Play Manifesto

The Problem

Play, playfulness, and creativity may be of central importance in human life and development, both as individuals and in the development of societies and cultures, according to contemporary social scientists (Bruner & Sherwood, 1976; Graeber & Wengrow, 2021; Huizinga, 2009; Marjanović, 1977; Piaget, 1951; Sutton-Smith, 1997; Sutton-Smith et al., 2017; Vygotsky, 1976, and many others). In my view, too, they have intrinsic value for humans.

However, modern industrial society has posed serious challenges to play, playfulness, and creativity. This problem is especially severe in the lives of children, although it exists for all. Because of its severity and specificity, in this manifesto, I particularly address the problems and obstacles related to play in the lives of young children.

Modern industrial societies around the world place a strong stress on conventional education in which play, playfulness, and creativity have been systematically suppressed and devaluated. Public education on all levels, including the earliest childhood[1], has increasingly focused on the effectiveness of teaching cognitive skills, the transmission of ready-made knowledge, pattern recognition, memorization, and training. Childhood is considered the most important time in life that should be organized around activities that enhance the child’s “preparation for life” rather than left to the unpredictability and serendipity of living in the moment (Carpe Diem). Moreover, since “preparation for life” is the sole raison d’être of the usually mandated public education, this organized preparation for life is considered more valuable than “merely living” – e.g., “extremely important,” “having importance of the national interest,” (cf., Elmore & Fuhrman, 1990). Thus, just being, just “living,” just having “free time,” especially in childhood, is often seen as a waste of time. In the serious educational business of “preparation for life” – a life that will come in some distant future – there is not much place for play, playfulness, and creativity, these “frivolous,” unproductive, unpredictable, and untamable activities (cf. Sutton-Smith, 1997). Nor is there a place for other kinds of leisure that are, outside of education, known to be necessary for the good life and personal enrichment, such as spending time with family and friends, engaging in the activities of personal interests and desires, having time for serendipitous encounters, dialogues, and reflections, entertainment, or just doing nothing.

According to some anthropological, sociological, and psychological studies, (Bronfenbrenner, 1981; Bruner, 1968, 1976; Bruner et al., 1976; Patte, 2009; Riesman et al., 1961; Sutton-Smith, 1972, 1973, 1976b), suppression and devaluation of play, playfulness, and personal interests and desires in early childhood seem to be just a symptom of the much more profound and larger issues caused by the fundamental changes in the current conditions for raising children in many parts of the world (Gray, 2010, 2013; Holloway & Pimlott-Wilson, 2014; Marjanović, 1987c).

Challenges for play in the modern world

The contemporary social conditions in the modern Western industrial societies (and broader) in which children grow up pose serious challenges to play, playfulness, creativity, and all other forms of life that are not strictly “productive,” “efficient,” and understood as beneficial for children’s development and their preparation for future life.

I believe the following list of societal conditions may be the most severe threats to play playfulness and creativity in childhood. If we believe that play is in some deep way central to the life of humanity in general, then these conditions and practices may also threaten some fundamental aspects of human lives in general. They may threaten the healthy, integrated, and meaningful lives in which all people, including children and youth, should be able to practice self-actualization and self-determination. However, the most challenging conditions and practices in childhood are the following:

·      Segregation of children and adolescents from the rest of society into separate social groups (perhaps social classes) that spend most of their lives in special child care and educational institutions. This segregation leads to the decontextualization of childhood and adolescence from the actual socio-historical conditions and events of their lives. Once segregated and institutionalized, children’s experiences of the society, its practices, the others and their lives become impoverished. Children lose opportunities to directly experience and perceive the full richness of the adults’ lives, their ways of being, behaving, and relating to life, to each other, and to self. Instead, children in general, and young children in particular, spend a large proportion of their time in rather purified environments of the institutions of public education and care (Marjanović, 1987b). Lacking a substantial portion of the variety of first-hand life experiences in the life of society and its variety of communities is often a problem for overall child development. Specifically, it creates challenges for play, playfulness, and creativity. It has been known that rich play, playfulness, and creativity depend on the richness of the experience of everyday life and participation in diverse aspects of the public sphere (Calhoun, 1992; Gripsrud & Eide, 2010; Marjanović, 1987b; Sutton-Smith et al., 2017; Vygotsky, 1976, 1987, 1998). Additionally, within the institutions for early childhood education and care, children almost completely lose the freedom to play without the supervision of adults, who now keep them constantly under a spotlight (Matusov et al., 2016; Rinaldi, 1998, see more below).

·      Segregation of children and youth into age groups, where younger and older children and youth lose mutual interaction. This segregation into narrow age groups (usually by the year of birth) further intensifies the impoverishment of the opportunities the children have to experience and perceive the important others, their lives and relationships, life problematics, and resolutions of their life challenges.  In addition, there are many indicators that children and youth create and transmit to each other a specific youth culture throughout generations. Older children and youth initiate the younger ones into games, rituals, and children’s rich lore (verbal and situational) through joint free intergenerational play and leisure time (Opie & Opie, 1967, 1969; Propp et al., 1984; Sutton-Smith, 1981; Sutton-Smith et al., 2017). Connected to this is also gender segregation, especially in some cultures and cultural groups. Even some games are thought appropriate only for particular genders.

·      Schoolification of childhood and adolescence – reducing time for free, unsupervised activities, play, and playfulness in educational institutions, even at the preschool-age level. Studies of recess in Western public school show drastically reduced times when children can engage in unsupervised play activities (Beresin, 2010; London, 2019; Patte, 2009; Pellegrini, 2008; Ramstetter & Murray, 2017). This is accompanied by the reduced places where children can play, such as playgrounds, streets, yards, parks, etc. (Holloway & Pimlott-Wilson, 2014). Reducing opportunities for play in childhood may have already led, in modern industrial societies, to the increase in mental problems in children and youth (Gray, 2010). In extreme cases of the impoverished institutionalized lives of babies and toddlers, the lack of playful relationships and activities may even lead to severe physical and mental retardation (Brown & Webb, 2008).  

·      The exploitation and instrumentalization of play for educational and schooling purposes (as a result of schoolification) – creating play-like activities that serve as instruments for students’ engagement in school assignments, activities that, in actuality, have little to do with play and playfulness. This instrumentalization of play could be done in many different ways: exploiting real play and games; creating pseudo-play activities for practicing particular skills; using play as a bribe for doing school work and homework; etc. In most cases, children are aware that these “educational” uses of play are draining the life out of “real” play (Beresin, 2010; Brown & Patte, 2013; Patte, 2009). It seems clear that strong tensions exist between play and education: education is trying to get on the territory of play, to subdue or exploit play. However, we do not know where the legitimate boundary between them lies. Can education and play overlap and support each other? If so, in what ways, under what circumstances, and conditions? Can education and schooling be influenced by some of the central characteristics and principles of play? I discuss these issues in more detail below, in my current assumptions and visions about play.

·      Patronization of children’s play. Many middle-class children in industrialized, Western societies live under almost constant supervision and excessive adult interference in their lives and play. Adults often create various forms of guidance for playing, choosing what they deem to be appropriate games/play and controlling their rules (Beresin, 2010; Brown & Taylor, 2008; Gladwin, 2008; Holloway & Pimlott-Wilson, 2014; Lareau, 2003; Taylor, 2008). “… some [children are] being channeled into commercialized play spaces and supervised clubs and activities… [W]hat has been lost … [are] children’s outdoor play and independent mobility… [as the result of] changing socio-spatial organization of children’s play” (Holloway & Pimlott-Wilson, 2014, p. 614).

·      Colonization, commercialization, standardization, and typification of children’s play by adults are issues related to the patronization of play. In some types of practices, the adults are in complete charge of designing ecology and the environments that channel, structure, or limit children’s play, while the reasons and motives for these designs are not related to playing per se, having other purposes in mind. For instance, the design, architecture, and furnishing of daycare centers and playgrounds, standardization and stereotyping of toys, design of video games, etc. In addition, play and games are heavily exploited by a lucrative child and youth-focused industry (McKendrick et al., 2000; Striniste & Moore, 1989).

·      Devaluation (and even demonization) of play or some forms of play. Play is seen as useless, trivial, unproductive, childish, irrelevant, and insignificant in the “serious” adult business (Sutton-Smith, 1997).  The transformation in the status of children in modern society leads to the overall devaluation of children, their needs, and their ways of living. “… play is just fooling around, [children] asking questions is pestering, curiosity is dangerous, decisiveness is disobedience, collaboration is a nuisance, feelings are impolite, and imagination is an error in thinking” (Marjanović, 1987c, p. 24). Playing can be more than devaluated; it can even be seen as a form of addiction (playing video games, both for children and adults) that must be forbidden.

Another significant issue is the issue of children growing up in diverse cultures that may not have the same vision of play as has been developed in the social science of our modern Western culture (Rogoff, 1990; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1979, 1986). Most (but not all) of the currently known studies of play, playfulness, and creativity, predominant in contemporary views of child development, have been done within the Western philosophical, scientific, ideological, cultural, and upbringing traditions. From that point of view, what we see as the critical role or roles of play, may not coincide with different cultural traditions and their philosophical, cultural, and social beliefs. As Rogoff pointed out, “Key to moving beyond one’s own system of assumptions is recognizing that goals of human development—what is regarded as mature or desirable—vary considerably according to the cultural traditions and circumstances of different communities” (Rogoff, 2003) . All of that means that there exist very different understandings and concepts of the “childhood” and different practices of child-rearing and education. International cooperation focused on promoting play, and playfulness could thus create opportunities for better and deeper studies of early educational practices and the role that play and playfulness can have in different local and national cultures, for children and also for adults.

The significance of play for realizing humanity

For me, it is difficult to define play. Yet, I agree with many scholars that play is at the very heart of being human and, therefore, that play is an existential human need. In fact, play probably pre-exists humanity. According to a number of studies, some kinds of playing and playfulness are older than humanity and human cultures (Bateson, 1976; Bruner, 1976). It has been documented that some forms of play exist in mammals and potentially other species (Burghardt, 2005). But it seems to me that full-blown human play may represent an evolutionary breakthrough that opened new possibilities in human evolution. Alas, the differences between human forms and meanings of play and play in animals have not been systematically studied. However, I agree with several scholars of play that human existence as humans may be deeply related to aspects of play that maybe facilitate and set up the appearance of the crucial facets of human life, including the genesis of individual subjectivities, the development of cognitive and symbolic skills, building and creation of communities, cultures, and societies (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021; Huizinga, 2009; Marjanović, 1979, 1987a; Sutton-Smith, 1997; Sutton-Smith et al., 2017; Vygotsky, 1976, and others). I agree with Huizinga, who was probably the most influential play scholar, when he said that play,

… goes beyond the confines of purely physical or purely biological activity. It is a significant function - that is to say, there is some sense to it. In play, there is something ‘at play’ which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something” (Huizinga, 2009, p. 1). 

This is why, together with Graeber and Wengrow (2021), I tend to suspect that play and playfulness may be significantly connected to imaginative breakthroughs overcoming the status quo of the existing cultures and given conditions of life. Like Turner (1982), I find it important to think of play as “liminal.” Sutton-Smith, another influential scholar of play, argued that play occupies “the threshold between reality and unreality” (Sutton-Smith, 1997, p. 1). For me, it has been important to explore the boundary between the “experience of the existing reality” and the “unreality,” i.e., the boundary between the realm of “the real” and the realm of the “imaginary” that is created in play (Vygotsky, 1976).

It may be because of its liminal quality that play creates opportunities for children (and adults) to imagine something beyond their given existence, a realm where they can be, according to Vygotsky’s wonderful metaphor, “a head taller” than themselves. Today, most researchers of play in early childhood agree with Vygotsky’s view that

… play creates a zone of proximal development of the child. In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play, it is as though he were a head taller than himself. As in the focus of a magnifying glass, the play contains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form and is itself a major source of development” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 102). 

Vygotsky’s concept of the “zone of proximal development” (ZPD) became well-known in contemporary Western developmental psychology. Only not for its connection to play but for its connection to education and learning. What has been less studied, despite being widely accepted, are the significant aspects of the “zone of proximal development” that originate in play and playful relationships among the participants. For instance, according to Peter Gray, a playful state of mind may be a necessary condition for many kinds of learning. Gray described numerous studies that “… show that learning, problem-solving, and creativity are worsened by interventions that interfere with playfulness and improved by interventions that promote playfulness” (Gray, 2013, p. 133). It seems that some kinds of play may create a specific quality in the relationships that are related to a free and leisurely, joint or solitary meaning-making (Beresin, 2010), and the players experience a sense of freedom. Thus, play may have a significant role in the development of self-reliance, self-efficacy, and self-determination (Stetsenko & Ho, 2015), as well as the authorial agency (Matusov, 2020; Rainio & Marjanovic-Shane, 2013). To play means to do something that has significance for the player and that can emotionally move them and their companions (Sutton-Smith et al., 2017).

Secondly, play seems to be deeply intertwined with the development of human “symbolic function,” our ability to create and acquire a symbolic system of communication such as language and visual, musical, and gestural symbols (Vygotsky, 1976).  In that sense, play is connected to human symbolic communication, which depends on the ability to create a layer of meta-communication (communication about communication) (Bateson, 1976).

Of course, there are many other lenses through which play can be understood, sometimes even in contradictory ways (Sutton-Smith, 1997), all related to some essential aspects of being human. For instance, I was just describing play through its developmental aspect, seeing play through the lens of progress; But play can be seen as fate (like in playing with chance and luck, gambling, etc.); play as testing power (sports, contests); play as identity (tradition, rituals, ceremonies, etc.); play as imaginary (related to imagination, flexibility, and creativity); play as an aesthetic experience in development of the self; etc. (Sutton-Smith, 1997). These different analytic lenses are not exclusionary. On the contrary, they are complimentary. Play, playfulness, and creativity may be that much more important and central to the richness of human experiences, cultures, and relationships.

Over the years of my studies, I have come to look at human play and playfulness as the distinctive way the players relate to the world, others, and the self. Play and playfulness depend on a few conditions. So far, I found that the following conditions and qualities seem to be necessary for play and playfulness to emerge:

a) Intrinsic significance – a play activity is about something that, first of all, matters to the players for reasons of their own.

b) Voluntary and owned by the players – A degree of freedom players have to voluntarily join or leave the playful activity and relate to others freely. “A key characteristic of play for children is that it is chosen and directed by the children themselves” (Gray, 2022). In other words, when participation in play is not voluntary but by some pressure or force, participants may not experience playfulness in the activity. Play is not play if a player does not own it.

c) Negotiated activity – when not solitary, playing relies on negotiations of the internal meanings and sense, power, and fairness among the players. These negotiations are a part of playing. They create a meta-level in the players’ relationships. In other words, play may test the ethical aspect of the relationships among the players: how they treat others and how they feel they are treated. Or play may be about negotiating alternative ways of being and doing and making sense of these alternative perspectives. In addition, these negotiations create a meta-level in the players’ relationships to a “referenced” reality – actual aspects of children’s lives that play may be addressing.

d) Creativity in the (co)-authorship – Playing may probe the players’ creativity in (co)authoring play moves. What does it mean to potentially come up with novel, surprising, powerful, and aesthetically appealing situations, plots, and twists? What counts as a “good” or even an “excellent” play move? Based on what values, principles, and/or aesthetics? (cf. John-Steiner, 2000).

Thus, I argue that play and playfulness seem to be specific ways of relating to the world, others, and self by way of an activity that is at once voluntary, purposeful, and deliberate practice of novel meaning-making. The players may experience it as attractive, joyful, and entertaining, but also as unpredictable, dramatic, suspenseful, and even tense both in its content (what the play is about) and in the negotiations among the players, testing their ideas, desires, powers, the strength of character, steadfastness, endurance, or flexibility, and creativity. Play is not always “happy, happy, joy, joy.” It can be painful, risky and dramatic, too. It deals with all kinds of feelings, emotions, meanings, values, and ethics in relationships (Sutton-Smith et al., 2017). But it does it in ways that are deliberate, purposeful, intrinsically motivated, with heightened alertness that is moving for the players.

Although this approach to play is formed on the basis of many international studies, I think that these general assumptions about play still need to be further examined in diverse cultures and communities. As scholars of play, we should not rely only on our, to a great degree, unified points of view, which are chiefly developed in our Western philosophical outlook and mostly inspired by the Enlightenment. In fact, it might not always be easy to determine what counts as play, playfulness, and creativity, and especially what these concepts and the corresponding practices might mean in the lives of children in different cultures – or if they even exist (Rogoff, 2003; Sutton-Smith, 1972, 1976a, 1995).

Nevertheless, if we accept the general assumptions about play, playfulness, and creativity I described above, it is easy to see tensions between play, playfulness, and creativity, on the one hand, and the contemporary practices and policies of public education (on all levels), on the other.

Tensions between conventional schooling and play, playfulness and creativity

To better understand these tensions, it is useful to situate public education in the social, cultural, and historical context. Public education in general, and especially early childhood education and care (ECEC), need to be seen as defined by the response to the changing role of families in raising their children and caring for them in modern industrial society. Before the advent of the industrial revolution, children’s upbringing and education have been integral to the social, cultural, and economic lives of families and communities. Children’s lives and upbringing were not separate spheres of knowledge or separate kinds of practice. But with the advent of the industrial-technological society, children were segregated from the social-economic lives of the adults, and child upbringing, care, and education were displaced from the family and close community lives. The practices of upbringing, education, and care became transformed and regulated by the economic and pedagogical-psychological models of the intervention (Marjanović, 1987b). The organizational aspects of the new ecology of children’s lives were created as responses to the necessities of economic production, the organization of labor, the new mechanized, unified pace of time (Anderson, 1991), sorting by age as a normative tool, and hierarchical, meritocratic competition combined by the survival of the fittest among peers (Labaree, 2022). These ecological characteristics were manufactured for organizing children’s lives, now decontextualized from the life of their communities and envisioned strictly as “preparation for life.” Various solutions to that ecology have been driven by the ideology, principles, and values of new economic relationships and by the nascent philosophical, sociological, psychological, and pedagogical studies of childhood and child development. Without going deeper into the development of pedagogical theories and practices in early childhood upbringing and education, I think it is important to stress that the most significant change for children has been the fact that instead of living integrated into their family and community life and culture, their childhood now became an object of scientific study and their lives and subjectivities became objects of pedagogical processing (Marjanović, 1987b, 1987c). Play, playfulness, and creativity have been suppressed and excluded from publicly organized education (cf., Montessori, 1912). To some degree, this happened inadvertently, as a result of the ecological and organizational planning of children’s lives: segregation from the richness of the socio-economic aspects of life, segregation by age and gender, decontextualization from public spheres of cultural and historical traditions, beliefs, and lore. But to a large degree, this suppression results from the tensions between the concepts of education and play and the understanding of their purpose and value in life. 

·      Where play needs to be an intrinsically significant activity for the child, the current conventional understanding of education and upbringing has been based on foisting preplanned activities on all children equally without taking their interests into account.

·      Where play depends on the players’ mutual voluntarism and their inalienable freedom to join or leave an activity, contemporary public education, even public early childhood education, are predominantly obligatory activities in which freedom to join or leave is almost completely erased.

·      Where play includes negotiation of the meaning, power, and fairness among the participants, creating the meta-levels of communication (communication about communication) and reflection, public education is founded on an inalienable authority of the teacher/caregiver that cannot be negotiated, and preset educational end-points and truths that cannot be questioned.

·      Where play entails unpredictability, creativity, surprise, risk, and dramatic and aesthetical appeal, public education is based on known, pre-planned goals and endpoints. Surprise, risk, drama, creativity, or aesthetics are rarely appreciated, mostly seen as disruptive, and often actively suppressed.

The question for the planners of public educational policies then becomes a question of exploring these tensions and the boundaries between play, playfulness, and creativity on the one hand and various aspects of public education and upbringing on the other. For instance, is it possible to reduce the above-described tensions or even completely eliminate them? If so, how? What would be changed, and would these changes be good? Good for whom? Under what circumstances and in what local cultures? Who would benefit? Who would suffer, and in what ways? What would be the obstacles to such changes? What aspects of play, playfulness, and creativity could be incorporated into public education but not subordinated to it? Could education and upbringing become more intrinsic to the students? More voluntary for the students? More negotiated between the students and their educators? More unpredictable and surprising? More owned by the students? Could schooling incorporate more collaboration between the students and teachers as partners in and co-authors of various activities and practices?

Visions of public education that supports and promotes play, playfulness, and creativity

In response to the current conditions of children’s lives and growing up, public education and care, being purposeful and planned practices, do not necessarily have to be alienating, foisted, non-negotiable, and suppressing the unpredictability of human authorial agency. Indeed, the fact that education and upbringing ceased to be spontaneous by-products of communal living and became purposeful practices creates new social conditions where children and youth could be freed to develop in rich learning environments. That new freedom could open incredible opportunities to design a different ecology of life – an ecology supporting and promoting human dignity, self-actualization, self-determination, and critical and creative activities like play and playfulness. In such an ecology created for upbringing and education, children and youth could develop critical and creative examination of their relationships with the world, others, and self.

A new ecology of education as a “leisure” (Matusov, 2020) or education as a “scaled-down society” (Rietmulder, 2019), rather than the contemporary ecology of education as “labor,” may create rich opportunities for transforming the boundaries between education and play, two distinct practices with their own separate territories and their own spheres. Education as a leisure or education as a scaled-down society could provide the possibility to incorporate diverse kinds of relationships, friendships, partnerships, hanging out with friends, personal interests and hobbies, etc. It could become a rich environment for all kinds of activities, which are neither play nor education in the traditional sense but could potentially be in synergy and lead to serendipitous events that can be both play and education. 

Today, the ecology of public education still suppresses play, playfulness, and creativity. However, despite the domination of the conventional public school approach, there exist schools where play, playfulness, and creativity are not suppressed or excluded. On the contrary, in these schools, play and playfulness can flourish because students of all ages between 4 and 18 have the freedom to engage in activities voluntary, based on their interests, passions, and friendship across generations and genders, to negotiate with others what to do and how to organize their lives. They are free to imagine ways of being beyond the limitations of the given moment and organize exciting, unpredictable, and engaging projects, games, art, and studies. These schools are known as democratic schools, where the primary objective is not “learning” but “practicing life” (Rietmulder, 2019). Without going into a detailed description of democratic schools, which is beyond the scope of this “play manifesto,” I want to conclude by quoting a recent alumnus of a democratic school whom I interviewed a few weeks before his graduation. This is what he told me: “When I originally came to this school in the fifth grade, I first ‘fell asleep’ for about six months. But then, I woke up and started to live.”

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[1] In Greece, public education is mandatory from the age of 4 years old. See here.