://www.theplayethic.com. Pat Kane is appearing in Borders in Glasgow on 16th September, 0141 222 7700
HOW TO BE A PLAYER: A TEN-STEP GUIDE
1. Take reality lightly. This was the definition of the play attitude given in 1794 by Friedrich von Schiller, author of the ‘Ode to Joy’ – and it’s still right. This doesn’t mean living in a fantasyland. But it does mean striving to see all the fixed structures in your life – whether work, school, family, relationships, technology – as potentially changeable, rather than grimly determined. Literally, seeing things ‘in play’ and ‘at play’.
2. Have children, or be around them, at various ages and stages. Kids today are thriving in an environment of speed, interactivity and cultural change that their elders never imagined. Respect their strivings, and learn from their playful energies.
3. Play the lottery…and plan your future. A play mentality is about staying coherent in the face of incessant change – so it’s healthy to sample some of the extremes forms that play can take. Gambling is about allowing the gods of chance to play with you: scenario planning is about playing God (or at least simulating him/her) over your own life. Do one directly after the other, and you’ll definitely be living a play ethic.
4. Take this job… and rise above it. Confucius said that ‘the man who finds a job he loves never works another day in his life’. If you haven’t found it yet, at least keep imagining that productive and creative future you want for yourself, even in the midst of the most oppressive tedium. No matter what situation they find themselves in, players are always internally prepared for things to change – and because their mentality is open and searching, they’re able to see change where others can’t.
5. Build your networks – as many as you can. Players don’t (or shouldn’t) depend on static structures to support their activities – not just the company, not just the state, not just the family, not just the community. Use the internet, and as much free-time as you can manage, to connect yourself to people who are passionately interested in specific things that are relevant to your life-journey. Treat your desires with respect, not contempt.
6. Never pass up the chance to experience something crazy or challenging. It’s a big globalised world out there – and the more you can play with your basic terms of reference, the better prepared you’ll be for the next big shift or change in society. Try a new religion or theory, ponder the quantum or the Mobius strip, take up an underground sport, sample an unfamiliar drug. But always try and do it in good, convivial company.
7. Get broadband, become wireless. What the town square and the shop floor was to the worker, so the broadband terminal and the wireless hotspot is to the player – both open spaces which enable people to connect and commune. Except players can connect to the world, at almost any point in the world. The web is your global playground – use it.
8. Be an unashamed amateur at something. Amateur means ‘doing something for the love of it’. That childish moment of ‘playing around’ is such an essential energy source for us – and we downgrade it at our peril. Esteem your hobbies: be a Jill or Jack of all the trades you’d like to try. (Music is particularly good for the health of a player’s synapses).
9. Extend the playground. Being a player is fine and dandy – but having a play ethic is about realising that politics might stand in the way of everyone getting a change to play. Support campaigns, parties and politicians that look at reducing working hours, extending parental and sabbatical leave, supplying free grants for education and the arts. And be intelligent and innovative about your own lifestyle – hopefully with a partner who wants to play and care.
10. Attend to your resources. Play creates energy, but it also requires it. So burn off as much as you ingest; deploy whatever mind-therapies are required to keep eternal sunshine on your spotless mind; laugh and flirt and have as much sex as you can. And that’s an order!
Times Educational Supplement, Sept 10, 2004
Plea For Play Hits All The Right Notes
Review by Gerald Haigh
THE PLAY ETHIC: A MANIFESTO FOR A DIFFERENT WAY OF LIVING. By Pat Kane. Macmillan Pounds 12.99
CULTIVATING CREATIVITY IN BABIES, TODDLERS AND YOUNG CHILDREN. By Tina Bruce. Hodder & Stoughton Pounds 14.99
A WELL-TEMPERED MIND: USING MUSIC TO HELP CHILDREN LISTEN AND LEARN. By Peter Perret and Janet Fox. Dana Press Pounds 16.50
In the film The Sound of Music, Maria (Julie Andrews) famously takes down the nursery curtains to make play clothes for the stern captain's seven children. It's a subversive act for, as the housekeeper tells her: "Von Trapp children do not play -they march!"
It's surprising that Pat Kane doesn't invoke Maria -the ultimate playful adult ("a flibbertigibbet, a will o' the wisp, a clown") -in support of his thesis, for he drags in just about everyone else. His richly exotic index, in fact, reads like one of those knowingly clever songs by Noel Coward; the Ds alone include Bobby Darin, Rene Descartes, Dilbert, the Dixie Chicks and Greg Dyke.
Kane's entertaining roller-coaster ride of a book strives to define a counter to the "work ethic", and to give it a philosophical underpinning, illustrated by reference to people and groups who are reaching for, or have achieved, a playful life of unbridled creativity. Take Sarah, for example, "a tall, chin-forward woman in her early thirties".
"'Of course,' she announced, cigarette already aloft, 'you have a slightly wobbly moment about whether you'll get the next gig -whoops, hold on.' Her mobile phone rang: it was a London product designer." (No wonder Julie Andrews hasn't made it into Kane's universe. What chance does she have against the cool Sarah with her "gel-flipped hair"?) To the teacher who reads them, some of Kane's ideas are already received wisdom, but it's still good to see them reiterated. "Education has always prepared children for 'society'," he writes. "Yet 'society' has never been prepared for truly educated children."
Kane detects real hope in the way educators strive to inject passion and vision into the nuts and bolts of their work. He finds The TES (which he read over six months as part of his research) "inspiring". It has "human capaciousness". There are "so many experts straining to translate their findings into useable tools for pressured teachers".
Kane knows there are too many people out there who really do think life is a serious business that's not workin' if it ain't hurtin'. The scary thought (which he avoids) is that it just might be their seriousness that gives the rest of us the playful freedom he's so passionate about.
Kane, you imagine, would approve of the current drive to get more creativity into the curriculum. He'd certainly nod at Tina Bruce's notion in Cultivating Creativity of the child's right to play. "Whilst they play, children prepare, simmer and illuminate ideas."
There are always doubts about any earnest attempt to corral and closely define a concept such as creativity. Nevertheless, it's an area where teachers -especially those trained in the grey 1990s -need lots of practical help, and that's what Professor Bruce sets out to provide.
She begins by demolishing some myths -creativity isn't necessarily about genius, or just to do with the arts, or only displayed in performance. She goes on to give guidance about nurturing individual children, about building a creative environment and about the crucial role of adults. (How many parents worry that their child has a teacher who's not picking up on obvious signs of creativity?) There are good photographs that illustrate points in the text. Professor Bruce is strong on the idea that creativity isn't just about painting and singing.
In A Well-Tempered Mind (a reference to Bach's ground-breaking "Well-Tempered Clavier"), the authors put flesh on the feeling shared by all music teachers that the experience of music enhances thought and learning in unexpected directions, well beyond the simple act of enjoying the sound.
The book describes work in the United States: the Bolton Project, in which a group of musicians regularly visited Bolton elementary, an under-performing school in North Carolina. They played music to the children and encouraged responses that improved thinking skills, abstract reasoning and communication. Over two years, test scores improved and the school moved out of its "at risk" status.
The book describes the project and many of the individual lessons and children's reactions in detail. It's exciting stuff and necessary reading for all who are battling to ensure the place of music in the school curriculum.
