From Plato to Erikson: How the war on ‘bad play’ has impoverished higher education

In the beginning

Opposition to bad play goes way back, as Adam and Eve learned to their peril. In the beginning, as was explained in Genesis, Adam and Eve had it all, living forever in the Garden of Eden. They played all day without a care in the world, subject only to the few rules imposed by a benevolent God. But a serpent ‘beguiled’ Eve: if only she would eat of the tree of knowledge, ‘ye shall be as gods.’ She was intrigued by the prospect of ‘make-believe,’ of taking on a new identity, especially one that would enable her to compete with God and subvert his authority. What could be more fun? Eve, of course, succumbed, the first of our kind to yield to the siren call of bad play.

Then God smacked her down, and Adam, too, consigning them both to a life of work and suffering. The lesson was clear: Adam and Eve had been free to play all day, but they committed a (literally) mortal sin by indulging in bad play.

Plato's Socrates was another staunch opponent of bad play. When he insisted in the Laws that life ‘must be lived as play,’ he was advocating a return to the chaste athletic and martial contests of a earlier Greek past, which he contrasted with the wrong-headed play of the Athenian adults he met in the marketplace. While playing, Athenians should be ‘of another mind from what they are at present’ (Plato, 1979: 193). The problem was that Athenian male citizens did little but play, a consequence of the wealth generated by imperial tribute and an abundance of slaves. Athenian citizens consequently turned many aspects of life into contests, ranging from beard growing to choral singing. Socrates especially condemned the rhetorical competitions in the assembly and law courts, where Athenians shouted and clapped ‘till the rocks and the whole place re-echo, and redouble the noise of their boos and applause’ (Plato, 1974: 214). ²

Worse than the Athenians' love of competition was their addiction to make-believe. They sat transfixed as orators and poets, pretending to be Achilles or Odysseus, enacting scenes from Homer. Athenians also spent entire days at the theater, identifying with mighty warriors and deathless gods. Such play encouraged shepherds to imagine themselves as statesmen, and shoemakers, as magistrates. Athenians consequently inhabited a shadow world of fantasy which they mistook for reality.

By transforming social and political life into competitions, by pretending that their own selves contained glorious multitudes, by undermining the natural social order, and by accepting nonsense as the truth, Athenians were hopelessly caught up in a world of bad play, or so Plato contended.

In the Republic Plato's Socrates propounded an alternative society based on antithetical principles. It would be based on work and structured by occupation. Shoemakers would make shoes; rulers would govern. Competitions would be eliminated, apart from a few martial contests to honor the gods or strengthen warriors. Poets, orators, and dramatists—those most skilled at evoking alternative selves—would be banished. And because this utopia was built on political order—the ‘natural relation of control and subordination’—subversion was the worst offense imaginable (Plato, 1974: 154). Discipline and reason would prevail; disorder and absurdity would be expunged. Play would be sober and serious, a means of producing the disciplined citizens of the Socratic republic of reason.

The assault on ‘bad play’ resurfaced in Rousseau's Emile (1762). An eloquent appeal for experiential and child-centered learning, this classic text was also a blistering attack on bad play. Rousseau was himself deeply influenced by Plato's Republic, ‘the most beautiful educational treatise ever written’ (Rousseau, 1974: 40). Rousseau also followed Plato's Socrates in opposing what he regarded as the imaginative excesses of his age—the exuberant iconoclasm of clever philosophes, poets, playwrights, and scientists. Rousseau subverted the subversives, enlisting playful wit to condemn wittiness (as when he submitted an essay to the Dijon Academy denouncing academe). ³

In Emile, Rousseau proposed an educational regimen designed to produce a sober, self-reliant, and self-disciplined individualist: an anti-philosophe. Emile, Rousseau's putative student, would grow up in the countryside, alone with his tutor. The boy would be spared social competition because he would have no one with whom to compete. ⁴ And while Rousseau endorsed experiential learning and recommended pedagogical modes where students ‘enjoy the instruction,’ he opposed most contests and competitions: ‘boisterous games and turbulent joy veil disgust and boredom’ (Rousseau, 1974: 185, 229). Rousseau also disapproved of ‘make-believe,’ which is why Emile would be denied books, lest they stimulate his imagination; even history books had to be avoided, because a young reader often put himself in the shoes of the subject, and if Emile

just once prefers to be someone other than himself—were this other Socrates, were it Cato—everything has failed. He who begins to become alien to himself does not take long to forget himself entirely (Rousseau, 1974: 243).

Darwin, evolution, and functional play

Over the next half century, countless educators tinkered with Rousseau's pedagogical scheme. Then came Darwin, who revolutionized educational theory along with everything else. In Origin of Species, he hypothesized that play likely promoted evolution. When fawns chased each other through the woods, for example, they learned skills that would help them survive. Soon Darwinian educators defined ‘good play’ as that which promoted evolutionary progress. And because the young of many species—humans, especially—spent so much time and effort playing, expending the scarce stores of energy for which organisms incessantly competed, play must somehow function in ways that helped species survive and ascend the evolutionary ladder.

Educational psychologists intent on developing this insight, however, confronted a major theoretical difficulty. The ‘natural’ play of young people seemed to be characterized by teasing, fighting, absurd fantasies, and silly jokes and pranks. Such play, though perhaps suitable to Paleolithic peoples dependent on hunting prowess and acculturated to magical thinking, could not possibly teach children to become the disciplined workers and knowledge-seeking scientists demanded by advanced urban-industrial societies.

In the early 1900s, the German psychologist Karl Groos, a committed Darwinian, suggested that society had evolved more rapidly than its play forms; it was up to educators to provide an antidote by suppressing the ‘deadly poison’ of imaginative excess. Educators should impose a ‘moral law of temperance’ upon play, thereby leaching out its bad elements (Groos, 1919: 405–406).

G Stanley Hall, first president of the American Psychological Association (1892), disagreed with Groos. Borrowing from the theories of Ernst Haeckel, a German biologist who contended that the evolutionary stages of any organism were reflected in its growing embryo (‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’), Hall insisted that the psychological development of infants, children, and adolescents ‘recapitulated’ the stages of man's evolutionary ascent. A young child was ‘half-anthropoid ancestor,’ and children's raucous and wild plays were manifestations of ‘the past of the race, persisting in the present.’ Educators were no more likely to elevate the regressive play of adolescents than they could teach dogs to speak English. On the contrary, educators should ‘indulge’ the ‘tribal, predatory, fighting, roving, idle, playing proclivities’ of young people. The sooner they completed that stage of development, the sooner they could advance to a higher stage of thoughtful study and disciplined work. That is why Hall regarded college as a waste of money and effort. Only a ‘few hundred picked and ripened adolescents’ were capable of embracing the life of the mind (1904: x, 559). When he became founding president of Clark University, Hall sought to restrict it to graduate study.

Dewey, Freud and the progressives

But Hall's pessimism was out of step with the progressive sensibility that was taking hold among many intellectuals, especially in the United States. Progressive thinkers maintained that the glacial pace of evolutionary change could be accelerated through the well-directed efforts of enlightened experts. John Dewey, the foremost progressive philosopher, identified education as the best means to initiate societal change. Plato, he maintained, had been among the first to perceive that ‘social life was capable of intelligent direction,’ and that the ‘first step’ in precipitating social change was to ‘begin with the child and prepare him from the first for the type of social life in view’ (Jackson, 2014: 27).

Much as Plato had deplored the play of Athenians, Dewey, who had studied psychology with Hall, concurred with his mentor's characterization of the backward play of the young. ⁶ When left on their own, children often played in bad ways—a ‘natural recurrence’ to the ‘typical activities of primitive peoples.’ But where Hall regarded this as unavoidable, Dewey insisted that enlightened adults could change the way children played. Wise parents should avoid the ‘danger’ of fanciful stories, which weakened character, dissipated mental energy, and drew children into imaginary worlds instead of ‘the world of actual things.’ Competitions, similarly, could lead to tumult and anger; and foolish and nonsensical amusements could induce habits that were incompatible with adult rationality. Good teachers should ‘introduce positive material of value’ in order to ‘lead the child on,’ allowing him to ‘pass naturally, and by continuous gradations’ from play to study and, ultimately, to work. Young girls, for example, should play with brooms; and boys should cooperate in productive undertakings rather than playground fisticuffs. Dewey told parents that he had tried washing dishes and not found the task ‘unimaginative and prosaic’ (Dewey, 1976: 340). Similarly, sober games, devoid of competition and ‘make-believe,’ would help acclimate students to the ‘work and play of the grown-up world’ (Dennis, 1970: 233). ‘It is necessary that the play attitude should pass to the work attitude,’ he added (Dewey, 1910: 162). ⁷

Dewey's perspective was remarkably similar to that of Plato's Socrates. Dewey himself acknowledged that Plato's works constituted his ‘favorite philosophical reading,’ and he even endorsed a ‘Back to Plato’ educational movement (Betz, 1980: 348). The similarity of their views may seem odd, given Dewey's commitment to progressive political change and Plato's sustained critique of democracy. But like many progressives, Dewey was dismayed by the destructive character of late 19th-century corporate capitalism, and by the rampant individualism it condoned. Young people needed to relinquish their dog-eat-dog competitive nature and assimilate to a broader ethos of social cooperation (Jackson, 2014: 15). A progressive education would ‘keep the individual properly adjusted to a rapidly changing environment’ and also ‘lessen friction and instability’ (Jackson, 2014: 15, 27). Good play held the potential of building a well-ordered and cooperative society.

Freud's work fitted into these emerging concepts in significant ways. (Freud was an associate of Hall, who sponsored Freud's first and only trip to the United States.) While Hall and Dewey regarded the play of children and adolescents as ‘primitive,’ Freud offered a somewhat different (but complementary) explanatory model. Freud insisted that children were dominated by the pleasure principle, a craving for instant gratification, often achieved through silly games and bizarre fantasies. As children matured and gained more control over their surroundings, however, they learned to satisfy their desires more concretely; eventually they shifted from fantasy and pleasure to reality and the tangible benefits derived from work in the real world.

Freud acknowledged that while the transition from the ‘pleasure principle’ to the ‘reality principle’ was normative, the lure of childish play—of fantasy, competition, and nonsense—remained strong. He was struck that even adults were sometimes drawn toward amusements and other activities that were ‘forbidden by reason.’ Nonsensical and irrational games in particular provided the means by which people could ‘withdraw from the pressure of critical reason’ (Freud, 1960b: 125–126; Spariosu, 1989: 176). The task of teachers and adults, consequently, was to suppress the lure of fantasy and irrational play. Education, Freud added, was tantamount to the ‘conquest of the pleasure principle and to its replacement by the reality principle’ (Freud, 1989). ⁸ A commitment to work was the final psychological prerequisite (and the ‘most effective technique’) for ‘attaching’ an individual to reality. Most adults, Freud insisted, embraced the reality principle and learned to accept the world as it was. Those who remained besotted with competitive play and inhabited imaginary worlds were ‘madmen’—fitting subjects for psychoanalytic treatment (Freud, 1960a: 27n, 28). ⁹

Piaget, Erikson, and the developmental trajectory

Jean Piaget, arguably the most important educational theorist of the 20th century, agreed with Hall on the inadequacy of the child's cognitive processes. Among his early triumphs was his observation that children often adhered to erroneous beliefs—such as assuming that the volume of a fluid differed according to the size and shape of the containers holding it. Such ‘childish’ errors reflected their inherently undeveloped cognitive faculties. Like Hall, Dewey, and Freud, Piaget conceived of a developmental trajectory from ‘infantile’ play, often characterized by a ‘distortion of reality,’ to adult rationality—and thus to work. As children matured their play became ‘progressively less distorting and more nearly related to adapted work’. Literature professor Mihai Spariosu concludes that Piaget, following Plato and Kant, attempted to ‘discipline play, yoking it to rational rules and social order’ (1989: 195–196). ¹⁰

Subsequent psychologists emphasized that play not only reflected the transition from fantasy to reality, and from play to work, but it also was instrumental in pushing children from lower to higher cognitive stages. Thus young children, though initially inclined to selfish, aggressive play and ‘magical thinking,’ were naturally drawn into group play and team sports that taught higher order social skills and moral principles; as the rules of their games grew more intricate, young people learned about law and social systems; and games with increasing levels of abstraction and complexity, such as cards and chess, taught cognitive skills. Robert Fagen, a leading biometrician, defined play as ‘behavior that functions to develop, practice, or maintain physical or cognitive abilities and social relationships’ (1981: 65). Play, Jerome Bruner declared, was ‘the principal business of childhood’ (Sutton-Smith, 1997: 39). Dewey had been right all along: K-12 teachers should introduce students to increasingly stable, thoughtful, and work-focused play; the corollary was that by the time young people went to college, they would not need play at all. They would be ready to work.

While most educational theorists focused on the play of young children, it was left to Harvard psychologist Erik Erikson to develop a model for the later ‘stages’ in the developmental cycle. Erikson insisted that teenagers naturally engaged in a search for adult identity; the central developmental ‘danger’ of adolescence was ‘role confusion,’ an inability to succeed in that quest. Erikson cited the example of young American boys, growing up in an era of ‘decaying paternalism,’ who lacked the strongly masculine models to guide them to adult manhood. Doubts over sexual identity, Erikson added, often left young people vulnerable to ‘delinquent and outright psychotic episodes’ (1950: 262, 314).

‘Bad play’ exacerbated the problem of role confusion, as adolescents ‘over-identified’ with cliques and peers. Movies and pop culture also encouraged adolescents to identify with inappropriate models. In Toys and Reasons (1977), his last book, Erikson blamed bad play for much of what ailed American society. Generals, forever mired in adolescence, played war games with nuclear weapons. American soldiers, having played at war as children, could not distinguish between their childish fantasies and the Vietnamese women and children they slaughtered at My Lai. Erikson denounced the imaginative fictions of the modern world, which were so enticing that many young people never figured out who they really were. Erikson spoke of the ‘desperate need’ to help young Americans to find their ‘real’ identity (Erikson, 1977: 26).

Erikson worried especially about the human ‘capacity for imagining different scenarios’—this ability to engage in make-believe; he observed that it could ‘take over’ a person's cognition and emotions. Erikson's words echoed Plato's indictment of the actors and playwrights who persuaded Athenians to imagine themselves to be gods and heroes. And while Plato proposed to banish those skilled at evoking imaginative identities, Erikson sought to replace bad play with ‘true play’. ¹¹ Erikson acknowledged his massive intellectual debt to Plato in the first sentence of his last book, in which he flatly declared that of all of the analyses of play Plato's remained the best (1977: 17, 21).

In recent decades, few concepts have figured more prominently among educational reformers than that of ‘flow.’ Propounded by the Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow refers to the heightened state of intense concentration and contentment attained by successful people during their peak moments of achievement and creativity. Many psychologists and educators seek to recreate the conditions of ‘flow’ in the classroom. Because passive teaching modes can seldom elicit the quiet intensity characteristic of flow, the concept has contributed to the rise of active-learning pedagogical strategies. But in many ways the concept of flow is a sophisticated reworking of the core ideas of Plato and the progressive educators and psychologists of the early 20th century. The first few pages of Csikszentmihalyi's Flow (1970) could almost have been lifted from Plato's Republic. The chief components of ‘flow’—achieving a ‘sense of mastery,’ ‘inner harmony,’ ‘order in consciousness,’ and ‘control over the contents of our consciousness’—echoed the Platonic goal of ‘self-mastery,’ ‘self control,’ and overcoming disorder through focused mental effort (Plato, 1974: 126–127). Csikszentmihalyi's nostrums for ‘getting control of life’ paralleled Dewey's call for students to move from the ‘fooling’ and disordered play of childhood toward order and discipline. And like all of the other philosophers and educators mentioned in this essay, Csikszentmihalyi embraced play, but he eschewed competition and other characteristics of ‘bad play’ (1970: 2, 4, 6, 9). ¹²

Conclusion

From Plato to Erikson, and from Rousseau to Csikszentmihalyi, the chief proponents of educational reform have indicted bad play—the lure of social competition, the longing to imagine what it is like to be someone else, and the subversive implications of both types of activities. More precisely, the leading philosophers and educators have insisted that bad play, while tolerable among children and teenagers, is wholly unsuited to young adults—especially those destined for college.

The argument against bad play makes perfect sense. The purpose of higher education is to advance hard knowledge, rooted in reality, confirmed by science, and upheld by reason; and to promote its dissemination among young adults. Bad play is based on antithetical principles: it embraces fantasy and ‘make-believe’ and is animated by competition and subversion. The mode of bad play is incompatible with the purposes of higher education.

This argument is so reasonable—in a literal sense—it is hard to rebut. Many regard college as the place where young adults sever their ties to childish play and delusion and learn to commit to the adult world of reason—and work. This explains why professors, themselves imbued with rationalist principles, employ pedagogical modes that underscore the authority of the instructor, as lecturer or Socratic guide: education is a process of transmitting knowledge to those who lack it.

But the argument against bad play, however reasonable, is wrong in several ways.

Many of the principles on which the argument has long rested have been discredited. We now recognize that the developmental paradigm associated with G Stanley Hall's ‘recapitulation’ thesis was pervaded with racism and sexism. Few scholars believe that children's minds are akin to those of ‘savages.’ Nor is it true that adults ‘naturally’ relinquish the ‘childish’ allure of fantasy and embrace rationality. Perhaps the most obvious proof of this has been provided by the Internet, which allows adults to indulge in ‘bad play’ anonymously. And they do. The average age of players of World of Warcraft is 32: for every 16-year-old battling to attain the Lich King level, a 48-year-old is doing so, too (Davidson, 2011: 146). Many mature adults log on to compete as car thieves or to repel alien invaders; to imagine ‘themselves’ in different occupations or gender identities; and to wander through dungeons and past dragons. There is little evidence of a ‘natural’ trajectory from childish fantasy and nonsense to an adult commitment to reality and reason. ¹³

Recent research in neurobiology suggests, too, that our ‘self is not the ‘fixed’ or ‘unitary’ essence posited by Plato—and by Rousseau, Freud, Erikson, and others following in his train. The self is a neurological capability that grows and changes. Many scholars consequently encourage precisely the forms of education that Plato, Rousseau, and Erikson deplored—especially taking on fictive identities. Classicist Martha Nussbaum, for example, calls on professors to assign plays, novels, and poems by American minorities and peoples from other parts of the world. Such texts will help students imagine ‘what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself’ (Nussbaum, 1997: 10–11). Role-immersion games take this concept several steps further.

But the main argument against bad play is that such modes fail to acclimate students to the hard work on which learning—and success in life—depends. When professors say, ‘Welcome to the real world,’ they not only uphold the rationalist ethos of academia but they also underscore the need for students to embrace the work ethic. But as countless studies have shown, most college students do not work hard, and this has been true for as long as faculty have left accounts of their teaching experiences. There is no ‘golden age’ of higher education (Bok, 2006: 29–30).

By insisting that competitive and make-believe play is bad, the titans of enlightened pedagogy have succeeded in banning it from higher education. But they did not so much win the war as push the battle out of the classroom. In fraternity and sorority houses, football stadiums, and dorm rooms, bad play has prevailed. College students joyfully thrust themselves into brutal social competitions: beer pong, hazings, Lulu, and Tinder. They spend much of every day pretending to be someone else—assuming new identities as fraternity ‘brothers,’ as perfect avatars of their real self on Facebook, as misogynistic car thieves and blood-thirsty killers in online games. The simple fact, which Plato's Socrates well perceived, is that bad play is often compelling.

Which is why faculty and administrators have fought so long and hard to suppress it.

By contrast, professors report and studies confirm that students who play Reacting to the Past games work far harder than classmates in regular classes. One example came to my attention after my book was in press. Martina Saltamacchia, a history professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, found that her class on the crusades, after playing a Reacting game set during the Second Crusade, had become consumed with the subject. When she mentioned that an international symposium on the crusades would soon be held in St Louis, her students asked if they could attend. Ten of them raised money for the trip, participated in all of the sessions, buttonholed presenters afterwards, and so impressed Adrian Boas, the keynote speaker, that he offered to pay their food and lodging to work on his excavation at the Montfort Castle in the northern Galilee. As I write these words, three of Saltamacchia's students are there now.

A few days after I had learned of Saltamacchia's remarkable students, Julie Casey, who teaches at the honors college of the University of Texas at Austin, reported that when a freak snow storm shut down the university and forced the cancellation of all classes, her students were appalled. They were playing the Reacting game, Henry VIII and the Reformation Parliament. ‘Nooooo!! Parliament can't be cancelled!’ a senior posted on the Facebook site that a student had created for the course. ‘Seriously, this is the one time I'm upset about a snow day.’ A junior added that she had ‘never been more disappointed to learn that I have more time to sleep and fewer morning obligations.’ This set off a flurry of activity to hold class on their own. When students learned that all of the classrooms would be locked, they made alternate arrangements at a nearby conference center.

Allison Belzer, a history professor at Armstrong State University in Savannah, then shared an email she had received, unbidden, from a senior who had been playing Rousseau, Burke and Revolution in France in 1791. ‘I'm very much the type of student that will show up to class, hear a lecture and possibly make a comment—and then leave the facts and information inside that classroom,’ the student reported. But the French revolution game had ‘completely’ engaged her. ‘I know, without a doubt, that after this semester I will be able to inform someone of the events of the French Revolution, list its key players, and describe the effect of the revolution on France and its government all in great detail.’

Reacting students become fully engaged because the elements of bad play—the pressure of social competition, the joyous liberation of taking on a new identity, the thrill of subverting customary social hierarchies and conventions—are so powerful. This would have come as no surprise to Plato's Socrates. The lure of such forms of play among adults was why he thought bad play must be suppressed. Poets and playwrights were givers of such ‘rare pleasure’ that even he could not resist their inventions: the psychological sorcery of subversive play was the chief reason it must be renounced ‘as a passion’ that did ‘no good’ (Plato, 1974: 351). Rousseau, Dewey, and scores of modern psychologists concurred.

In one sense, the critics were right. Many forms of bad play, such as opium dens, gambling casinos, and beer pong, do little if any good. Gamblers and binge-drinkers may claim that their play helps let off a little steam, making it easier to knuckle down later and work; but the meager benefits of these modes of bad play hardly offset their costs to society, including their adverse impact on higher education.

But bad play can improve society. Plato's Socrates insisted that democratic Athens demonstrated the failings of bad play; and surely the Athenian penchant for conflating bad play with judicial and political deliberation sometimes resulted in tragedy, as the conviction of Socrates illustrated. But despite Athens's shortcomings, the achievements of this tiny polis stagger the imagination. The contests among its rhetoricians and philosophers, the habit of assuming all sorts of imaginative identities, the relentlessly subversive imaginary worlds of its playwrights and poets—in short, the Athenian absorption in bad play unleashed tremendous creative powers. In philosophy, literature and drama, political theory, law, historical method, science, mathematics, medicine, sculpture, architecture, and numerous other fields, the relentlessly playful Athenians added more to the storehouse of knowledge than any people before or since. They achieved so much not because they worked so doggedly but because they played so brilliantly.

Bad play has its uses—and we should do more to welcome it into the academy. During the past decade, Reacting to the Past has spread to over 350 colleges and universities because professors like Saltamacchia, Casey, and Belzer have proven that bad play can be enlisted to achieve academic purposes. Soon, too, online education will break free from the traditional pedagogical mode, where students watch videos of instructors—an awkward linkage of the pedagogy of the past with the technology of the future. Online educators, fully aware that most students use the Internet not to acquire knowledge but to engage in bad play—social competition, ‘make-believe,’ and mischievous subversion—are already devising games to promote higher learning. When online game designers succeed in intellectualizing bad play, they will revitalize online learning much as Reacting is transforming in-class instruction.