Children's Play and Self-Education

Author(s): Roger D. Gehlbach

Source: Curriculum Inquiry, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), pp. 203-213
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1179770
Accessed: 22-02-2017 00:02 UTC

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 Children's Play and
Self-Education
ROGER D. GEHLBACH
Simon Fraser University

ABSTRACT

Children's instructional play and adult's self-education are both acti

result in learning without conventional teaching by someone othe
learner. Given that play is commonly considered as a form of "cu
early childhood education programs, the concept is examined t
whether it may be legitimately considered to be a child's counterp
education in adults.
An analysis of the two concepts suggests that, in spite of the fact that they have
much in common, the critical difference between the two may be that the play-
ing child does not control the learning enterprise to the same extent as the self-
instructing adult, since the adult has relatively more control over the environ-
ment with which s/he interacts. In spite of this, when learning does occur from
either kind of activity, both the self-instructed adult and the playing child usu-
ally perceive that they have learned "on their own." From this, it is argued that
play may serve as an important kind of simulation for later, self-directed learn-
ing.

Introduction

Play is frequently said to be "children's work," at least partly because of the

amount of time children spend doing it and because of its importance to
their growth and development. However, although virtually every major
theorist considers children's play to be critical to early growth and devel-
opment, there is little agreement on the psychological processes and
mechanisms that actually produce learning and development (see, for
example, Smith, 1982; Sutton-Smith, 1967; Herron and Sutton-Smith,
1971; Bruner et al., 1976; Ellis, 1973; Garvey, 1977; Piaget, 1962, and
Kamii and DeVries, 1978). Nevertheless, it is agreed that children learn
a great deal while they play, and they seem to do so without the benefit
of lesson plans or deliberate teaching by educational practitioners or
other adults. In this regard, children's play shares an obvious and impor-

? 1986 by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
CURRICULUM INQUIRY 16:2 (1986) CCC 0362-6784/86/020203-11$04.00

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204 ROGER D. GEHLBACH/CI

tant feature with self-education in adults, an enterprise which

free from the structural trappings of formalized learning pr
The first purpose of this paper is to examine children's play
self-education in order to determine their common and distinctive fea-
tures as ways to learn. The second purpose is to determine whether play
activity may have potential as a learning mode for skills that underlie
learners' capabilities to educate themselves later in life.
Most of what we know is probably not the result of formal or even
informal instruction organized by others or by ourselves. Rather, it is the
result of simply "moving through life," of acting within and upon the
environment, often making changes in it, and then of acting again, with
our later actions themselves changed as a function of the feedback from
the environment to our earlier behavior (e.g., Rousseau, 1974; Skinner,
1974). For example, a young child playing with blocks may learn enough
about the center-of-gravity relationships among vertically stacked blocks
to make substantial block towers, having seen stacking happen as a result
of an accidental placement of two or more blocks earlier during play.
The child tries to repeat the event. It works. The child learns. Similarly,
an adult, self-educating writer, while describing a current essay project
to a friend by telephone, may notice how much more smoothly the ideas
flow in that communication setting than in earlier attempts to write with
no special reader/listener in mind. The writer later tries to develop the
essay as though it were a letter to a friend. The ideas occur more readily
(Bereiter, 1985). The writer learns. In both of the above cases, the learn-
ing is fortuitous, inasmuch as it was not pre-planned or predictable in
the activity that produced it. A hundred other children may play with
blocks and not learn the same thing about center-of-gravity relation-
ships. A hundred other struggling writers may talk to friends on the
telephone and not discover a cognitive device that will facilitate their
writing processes.
I will ignore such fortuitous learning in most of this discussion, not
because it is unimportant, but because my interest here is in the learning
that is predictable from the activities of play and self-education. Play
should not be justified as curriculum in school on the grounds that
children might learn things about blocks. This, of course, is not the
common thinking among early childhood educators. In fact, the basis
for most advocacy of play curriculum is the value of play as a provider of
"opportunities" to learn things, rather than, as in most curriculum, a
provider of guarantees (or at least high probabilities) to learn things. For
example, Bruner (1976) writes, "Play provides an excellent opportunity
to try combinations of behavior that would, under functional pressure,
never be tried" (p. 38), in his discussion of play as a medium for learning
creative skills. One need not dispute this matter, however, to simply
observe that in education generally, one of the key features of "curricu-
lum," whether teacher-directed or not, is a critical criterion that learning
outcomes be planned, predictable, and/or evaluated (e.g., Eisner, 1979).
Most of children's play does not meet those criteria (Gehlbach, 1980), as
we simply know too little about its psychology (Ellis and Scholtz, 1978).

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CHILDREN'S PLAY AND SELF-EDUCATION 205

Similarly, one would usually not make a telephone call bec

remote possibility that one will learn to become a better wr
fore, the focus of this analysis will be upon restricted forms o
and self-education, particularly on the relationships between f
activities and of learning outcomes which, if not confirmed e
are at least highly probable hypothetically.
The arguments which follow will take the following form: Fi
tions will be formulated for the important concepts to be ana
or modified; second, the enterprises of children's play and a
education will be analyzed with respect to the control that is
each by the learner and by environmental factors external to
and finally, arguments will be offered which suggest that chil
even with its more diffuse locus of control, may be an impor
ness activity for later, more learner-directed forms of instru

Defining Instructional Play and Self-Education

The diversity of activities commonly regarded as play is exten
ing from solitary fantasy to complex social games. The problem
ing play is discussed in virtually every major work on the top
summaries are available in Garvey (1977), Ellis and Scholtz (19
Lieberman (1977). More theoretically technical definitions ar
Piaget (1962), Hutt (1970), and Ellis (1973). It should be n
Piaget and Hutt both define play in such a way that common
play activities, such as construction play and dramatic play, ar
For example, Piaget (1962) writes, "It is evident that cons
games are not a definite stage like the others, but occupy ...
half-way between play and intelligent work, or between play
tion" (p. 113). Hutt (1970) contrasts "specific" and "diverse" e
only the latter theoretically considered to be play, but both co
genuine play in common educational parlance.
Our interest here is best focused on those forms of play
greatest number of features in common with self-education a
ally found in adults, namely individual, solitary or parallel pla
the individual child functions relatively independently of ot
Such play may be defined as follows:

Play is the iterative interaction between a child and a part of the ph

environment, that interaction being (a) voluntary, or independent o
tive directives from other persons, and (b) not related to the direct sat
biological needs (e.g., not to alleviate hunger) or to the achievemen
beyond the interaction itself (e.g., not for money).

Examples of such play include many of the activities common

curricula for young children, including play with sand, water
ous kinds of construction playthings, such as Tinkertoys,
wooden blocks. In order to achieve conceptual parity with sel
tion in adults, however, the concept of play may be delimite

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206 ROGER D. GEHLBACH/CI

Instructional play is a form of play in which the child's behavior is struc

features of the play environment in such a way that specific types and l
behavior are produced.

The first, general definition of play is not substantively differen

most of those offered in the literature cited. A general definition
for example, discriminate play from other activities by noting th
voluntary (e.g., Huizinga, 1950) and, hence, independent of auth
tive directives from non-players. Play is generally regarded to oc
"relaxed field" (Bruner, 1976) and, hence, in a situation free fro
ger, pain, or other biologically-based stresses at the time of the a
The concept of instructional play, however, is intended to be
tive from play in general and from so-called "educational" play
(see Gehlbach, 1980, for a comprehensive theoretical discus
Briefly, instructional play may be considered to be a subset of e
tional play activities. It is distinctive in that the behaviors that oc
relatively predictable, including new and/or learned behaviors. It
erally agreed, for example, that children's play with various kin
construction materials, such as Lego and Tinkertoys, is "good" for
Such play may be regarded as educational in the sense that it
always results in worthwhile learning of some kind. We cannot, h
predict enough about the learning to justify the activity as curri
Instructional play, on the other hand, occurs in an environment
structured so as to produce certain kinds of behaviors. In our own
ratory, for example, we have been working on ways to increase th
of common educational play activities with respect to the verbal
of children's speech. We have found, for example, that the placem
partitions that partially reduce visual communication between c
in blockplay tends to produce correspondent increases in the spec
of their spontaneous social speech (Gehlbach and Partridge, 1984
hypothesized reason for the increase in verbal specificity is that the p
tions reduce the effectiveness of language which depends upon v
contact for its communication utility (e.g., "this one," "that piece
there"), thereby increasing the social pay-off for relatively more
tive language (e.g., "the big one," "the blue truck," "next to")
degree that the change in children's language is predictable from
placement of partitions, then the partitioned play environment
said to be more "instructional" in its effect on verbal behavior than a
non-partitioned environment. Another way of viewing it is to note that
the partitions have an effect similar to what a teacher would attempt to
produce during informal instructional activities in language arts (i.e.,
practice with specific verbal descriptors).
An important aspect of play in the present context, however, is that
the play activity itself is, and must be, independent of external personal
control by non-players. Hence the management of play behavior for the
purpose of producing specific learning outcomes must be achieved, by
default, through the prior selection and/or design of the environment of
the players.Thus, for example, a teacher interested in children's acquisi-
tion of visual-motor skills may provide blockplay rather than waterplay,

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CHILDREN'S PLAY AND SELF-EDUCATION 207

or may design the waterplay table and its accessories so that th

activity of children will be structured in desirable directions by
ers with small openings and precisely fitting lids (e.g., Montessor
To the extent that the teacher may introduce structure via verba
vention (to increase the predicability of learning) with direction
signed to increase the incidence of specific behaviors, the activity
character as free play by the present definition. It then become
Bijou (1976) calls "structured" play, where the play becomes i
tional as a result of actions by someone in the child's social envir
Let us turn now to an analysis of self-education. Conceptually
education" is as complex as "education" itself. The present pu
however, is to consider self-education as a learning activity with
siderations such as personal, social, and cultural evaluations of w
learned or how that learning is achieved (see Peters, 1967). Thus
education will be understood to be synonymous with "self-instruc
the discussion that follows, with the following definitions:

Instruction is the management of structure in the physical and social envir

of a person for the purpose of producing learning of a specific kind to
level. Self-instruction is a form of instruction in which the managemen
learning environment is conducted by the learner.

Understood in this way, self-education differs from most educa

we commonly know it (e.g., in schools, graduate programs, recr
programs) in that the learner is the principal architect, contrac
even subcontractor of the instructional enterprise (Gibbons et al.
The above definitions are very general, primarily because of th
variety of tasks that a person may undertake in order to effect
manage a major self-instructional effort. For example, a man m
cide to learn to write fiction well enough to be published comme
To do this, he would probably restructure his social and physica
ronment in one or more of several ways. He may restructure h
life by joining a literary discussion group at the local library, so
would have regular contact with and opportunities to use concep
as "style" and "form." The learner may decide to ask his family to
a fixed period of time each evening durng which no one would in
him. The physical environment of the den may be restructured t
tate concentration on reading and writing, including the new pla
of furniture and/or visually distracting objects.
A critical feature common to the definitions of both instruction
and self-education is the provision that structure of some kind b
duced to the learner's interaction with the physical and/or socia
ronment. In the education literature, "structure" normally refers
tional features of the subject matter to be instructed (Bruner, 196
systematic and/or authoritative instructional interventions by a
(Bijou, 1976). In the present discussion, the term will be use
more broadly:

Structure in a behavioral environment is any physical or social feature

environment which (a) creates a consistent and direct influence on beh

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208 ROGER D. GEHLBACH/CI

(b) regulates systematically the environmental responses to specific beha

Examples of direct constraints include features such as socia

during play, the placement of furniture in a play or study spac
nature of the floor covering in a play area (e.g., carpet vs. linole
the quality of the lighting above the would-be writer's work sur
Examples of response-regulating structure include the partitions
research cited above, with their apparent effect on the relations
tween visual contact and certain verbal responses in spontaneous
speech, the new consistency in a spouse's behavior prompted by
interruption request, or the format of the meetings of the literar
Ultimately, the purpose for introducing structure of any kind
learner's environment, physical or social, is to control behavior in
ways. It is around this issue that we will find both some common
and some important differences between play and self-education

Instruction and Control

The analysis of any educational or instructional enterprise requires rig-

orous attention to the sources of control over the events and behaviors
that make learning outcomes predictable. In this context, I do not mean
control in only the restricted sense of simply starting or stopping events,
but in the more general sense of regulating them, of causing them to
start, to increase (e.g., in frequency) on some occasions and dimensions,
to decrease on others, and to stop on still others.
During instruction, control over specific learning outcomes is nor-
mally achieved by structuring, by one or another means, at least three
principal aspects of the experience of the learner: (1) the learner's expo-
sure to new information and/or skill levels; (2) the learner's practice
using the information and/or performing the skill; and (3) the learner's
feedback from the environment, referenced to the closeness of the prac-
tice performance to goal-levels (e.g., Popham and Baker, 1970, Gagne,
1985). To the degree that the three functions are appropriately man-
aged for the target learner (i.e., planned, organized, and implemented),
the instructional program as a whole will be successful. In the case of the
self-educating writer, the restructuring can be tied readily to the above
analysis of instruction. Participation in the literary group, for example,
guarantees all three instructional functions, as he is exposed to the ways
in which critical concepts are applied to written work, as he practices
applying those concepts through verbal participation, and as the writer
receives feedback from other members' responses to his participation.
In spite of such environmental structure or control, one feature
shared by both self-education and play in virtually all the available defi-
nitions and descriptions is their voluntary character. With respect to
play, the role of the player as controller of the activity is described by
Piaget (1962), for example, as a "relaxation of the effort at adaptation
and by maintenance or exercise of activities for the mere pleasure of

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CHILDREN'S PLAY AND SELF-EDUCATION 209

mastering them and acquiring thereby a feeling of virtuousity

(p. 94). The role of the player is also reflected in Hutt's (1971)
the difference between exploratory and play behaviors: "I
emphasis changes from the question of 'what does this object
can I do with this object"' (p. 246). Similar observations m
about the learner's role as a controller of an enterprise of self
None of this comes as any surprise. The issue of "self" contr
activities does, however, deserve close scrutiny, since in both
other controlling factors which are generally ignored but whic
cal to the determination of learning outcomes. To contend tha
ity or behavior is voluntary is normally to imply that its occu
its initiation, continuance, and termination) and content are
exclusive control of the actor or behaver. This, however, is n
for either play or self-education. Factors outside both the play
self-educator influence both the occurrence and the content of both
activities, and, in fact, must be included rigorously in any theoretical
analysis of their control.
The issue of control in play becomes more clear if we consider a block
playing situation. Suppose that, between two successive approaches by a
normally enthusiastic player, the blocks were glued to one another and
then to the play surface. Or, suppose that we were to radically change
the centers-of-gravity of the blocks, so that they would remain and fall by
a different set of rules. In both of the above cases, one or more of the
instructional aspects of block play would be systematically different from
the original, normal situation. The effects of those differences on the
occurrence and content of play, and therefore on any learning that takes
place, are likely to be considerable. In the first hypothetical situation, the
strongest hypothesis is that the play would quickly cease, since no activity
by the child or feedback from the blocks would be possible. In the
second situation, the occurrence of play may or may not change, but the
content and the learning outcome would certainly be different from that
with normal, symmetrical blocks (Karmiloff-Smith & Inhelder, 1976).
All of this raises a critical question: Would the altered play behavior
from the original to the hypothetical play situations be more properly
attributed to changes in the player or to those in the playthings? Clearly,
the root causes of the changes in play behavior would be the alterations
in the playthings, even though there may be resultant changes in the
player (e.g., enjoyment of blockplay). Similar observations may be made
of certain kinds of changes in the larger play environment, such as the
placement of the partitions between players mentioned earlier, which
resulted in changes in children's verbal behavior.
What can be said of control vis-a-vis adult self-education? While it may
be readily conceded that a young child, with a short attention span and
only partially developed motor and perceptual skills, would be subject to
external control factors during play, it may be less readily accepted that
an adult self-educator would be similarly tossed about by external forces.
In fact, however, the adult learner is also vulnerable to the physical and
social environment, to both its fixed and its changing features. For ex-

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210 ROGER D. GEHLBACH/CI

ample, what if the self-educating writer were to find himself in a

group whose other members commented only on the politics o
language (exposure) and whose responses to his contributions
to his practice) were cold, condescending verbal remarks and
pressions? Suppose that great fights began to occur among m
his family because of restrictions imposed by the new "qu
Regardless of whether the initial motivational level of the self
were described as "determined," "strong," "casual," "weak," or
dinary," there is little doubt that the instructional effort, an
the learning outcomes of the activities, are at least partially co
events, including responsive events, in the physical and socia
ment.

Thus far, the arguments and observations have established that th

activities of instructional play and self-education have much in comm
in terms of the structure of the person-environment dynamic that
termines their instructional value once the activities are under w
While the characteristics of the learner are undeniably important det
minants of what is finally learned, so are the characteristics of the ph
cal and social environment within which the learner functions and inter-
acts. To the degree that the environmental factors regulate
self-educational and instructional play activity, neither activity is fully
voluntary, even if play may be slightly less so.

Responsibility for Learning

Instructional play and self-education, as defined above, bear a further

similarity in that both are designed enterprises, the designs being refer-
enced to specific learning outcomes. In this regard, however, an impor-
tant difference also arises. In self-education, the chief designer of the
instructional program is normally the learner, with the instructional
purpose referenced to perceived needs of the learner (Gibbons and Nor-
man, 1984). In the case of instructional playthings and play environ-
ments, the designer is normally not the learner, but a parent or teacher;
and the instructional purpose is similarly not selected by, or probably
even known, by the player (Gehlbach, 1980).
"Instructional purpose" is a difficult variable to assess in this context,
since it is normally internal to the learner and is available to an outside
investigator only by inference from behavior or by verbal report, both of
which are particularly difficult to obtain reliably, especially from young
children. Nonetheless, if we permit ourselves a little empirical license, it
would be rare indeed if a child block-player were to answer the question,
"Why are you doing that?" with the response, "Oh, I'm just trying to
improve my command of more specific verbal language," or "I'm trying
to figure out the center-of-gravity relationships in these blocks." By con-
trast, the same question to the would-be writer would probably produce
replies such as, "Oh, I am trying to improve my writing ability, so I am
attending a literary group ..., or, "I decided to rearrange the den so

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CHILDREN'S PLAY AND SELF-EDUCATION 211

that I could concentrate better on my work." Although play may

variety of developmental functions (e.g., Ellis & Scholtz, 1978), t
no empirical evidence that children either select or continue a pla
ity because of what they either expect to learn or discover that t
learn. Such expectations and discoveries, however, are the very
adult self-educational projects, without which the activities wou
mally not occur at all. There is a final sense, then, in which
educational program and a powerful play activity are differe
difference is, once again, accessible only by means of the empir
difficult route of verbal report, compounded by subjective judgm
the learner. R. S. Peters, in his landmark essay, "What is an edu
process?" (Peters, 1967), argues that "from the learner's point o
[educational] processes must be ones in which he knows what he
ing. Things may happen to him while asleep or under hypnosis
bring about modifications of his consciousness; but we would no
them processes of education. The learner must know what he is
must be conscious of something that he is trying to master, und
or remember" (p. 23). Self-education meets Peters' criterion per
Children's play, instructional or ordinary, seems to violate it, sin
the instructional design of play and its instructional purpose usual
nate with non-players, such as teachers and parents.
The difference may be modified, however, if we examine the
spective judgments of the player (after becoming a master of m
towers from blocks) and the self-educated writer (now presiden
literary society). If we were to ask each of them the question, "Y
to have learned to do a really difficult thing. Who taught you?"
would probably reply in one way or another, "I learned by m
There is, however, a problem with the concurrence of such retro
judgments. Neither the player nor the writer is quite accura
player was taught about the center-of-gravity relationships am
blocks largely by the systematic behaviors of the blocks to his/her in
unskilled stacking behaviors. Even the self-educating writer may
wholly correct, in that success was not fully independent of the r
by the literary group to his first attempts to contribute to dis
about "style" and "form," or of his family's willingness to respec
times. As with a child at play, much of the learning must be attri
factors outside the adult learner, regardless of his perceptions.

Play and the Simulation of Self-education

We have seen that self-education and instructional play share at l

important characteristics: (1) both instructional play and self-ed
take the form of structured interactions between a learner and th
cal and social environment; and (2) both types of interaction are
erned by physical and social variables within the interactions the
independent of external, authoritative directives. The principal
ence between the two enterprises seems to be that the designer

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212 ROGER D. GEHLBACH/CI

self-educational program is nearly always the learner, while the d

of instructional play is virtually never the learner, even though
learners may perceive themselves to be controllers of events.
Given the similarities and differences between the two activit
compelling issue emerges: To what extent may instructional
utilized as a simulation/readiness/training/preparatory activity fo
explicit attempts to train children in self-education? Put anothe
the issue is whether instructional play may be regarded as a kind
education, one in which the learner is not burdened with the resp
ity for designing the activity, but which, in every other way, functi
a comparable manner, that is, without external authoritative dir
A clue to the value of instructional play for later self-educatio
come from an analysis of simulation training procedures. A sim
exercise typically shares two key characteristics with instruction
first, both are designed by someone other than the learner(s); an
ond, both are "divorced from reality," so that the learner does no
real-life consequences for either mistakes or successes. This is tr
example, of simulation exercises completed by airline pilots-in-t
and of student "governments" in secondary schools. In such exer
the purpose of the simulation is for the participant to learn the d
of the interaction between the pilot and the aircraft or betw
governor and the governed, but in a safe manner. All the wh
simulation learner is ostensibly "in control" of the events of the e
If this analysis is accurate, then instructional play activities for c
may indeed have promise as a kind of simulation exercise for late
education.

In sum, it has been argued that instructional play and self-education

share several important features. Both involve structured interaction
between the actor and the environment and in both cases that interac-
tion is regulated by the social and physical environment within which it
occurs. Moreover, instructional play also manifests an essential dynamic
of self-education, namely, a learner-environment interaction free of
direct, authoritative interference. To the extent that the conceptual rela-
tionship between the two can be established empirically, properly de-
signed play may have considerable potential as early preparation for
later, life-long, self-directed educational inclinations and capabilities.

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