The Value of Play

Writing for children is a special case in the history of radical creative writing. It is special because, from the 1960s onward, innovation and risk taking were welcomed, not sidelined, in the publishing mainstream. Educationalists had for two centuries developed strategies which approved of play, venturesome thinking and the development of the full range of senses as key elements of learning theory. And while educational theory was on side, so too was economic practicality. Innovative children's books, including Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat (1957), Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are (1963) and many others, were massive bestsellers. In the world of children's literature, the radical and the popular were on the same (accountant's) page. Parents loved buying quirky, radical picture storybooks, paper-engineered books, waterproof books, etc. for their children, and school teachers approved of them. Possibly the shared delight adults derived from reading such books with their children was in part created by the fact that this sort of reading was not available to them in the conventional mainstream of adult reading. And it needs to be added, too, that writing for children – especially after the 1960s – involved the talents of some extraordinary writers whose capacities to think laterally and break with conventional expectations was astounding.

Histories of children's literature cite John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile, or On Education (1763 [1762]) as key works in educational philosophy which shaped the development of books written for children. In contrast to ideas prevalent among 17th-century educators, who considered each child was born corrupted by Original Sin while education's responsibility was to rectify and 'purify' them, Locke advocated that the child was more usefully thought of as a 'blank slate' which could be filled in a civilizing manner through the child's own observation and experience undertaken under instruction in a rationally disciplined way. This kind of experiential learning was potentially not a one-way instructional process, and involved the value of play to make learning more enjoyable and effective.