Cross Currents; Symposium Titled Children's Toys and The Serious Business of Life

This is Vermont Public Radio forums crosscurrents a series of lectures and public discussions exploring issues of concern in Vermont. On May 12th one thousand seventy nine the University of Vermont's Fleming museum in Burlington sponsored a symposium entitled children's toys and the serious business of life. On this edition of cross currents we hear two lectures from that symposium children's toys and the serious business of life was held in conjunction with the exhibition educational toys in America 1500 to the present. The exhibition sought to trace the development of educational or as earlier generations often termed them instructive Tories. Our first speaker is introduced by Karen Hewitt of the Fleming museum. When we zoom in I was thinking of consultants or choosing consultants to provide. A framework and some background material for our exhibition educational toys Bryanston Smith was an obvious choice for us. As a psychologist folklorist has written extensively on children's play. He's the author of numerous articles on children's play and a variety of aspects such as. Novels. These are some of the articles novel responses

to toys kissing games of adolescence in Ohio a on play critique and the playful modes of knowing in addition he's authored coauthored edited over 15 books on children's play with a particular emphasis on the role of play in cognitive development. He's author also the author of several novels for children as a scholar of children's play has naturally been involved with the objects of children's play their toys. And through this he served as a consultant to the programme Captain Kangaroo. And to the toy manufacturers of America. For instance Smith isn't a native of New Zealand. A father of five children he's observed children's play at all levels and in different cultures. He's taught in the elementary high school and university level from one thousand sixty seven to seventy seven. He was professor of developmental psychology at Teachers College at Columbia New York. And since 77 has been Professor psychology and folklore in The Graduate School of Education at University Pennsylvania isn't pleasure to introduce a writer.

Thanks. I find myself quite overwhelmed by the exhibit. In the sense of it wouldn't have been better if children were grown up in the first place. And then this wouldn't have had to have happened because it's extremely mysterious. I mean I know they drove Rousseau mad of course but I think that and I think he's still in a sense symbolizes the problem a problem I feel myself and that is what. Who is the child in there and who's the child in me and what is the relationship between these two. And as the child I see the product of my forgetting of the child I was. Or is it something else. And what is it and what we see in that exhibit are the efforts of a whole variety of people to implant upon that strange primitive beast.

Their perspective and a perspective some perspective so there's mathematicians and architects and people with magic balls and goodness knows what which is supposed to communicate the concept of unity between charge of God and man and so on. It's really a strains of goings on and I find that I do find it in a sense unsettling because it does. Reminds me that I don't know what's going on and I don't think I suspect that none of us really do. Since the child was segregated economically and conceptually from Western man we've been trying to build bridges ever since. I have a sense of there's a better sense of this from the work workshops I occasionally give on playing where I have adults play sometimes as children of different age levels and sometimes just playing kids games. And. It's an extremely disturbing experience to most people because they've got a very motley game history and play

history. Some kinds of plays and games they become expert at and of course they're quite secure with those. But there are many that they're not expert at and that they gave up when they were young and have not looked at since and somewhat traumatized by being brought close to whatever that package of passion was in the first place. And for those sorts of reasons I find the exhibit disturbing. What I want to do is talk to you about where it seems to me that the playfield at this point one of the one of the approaches to play that social scientists are making that might help us to look at what's going on here. I don't offer great promise. I think it is important to know what's going on even before you repudiate it. Or find some part of it you can accept. But the I would have to say that the. The social

scientists like the people who made toys have mainly managed this disturbing situation. By trying to in the one case it socialize in the other case educate. And that's what we're confronting here today that apparently the easiest way to rest the discomfort of what a child should do and what you should do about your childishness and your adult hood and the relationship between those two and the child's one. What we've done is bridge that gap by devising means for to make the children into adults as fast as possible. And what the social scientists have done of talk industriously about child socialization all the way through. I'm less familiar with the origin of toys that John Breaux writes about in the catalogue. I found that fascinating his arguments or his statements there. I'm more familiar with the end of the 19th century where the problem came very

disturbing through the 19th century in most western cities up to half the children between the ages of 10 and 15 are roaming on the streets and the possibilities of chaos for a very considerable. So social control was a main focus of many many types of educators. Mike Mark Katz rather Michael Katz has a. Has a maxim that when a 50 percent of the children roaming the streets you get a public school. The problem is how did you get a public school because most people want to sectarian schools and enlightenment and religion played in an easy play together in an uneasy dialectic in terms of the AIM supposedly to be served by the school. What apparently happened was that the fear of the kids was greater then the desire for their particular church training and you get the maxim of the fear of virgins was greater than the fear of God. At the end of the nineteenth century and their struggles to discover who these children were the

early place heroes like Stanley Hall I mean they had quite different points of view standing always you know felt that he was recapitulating some standards savage stage. I think that was really the best theory still is wrong of course but the best Baldwin put his emphasis and put his emphasis on the imitator capacity of the child. John Dewey on the chart the child learns through doing and thought like I have it training and so on. What's intriguing however is they all agreed that the answer you know the notions of childhood and their notions of development were quite disparate. They all agreed that the answer was team sports. So we had toys as an answer in the beginning of the 18th century have team sports at the end of the 19th century and what have we got today. Make believe. And if you know that's the new movement a new movement is if we train children in fantasy and symbolic activities then then all will be

well and those they will be able to be assimilated the children who can't. Once again it's not that they're not in the beginning of the century they called deprived children was deprived urchins and larrikins in New Zealand we call them a cup or two's. These were fun kids who were totally untrainable and it was said that the school actually failed in that task and they went then went to the team sports and and in a sense I suppose we failed again the not called deprave now they're called deprived. And the answer is if they get sufficient symbolic training then they will also be assimilated. What I'm suggesting is that the toys the sports and the fantasy are all apparently historical moments of this large scale attempt to control children to deal with this problem of who they are and who we are by converting them as quickly as possible into the kinds of characters and cognitions that will allow them to exist in our world with less trouble to us. And one can sort of see that and not know what to do about it I think. And as I look at

the social science research I'm going to talk about it's mainly about socialization. And I suspect that. Most of what children are doing themselves is not about socialization. I mean it may have some such consequences 10 percent of the variance. The trickle through may be that after you've played with some kids for a longer period of time you actually are more cooperative for you know how to form a club or something like that. And that's the sort of thing which the psychologists and her apologists find so important and exciting and which I find misleading. I think with children there when they're with each other like you and I are there when we're with each other in our own clubs and recreation centers for the hell of it we're not there generally to become more mature citizens and have more abstract form of thoughts and we tend to deny to children the ways in which they're the same as we are. I think that the main thing in life is a pursuit of fun and excitement and the various

packages in which we get our excitement. We house maybe a little more abstruse but we still do it. We still find places we still have activities we go to really centers of our lives and the things that make life meaningful to us and and I have strong feeling that those are the sort of models we should use for looking at what children are also about. OK. But that's not what's going on either in this exhibition or in the theories about children to play. You seem to me for kinds of socialization theories of this point of importance. One is emerging from anthropology and I think it's the strongest in vain at the moment in our understanding of childhood it comes basically from Gregory Bateson and it has to do with communication. The play is a kind of communication. And when we look there for play with toys as having something to do with communications I want to say something about that. The next one that's a more recent one and I think the most profitable

research is coming out of perspective has a lot to do with language and help children talk to each other and we're discovering they're a lot smarter than we thought they were beforehand. Next one is also in a way has had much more effect on the toy industry and so I would call its play as a kind of arousal modulation a term that refers to the fact that a lot of people think that play has to do with affectation its manipulation and its decreased and it's enhanced meant and that objects of varying degrees of complexity and so on have a pimp act upon that. That's a sort of a an effect of concern and then there's the old a fashion point of view that plays a kind of ego control and this is the Freud Ian Wing which is being with us for the last 40 50 years pointing out that play has to do with mastery in the child shifting from the passive to the active and so on and that's what Tori play would be all of her and the fifth is the fourth rather is the view view of play as a kind of structure

some sort of an operation in the head and the child learns things is a cognitive point of view presumably learns things through play and this makes a difference to how he thinks. So you really have four these are the four major current research models. Close communication coming out of anthropology Bateson players modulation coming out of a strict behavioral psychology line. Players control coming out of Freudian psychology and the whole history of child therapy and perhaps represented most fully now by Erikson still and play as a kind of structure a kind of cognitive operation which will be represented I suppose by PR. And I thought I'd talk a little about each of these. OK in the communication model. The emphases are several fold. A lot has to do with the kinds of signals that children give to each other they're playing and playing and so

on. And originally started work with animals and and baits and was very impressed by the fact that the dog that dog somehow know that a nipple connotes a bite but not what a bite connotes. And he was very impressed with that and suggested that that animals were much smarter we thought and that's that they're categorizing the world. Since then it's been a number of riders and perhaps the most influential in terms of a single article was a degree Bateson who wrote an article on what he called Deep play which was about cock fighting amongst the Balinese. Now the Balinese are very poll light fairly fairly inhibited kind of people in a very he Rakhal society almost caste like him with a few changes of status or position and where there's a certain denigration or derogation if you like of the bodily functions etc. and these puritanical kind of graceful slightly isolated nicely moving people. Neverless is combined with a contrary kind of play where

they have cock fights fights between cocks who have little metal claws stuck to their own claws and they tear each other to pieces and blood spurts all over the place and a normal amount of time is put into this and sometimes a lot of one's fortune can be lost and gets caught in the plate the play meaning it's play which may overwhelm you as compared with light or shallow play which we hope our children are into. Maybe it will have problems. But of course we do this I mean people here anybody who plays football is into deep play I mean to break your neck go rock climb any of these types there are many activities which some people pursue which I actually did play they have a probability of changing the whole character of your life. All right this is what we're saying here are the example of dogs was not an important and it says as lot of signaling going on. I'll pick that up again the moment but what gets then picked up on this was that that

not just that plays a kind of categorizing which is what they are saying. It's a whole interpretation of culture. You see we thought of reality and then reality which is called Play. And what these fellows are saying look you've got ordinary life and you've got ploy and the two together reality that apply is an interpretation of the rest of it and when you've got them both you understand something. The Balinese we now realize have a tremendous amount of hostility and aggression underneath that caste system they can't change it. They wouldn't want to change it the cockfighting is sort of a message as to what would happen if you did upset the system. He sets out that it's interpreted as a psychoanalyst if you give it another interpretation and nothing's final in these matters. But I like the idea and that is that it is that plate put together with the other things you do is an indication of the sort of person you are and the various components to Victor Turner's written a lot of books about the structure about society and the structural system rituals and so on and play activities as far as I can gather from the little knowledge I have from and been interviewing people on this is

that you're more likely to be in the play if you get less choice and freedom and so forth in your everyday sphere. You're more likely to require these quite radical transformations. It seems that people who have a fair control over the every day sphere have a lot of relative degree of excitement in the types of jobs and that seem to have less need for these other kinds of transformation. I'm not sure of that but that it looks a bit like it's going to go that way. OK so players interpretation sometimes it's it's is by reversing the situation it says what the what's underneath the situation except on the surface sometimes it's deals with ambiguity. A good example is if you like is my daughter. Quite often wants to play with me and I don't know what I always want to play with her just as bad as Rousseau in that respect I mean he was an irritable bugger and and so am I sometimes. And that is what I want what I want him to do to resolve

the ambiguity because I should play obviously she's my daughter I love her and she's wonderful gorgeous and sweet and I mean she has every right to expect it from the same time Damn it all I want to read the paper and I've had it it's been a bad day so forth you know. Now what do you do in a situation like that you're caught in this conflict this ambivalent situation. Well sometimes what I do I still be poking me and so forth and I turn around. And here what you do is you exhibit both sides of the coin. You convert the irritation into a Frankenstein monster. And at the same time you exaggerated or somebody somebody called and by exaggeration indicating it's under control. And so the play expresses the two sided situation of this relationship and play can apparently do that in an ordinary life apparently cannot as easily do it. And that's a part of what we say when it means to play as a kind of interpretations.

So we look at toys and say what words what do they mean I mean they're a message I've already alluded to the fact that we apparently one of the one of the kinds of things and I can't give you the answer I mean we're in the middle of this and we're under the water as it were we don't know. Nobody knows I suppose or so some things have codes and some things we can't stand you know the toys as a cultural phenomena are obviously a way of communicating with children. There was sort of a bridge across this gap if you agreed to get between us and them and asking ourselves. You don't have to agree with there but I think I feel that way. And it's very disturbing to read recently that hasn't been much change in that since one wants to play and one doesn't want to play. I read a book on how to play with children well you don't write books like that unless you have a conflict about both your right. OK you don't give toys an issue uncertain about giving anything. Perhaps. So one. So the toys have to do with

then the first to try and interpret what it means culturally it has something to do with the relationship obviously and the strain of the relationship it must have something to do with love Probably because most of them are given a Christmas 80 percent or something given at Christmas and I find that an overwhelming statistic I it's not the way I would normally think about this but the fact that they are given and the fact that to share them you bury the kids in them and they walk all over you know the fact that you do all that has to say something about giving gifts and you know all the psychiatric stuff about people having depressions after Christmas and stuff like that all the aspirations that are raised the perfect relationship will be formed and no such relationship exists they're all ambivalent. But this is a moment of festival that is not ambivalent the day is a festival that we have a unitary relationship to each other we love and they love and we in this gorgeous situation and if we give enough toys the delts may not assail us if they receive enough their doubts may NOT a say a limb and it lasts for a day and chaos sets in again. But that would be an anthropological

kind of interpretation of this Great Gift giving is also one of the yearly solution to ambivalence sort of a festival a festival of the contrary it is a festival of the contrary. I mean we are ambivalent I mean I'm not. They by day. Remember I'm a woman and here we highlight perfection presumably. Or try to. And you all know what actually happens. I mean sometimes it's a great day to reflect is a great day really. It's really a terrific day to exist in that second sphere endowed with gifts and gifts and endowed with gifts food poor in the vain all day long you know I mean if you can accept the singer role with it it can be fantastic. Tomorrow something else of a new way. That's one of the there's a couple of interpretations in that have to do with our socialization conflicts that Christmas in a sense sums says it has to.

It's got to do with dependency relationships love relationships. That's the Christmas I don't know where that's the truth in the whole truth but that's that's what that would apparently be trying to say. Toys have many other meanings of course. Some people of say that they're just a symptom of a consumer culture everybody consumes and destroys and discards and pollutes and kids in the same business. That's pretty cynical that. But it's not it's very hard not to see the parallel between all that's going on am I saying somebody today I'm always interested in the sort of the intensity of hatred for the Barbie doll you know which is what many professional women have. And yet the Barbie doll you know every girl in America has at least two Barbie dolls and infinity dresses roughly they say. And you know the mothers of the professional women who are protesting the Barbie doll you go to their houses and their lives they have a million dresses and a wardrobe that goes along one side of the wall. And see why they're protesting. So that's another way of looking at a

little cynical but economic that what the parents do to the children but again the conflict over by we don't the fact that she's representing glamorized values when the women culturally speaking and moving our grade moving through executive values I suppose is what the conflict is there that you know the glamour woman was a step up from the domestic side when someone sets up a step sideways from the domestic woman and the executive woman's another step sideways and it could be that the mothers who protest or those who protest are some sort of caught between those two and the children are representing the past rather than the future because by and large occupational dolls and things haven't done terribly well in the toy industry I mean there's been many attempts to put out the doctor women doctors and women executives dressed up as of what has been a striking success and this now. OK then finally the other one other. I know these are a number of interpretations and I'm not their needs through force I don't

know you know multi level meanings are the norm for anything. Toys are sort of a projective symbol and we can write many meanings on it must mean myriads of things I've been giving it through for two or three and there are obviously many more and means different things to different parents and different people but for now they are the other ones. That's a consumer one. There's an automation one too of course. There's a sensible one I suppose I mean most tribal cultures did have little objects. Which represented the adult activities little spears and bows and arrows and toys and so forth that sort of socialization function goes back a long way prior to our current problems. And I suppose that a great deal the big the biggest growth industry in the toy market of course has been boards and puzzles and games often in the 1920s the largest selling toy was a doll. It's not any longer. It's the it's the category of board and card games so that's a very interesting reflection possibly on a movement into an information culture. A lot of people don't understand what kids are in

today because of the brightest kids today and a tremendous amount of verbal facilitation of manipulation. Smart alec the sort of stuff you know it's a different world and I think it's quite a lot of code a lot of us who used to play in the streets and run around being little recapitulate as. Yes. Children are much more civilized and civilized in a sense and many of them seem to be making out rather famously and bright creative ways for the lucky parents and lucky kids. So there are a lot of the I think the Tory culture does reflect to some extent the automation part of the electronic part of it quite clearly. Some of the direction in which the society is moving away from the old dominance of manual occupations and to information control occupations and games of strategy. Jack Robinson I study games of strategy cross-culturally and we always thought of them as models of power you know and so that in on those little board games you learn how to cheat and bribe

and and deceive and so forth and it's all very implicit to settle but you have to learn about those things in order to be successful in marriage and war and business and so on. And the schools don't teach you you see so that one can see that there's inculturation an implicit kind of inculturation maybe carrying on the job for us that we're too frightened to look at you know can't really deal with ourselves. Another kind of meaning obviously in culture of inculturation meaning an interpretation of culture that we can derive. That might apply to toys has to do with the different traditional sex roles is very clear that that we give boys all the toys not the numbers. A girl might have the same numbers of toys a girl have a hundred dolls and a boy will have you know 10 of us and tell us something else. Boys get much more variety at least the two studies I did a study in New York and Harriet Rheingold won North Carolina and I was very it was very depressing to realize just how traditional things still are and these are all done the last few years hasn't been much change I

didn't realize not only knew how traditional things were but you didn't realize how bad it was or didn't realize what how what little variety the girls were actually getting as compared with the boys. Whether it be vehicles or even I always had the assumption that girls got the paint outfits at least the creative outfit they do in New York but they don't North Carolina. And so on and so forth. You just take the variety of categories of major kinds of toys and boys are getting a just and normal amounts more nuance more variety. So those are some of the interpretations we can think the Tories have and perhaps today will hear many more. And there's scope for all of them. The. The other part of the communication a way of coming at things that's just sort of that's pretty speculative for the work whether real research is being done is actually in children's negotiations the kinds of negotiations are children make how they negotiate plane together and some

interesting stuff. Millard Boston has established fairly clearly that already by the second year of life children used toys very or objects or whatever's available very clearly as a way of socializing they can be a bridge to socializing. You have to be careful about this but they are because of studies of older children when you don't have stuff in the playground don't have toys actually play to get them or the objects are A and impediment to action to interaction. What Millers found is that they're not at that early age where interaction is rather difficult. What one two one child will do something and then the other child will do the same thing with the same object or with a parallel logic. Parallel players are being called as a real bridge because of the sort of reflexive imitation of one child by another to social behavior. And he's followed children through so that after a few months of the sort of echoing each other in these little rituals of action where the object provides

some movement with the object provides the action of banging out of pushing it. They then begin to get into what he calls the contingency step where I move an action and what you do is take an action and change it. And then I make a change in my action and so on so that they move out of a strictly sort of more ritual to copy emulation of each other into the introduction of novelty. That is what we're discovering is that kind of turn taking is occurring much earlier than with thought and even between the ages of 2 and 3 we're finding that in the discourse little girls for example can already mimic the mother's voice if it's mother in the mother's voice if it's wife. They have a simpering voice for a wife in the VASI voice for mama. You know it's clearly a caricature and that's one of the most exciting areas of research right now as the whole question of character toys a caricature as to the something

fundamentally fundamentally sort of informational cognitive about toys and about character to use and develop a greater fine found that when you gay said I'm a ray of toys more realistic and less realistic to children between the ages of 12 24 months. The more realistic prompted more imaginative play to begin with and the younger children then as they got older they played more imaginatively with a less realistic. And that's very interesting because we have a lot of prejudices around about that sort of thing you know. And not only looks like is that that in the beginning in order to get the concept you need it a pretty good stereotype of the concept is still not the real thing. But in other words it 12 months a kid can take a little motor car and go like this. But I want to take a block and do it even if it is partly shaped as a car they don't just don't see the resemblance. They cannot get to the moon. What is being mimicked here. I am what I suspect is that there are whole cycles of conceptual development which

require this sort of thing. This exhibition for example is a is a kind of real ism for all of us. There's probably another exhibition on toys which has something to do with marketing figures and ideas in the way we're talking now you know which is a much more abstract account of what toys are all about. And that's but that's a concrete exhibition of what toys are all about. And we probably go in waves as we get a new conceptual levels and new areas domains of understanding probably go away from realism to non realism realism to non-religion like if I'm going to stand astronomy I need to see one of these things where the moon goes around the sun and all those his movements on you know because I can handle it algebraically or whatever other way astronomers handle it and that since I'm like the child. And so it's this this is the talk about an information significance of toys having perhaps a more fundamental one you know interpretation may be the way. Maybe that's because they're caricature that in a sense they use they can be they can transmit

information easily. We know that the little girls who did the simpering for example for the wife. Could do other kinds of voices but they choose to do one. And we suspect at his age work again. In other words caricature here helps communication. I think it's the same reason that the sexual stereotypes persist. When you're going as one of the same reasons that a lot of reasons one of the reasons is when you're going to somebody and they've got a kid and what is it a boy or girl. You don't know the child. And you don't make a mistake. You know I mean that's one way communication is aided by stereotypes. Unfortunately in some cases but but I think that's a part of what's happening here. Toys are a part of an information system they are a caricature a part of it. I think games are caricature are too. You always have to wonder why I even know such great relativity of cultures games did diffuse a few day games due to fuse so easily then diffused everywhere among confined cultural resistances to the simulation of certain games in New Zealand for example the Maoris or

Polynesians group never never took up cricket. But they took up rugby football and one can reason about the nature of tribal co-operation the remake one see that you know a team game of football is more easily a symbol in the cricket game which is very individualized kind of thing. And won't make those arguments but what is really striking is that games like that spread so widely in so many parts of the earth and my best answer is that the game itself of a game is also a stereotype of opposition of winning and losing a lot of action on a limited terrain. It's a stereotype of what that's all about as compared with complex ordinary life. Girls negotiate differently from boys. They seem to be more into inclusion and exclusion. It's harder to get into a girls group but it's nicer when you get in there. They tend to be small two or three boys groups are easy to get into but don't make any difference. Or you get to do is play outfield.

In other words we and some have argued that we are training boys in different kinds of boys spend much more time in argument and negotiation in play and some boys will spend a night or two thirds of the time trying to influence others in what's called a voluntary playtime. The politicians of the future in the making it's mean I get some feminists have felt that girls are disadvantaged as a result of all this. I know it's true but they've made that kind of an assertion that girls are being trained really for intimate relationships choosing lovers and children and things of that kind that kind of difference still goes on. I don't know how deep seated as it is there whether it's very important. It's hard to save in a way that's what communications about and that's how you would think about toys in that context you would say that the toy is an information Agent. It facilitates interaction. It conveys sex role stereotypes. It may convey that you can manipulate information. It may convey that you're loved and so on that's the way the communication model would go. The modulation model is much more sort of related to the

properties of stimuli of the toy. Lines work on a whole host of stuff happens that exhibit right writing about this and a lot of research on particular in infancy which objects children respond to and when they give up responding what you have to do then it all has to do with complexity and novelty and it's pretty straightforward the more novel a thing is the more different things it can do the longer char goes on responding to and that's had an enormous influence on the toy makers. And you can go out there and see some of these abstract devices that rattle the ball that rolls out and then they disappear and they roll out again but maybe three come this time then this too so the kids you know what was just in his hand in the first place there was a noise a noise you see and then after a while you know that goes down and goes you know. So you see the kids get into this for months. So that's the idea. Whether that's any good for the kid or not I don't know.

It's interesting and it does assume that the thing has to do is give as much stimulation as possible as can be managed because the mind will go faster and all this sort of thing called the American mistake. The idea that you could actually control arousal. So the idea of the modulation theories is that that person has a certain level of arousal of excitement and if it gets too low they move to increase it if it gets too high they move to decrease and the whole thing about toys in this case was that you that you put more of these in the car charge as young as a result to get used to higher levels of arousal is a go getter from the word go. And unfortunately evidence shows that that's true. What it shows is the children have more toys in the first year of life or the ones who really move around the kindergarten age of three exploring things having independence. Now unfortunately it's not really too convincing because as a coalitional thing you don't know it could be that you know that those are the kids whose parents put more stuff in because the parents of these highly active types and and the kids gone behind the times. So you really could be genetic you know washout.

But you know what I dread result because it's you know they have the appropriate toys and all the sort of stuff it probably implies that parents have made good choices and parents who make those choices probably spend time with the kids you know with something so they're probably a lot of other variables going there but it was interesting that Billy Cole who's a pretty good researcher did find that you know the mother loved the spirit of the kid and it didn't make much difference later on but what the giving the appropriate toys did to this exploratory sort of activity. But having said that let's just read the read the riot act on that lot. What almost everybody has discovered it is that that another child is worth a thousand times more than any toy. Remember Ellis Michael Ellis spent about eight years out in Illinois and his char researched a lab you know he's a motor development theorist those people really come out of the recapitulation era. There's concern with motor coordinations and motor skills and

trying to understand play in those terms. So he had these kids wired up he had heart rate going and they had had a marvelous tight situation where the amount of breathing could be registered and indicate the amount of activity and the science and what they did was expose these kids to all sorts of objects you know some with holes and some with red blue different sizes shapes in them that a kid in a play you know they were trying to see to what extent the objects had an effect and he was really doing Berliners later Rachel. He was doing. Posing the kid to objects to see where the novelty complexity and so forth. And Mike himself will say you know it was like eight years of wasted activity. What do you what they found is once they got going with several kids in their other children completely changed the situation the whole thing became a fantasy and then introduce a new object the kids would look at it for about five seconds reduce it to a an instrument of their prior thematic play and that was the end of the object. In other words objects had probably no power at all. As compared with

other kids other kids are so much more stimulated Now we mustn't go to an extreme of that I've just told you Millers example where the objects let the kids get they wave the kids away are acting together and imitating each other so we have to keep the both of those things in mind. But I must say I think this is one of the one of the abstractions which certainly has its dangers has been interesting I don't really feel negative about anything that goes on sort of what's important. I guess one retreats that once if a kid says that amount of freedom depends what the adults are doing with the sort of stuff is really manipulating the kids there is a smorgasbord of that the child can take from and has his own time with others to do what they will with it. Then it's OK. It's when the adults become so concerned with They've got to make it work in the child work it you know that's then I think you're in trouble but I don't think any of these other things are just a sort of a festive board you might say laid out before the little buggers and. On

those grounds it doesn't matter too much perhaps. I don't know what the modulation stuff you know I was just thinking is an abstraction we're talking summer silly about architects and playgrounds and I just think they have they also come in with their particular architected abstractions and house. And I've always had a great deal of difficulty the remoteness of most of the visual spatial ideas of those people to what kids do is that has always impressed me. Depressed me not really depressed but sort of. They're playing their games and sometimes their games children do find more scope in their playgrounds and sometimes they don't and they make some incredible mistakes because of the adult centric character of what they're about. On to the third model the. That's then those are things how do you ask kids to get them active you see and it can be objects or playgrounds and that's a way of going and I sort of feel probably more more mistakes made that way than the communication way. Control this is a Freud thing. The charge of the mastery. Hand objects there are different theories here you know the great Russian says the

toy is the first symbol. I mean he really gives it a place in a child's development it's because the child can separate this object from the thing it represents. That's like precedes words. This this really is a title symbol. Theology on the on the other hand says the contrary. That makes no difference. He's a funny guy. She says you know assimilate of simulations of part of intellectual life players what happens and then he says when you say what is it therefore what is just to consolidate the cognitions the Chargers acquired a new style comedy of his more serious activity he has of they both reversed because he says a child plays because he cannot get satisfaction he substitutes things. But then he has an intellectual through the substitution. He has an intellectual food while the child plays and then he has an affectation of what good it is and they both sort of do a switch. There are differences apparently in this business of control and what you want to control how it has some nice stuff now in children symbolizing some children really are into objects and some

not. In others I will now modify the generalization I just made that is that some children are into negotiations I made a boy girl difference but that's a difference in individuals within sexes to some kids a real negotiators and they mainly like social dramatic play and quite often they like to change the rules because their kids keeps them being the boss and things like that you know that's a way of life. That's a way of life you find represented by the work of Jerome singer on the Charles world of make believe. Make believers so sure dramatizes tend to be different kids from kids who deal with objects and build things and construct and so on. The latter type has not been dealt with by psychologists at this point. We tend to be the former type. Your own singer himself from his own book daydreaming clearly declares himself as a make believe or bad guy who's lived with his fantasies most of his life and now is making a profession out of studying them. So.

I'm saying here that the control of toys and objects is has an individual is individually very I mean it means different things to individual different individuals I've talked developmentally up to communication with individual differences. Structure. I think I'm running out of my time so I'll just say structure would be. All the kinds of cognitive operations which are allowed I've just mentioned the symbolism that would be one by particular toys. I am particularly impressed myself with what I call a sort of big expressive same Thracians that as children seem to be able to manage their relationship to others in a way by centering actions around a toy as a sort of tray ssion that unlike where the sentry centricity the child with a toy objectifies said egocentricity and makes a toy the center of all actions. So the toy the doll or the truck or whatever term you take across the ground in the foreground of whatever's going on right now and that's a theme variation type structure. It's the same as Beethoven if you like. But then you see if it was a toy at the age

of 12 months and I have it in kid stories children tell us that this is where I really. Well here is one of the reasons I believe in this. Children tell stories of the age of two and half know stories like their man fell down. The boy fell down the cookie monster fell down I fall down the end. Fall down becomes a vector. And there's the sort of stories you get you get an action becomes the center of the whole thing in that case this action becomes in the sense of background although it's a central pivot sort of phenomenon of pivot action that's going on and then these other things become the foreground of a story from a guy on a purchase of the swing the sky the sky the tree the tree the bench the bench bump the baby. And these are all things that are just lying out in front of our eyes right there you know. But it's the same kind of victim Trey tional vector. I was a child focuses on a particular direction and then and then mutate it through various things and that is a sort of an exaggeration sort of a caricature is why we find it hard to listen to little children stories and writing a

book now on how to listen to children stories or why we don't like to or something like that before it. But that's a structure now there are obviously dozens of structures this is structure repeats itself and chasing games later. We have the pivot person who is the chaser. It's a very central human structure both with objects and with other people. That was Brian Sutton Smith professor of psychology and folklore at the University of Pennsylvania. He spoke at a symposium entitled children's toys and the serious business of life. The symposium was held at the University of Vermont's Fleming museum in Burlington on May 12th 1979. The next speaker is cultural anthropologist and artist David Napier in our culture I think it is very easy to make a case for the dangerous nature of toys. If and when they may be shown to encourage unnecessary and destructive aggression.

Here I'm thinking not so much about objects like toy guns but rather I'm speculating about some possible consequences of such things as disguises or masks. We are all familiar with the experiments where people are ordered to inflict electrical shock on innocent subjects and how remarkable majority of them follow through on the commands given them. Well there are also been studies which of attempted to assess the extent to which people wearing disguises are more capable of doing harm than they might when undisguised. The studies were meant to call attention to a phenomenon which psychologists sometimes referred to as de individuation a sort of nebulous term that I'm not sure could be pinned down for meaning and to explore the extent to which disguises particularly in the context of crowd behavior led people to act in ways that they otherwise would not have. One might venture to find some danger in those toys which suggest to the child a vehicle for pursuing openly aggressive behavior especially when the disguise is used with the

understanding that responsibility for acts committed while wearing the disguise are not carried over to the individual player when the disguise is removed. Some examples of this occurrence might be the role of uniforms for the military. The costumes that we see commonly in Mardi Gras season and festivals where wear normally normal social prohibitions are suspended. And or the simple idea of trick or treat. This is not to mention other forms of disguised aggression such as the stylized form so common on television that is the way in which the adult world to see children and thinking that injured injury is something quite an agonizingly experience. Those anarchists and antisocial individuals among us might say that since the element of indoctrination appears to be such a part of our toy culture that we should advocate even encourage our children to depend more upon other non-human elements of nature as sources of play. This brings us interesting Lee to

the problem arising in the study of the so-called feral children are wild children which anthropologists have given much attention to. And I think that here again we have. There are a lot of analogies between the way we go about looking at the phenomenon of the wild child and some historical attitudes towards children as being somewhat wild or at least on the on the periphery of society. Despite the common romantic notions about children being taken in by wolves or bears the reality of the developmental consequences for such children present in fact a rather grim and pathetic sight. They have underdeveloped motor skills and those who are absent from society during the critical period of language acquisition rarely learn to say more than a few words. This seems particularly to be the case for children who are isolated during what Montessori discovered could be a period of what she called explosive writing that is normally around the edges of Florida half or five years of age for children who were

taught language earlier than they otherwise might have been. The fact that children who have been abused or incarcerated for lengthy periods of time have been successfully exhibited alongside of what seem to be some actual cases of children being cared for by animals says very little for the ability of children to develop in the absence of regular human contact. By degrees I think this comes down as a very strong warning to parents who feel that their children can develop more fully without coming into contact with what the parents take to be an evil and corrupt social atmosphere. The case of the wild children is particularly interesting for other reasons as well. One of the most interesting consequences is that these examples drive home what developmental psychologists have been telling us about the unique modes of thought and methods of organizing objects such as toys which children employs primary modes of organisation during certain periods of their lives. An understanding of these different modes of organisation is of special interest anthropologists who must deal in other cultures with what with ways of organizing objects which are at best unfamiliar to them

and at worse they find completely intractable. Interestingly as in the case of of toy related play this subjective difference is most apparent in those cultures which relate to the world around them and what we might call an animistic fashion that is in cases where the value of a certain stone a blade of grass a maybe a toy may change radically from one moment to the next or from one object to another one which to us might look identical. As a result of that objects possessing a certain god spirit are simply some recognized power. Moreover we find examples of this type of an attitude almost every time we come across another culture whose religion we describe as being polytheistic. That is in those cultures where people look at the world as being motivated by more than a single force. This is a way of approaching the material world. I should hasten that which is not only restricted to the so-called primitive cultures. But seems to be a way of conceptualizing things which may be evidence of some of the highest the most complex cultures which is some time or another populated this planet here in order

to elucidate this point I would like to take a simple object that I've been studying for some time which we in this culture column Ask now for an actual Greek who had considerable familiarity with the idea of personifying the objects in the world around him. It was not. What was most natural to look at the masque is a very complex thing. To him the word for mask the word crust soap on which incidentally the Romans called her persona from which we get our own word person meant not only a mask used by a player but the dramatic part the person and the face. Interestingly this type of flexible mode of categorizing is also very much apparent in the way the children often organize the world around them. So here we have an example of one of the most sophisticated classical art forms incorporating a device for describing experience which is comparable to modes which we normally associate with child's play. Just how close the similarity is can be evidenced in examples from our own century of the use of what we call toys by people in other societies. One example which is

remarkably similar to the Greek case is something that anyone who's traveled through the Southwest is likely to recognize. I'm referring to the kitchen adults which are common to many Indian groups there. The Cocina is particularly interesting because first of all is the sort of thing that people would point to as a good example of a toy and another cultural context. But anyone who is at all familiar with the Chinos knows that as in the Greek case the term may refer not only to the doll itself but to the man who dances in a mask or to the spirit which that mask is meant to represent. And while these dolls are mostly made for the enjoyment of children they may also be set up in the house as a reminder of a Spirit's power and importance. It is easy to see in this case how a complex idea penetrates the very fabric of culture to the extent that a certain Hopi Indian For instance does not outgrow as we often system toys in our culture. His commitment to could chinos. Indeed they figure very central in the many agricultural and religious festivals which highlight the Hopi year. You can see how the idea of the

classical Greek mask as well as the Katrina doll belong to a way of categorising which are much more flexible than we are normally prepared prepared to deal with. This kind of poetry is similar to what the philosopher vid consign meant when he compared certain ways of organizing to the fibers of a rope. And I might also point out the use of that toy just a moment ago seem to be a very good example of that same kind of a process. Today some anthropologists and scientists refer to these phenomena as polytheistic classes because things are linked together as if in a chain. Often without any single central element uniting all the members of the class. In fact some years ago this the psychologist Bogucki referred to such complex thought in children as chain complexes. He offered us as an example the case of the child who to go with the yellow triangle would pick out trap as always as well as triangles because they made him think of triangles with their tops cut off trappers always would lead to squares squares the hexagons hexagons to semi-circles and finally to circles.

He found the color as a basis of selection was a floating unchangeable yellow objects are apt to be followed by green ones then Green may change to blue and blue to black. Lastly in order to illustrate just how far these modes of organizing are from at least what we profess in our culture to be our primary organizational modes it is probably a good idea to cite a few common examples of misunderstanding about the universality of toy practices. Most importantly perhaps is is our own insistence that toys are at the Children's end of the playing games perspective for all of our talk about executive toys we are rather reluctant to openly admit the real reasons why we bought such and such a train and why we insisted at Christmas that it be set up in a certain way. Another example is the common case of the man who buys a model for his child and then proceeds to build it himself. Predictably just as we saw the degree of flexibility about modes of characterizing objects was a feature of animistic in polytheistic metaphysical views. The converse of this seems to be

seems to hold true as well. The history of Christianity is full of examples where prima facie differences are taken only as superficial and in significant. This mistrust over treating objects with any metaphysical flexibility is nowhere so obvious than in the attitude toward idols and the my medic behavior towards toys which are radical monotheism is likely to condemn outright. An example of this attitude which we which was mentioned in the catalogue for this exhibition is the Puritan idea the toys were sinful and to be discouraged that somehow play behavior was upsetting to the proper supernatural order. Along the same lines that is from the adults misapprehension and even suspicion over the child's modes of thought are the problems experienced presumably by toy manufacturers and writers of children's books. That is the problem of having to get to the child through the parent. And this seems especially noticeable for very young children as we can see again in the case cited in the catalogue of the parents having to be instructed in the purposes

of certain infant toys. I have myself experienced this lack of understanding over an experimental iconography that I worked out with a group of preschoolers some time ago. Finally I think it is important remember that many toys and games which we may recognize as playthings derived from practices which in our culture are taken as having far reaching consequences in the real world. The boardgame of snakes and ladders for example was originally a Hindu game for moral instruction. It is noteworthy that this game did not become an object of play simply through translation into our culture. But like the complex categories mentioned earlier existed in the social realm were board games were not only compatible with religion and ritual but where they still form an important and indispensable part of both the physical and metaphysical world. That was cultural anthropologist and artist David Napier. He spoke at a symposium entitled children's toys and the serious business of life. The symposium was held at the University of Vermont's Fleming museum in Burlington on May 12th

1979. Earlier we heard from Professor of Psychology and folklore Brian Sutton Smith. This has been Vermont Public Radio forums crosscurrents a series of lectures and public discussions exploring issues of concern in Vermont. This edition was recorded by John McNulty and Fred Wasser.