Sunday, April 26, 2009

References

Investigation into the physiological and psychological differences between developing boys and girls.

[ARNOLD and BURGOYNE, “Are XX and XY Brain cells Intrinsically Different?” Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism, 2004]

[CAINE, “The Effects of Music on the Selected Stress Behaviors in a Newborn I.C.U.” Journal of Music Therapy, 1991]

[CASSIDY and DITTY, “Gender Differences among Newborns on a Transient Otoacoustic Emissions Test for Hearing,” Journal of Music Therapy, 2001.]

[CONNELLAN and BARON-COHEN, “Sex Differences in Human Neonatal Social Perception,” Infant Behavior & Development, 2000.]

[KAPLAN and BENARDETE, “The Dynamics of Primate Retinal Ganglion Cells,” Progress in Brain Research, 2001.]


The Needs and Interests of Boys.

www.ep.liu.se/ecp/021/vol1/010/ecp2107010.pdf – 24/3/2009.

missing...

[TANNAN, DEBORAH. “You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation”, rev ed. New York: HarperCollins, 2001]

[BISHOP, JOHN H. BISHOP, MATTHEW. GELBWASSER, LARA. GREEN, SHANNA. ZUCKERMAN, ANDREW. “Nerds and Freaks: A Theory of Student Culture and Norms”
Brookings Papers on Education Policy - 2003]

[HANLON, THATCHER and CLINE, “Gender Differences in the Development of EEG Coherence in Normal Children,” Developmental Neuropsychology, 1999]

[SIMPSON, A. “Facts and Fiction: An investigation of the Reading Practices of Girls and Boys”, English Education 1991]

[DeROCHE, EDWARD. “Read all about it: The Case for Newspapers in the Classroom, Education Week, 29/1/2003]


Investigation into the most appropriate curriculum for boys.

National Curriculum website

HNC textbook

http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/curriculumforexcellence/curriculumoverview/index.asp

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article721863.ece

Wagner, T. (2001). Leadership for learning: An action theory of school change.

Barbara J. Bank, Sara Delamont, Catherine Marshall, Gender and Education: Gendered theories of education, South Carolina Press, 2007.


Bibliography.

McNAUGHTON, GLENDA. “Rethinking Gender in Early Childhood” Allan and Unwin 2000

SAX, LEONARD. “Why Gender Matters” Doubleday, Random House 2005






Key:

DF50 34 - Children and young people's rights: provision, protection and participation.

DF52 34 - Theoretical approaches to development and learning.

DF51 34 - Curriculum and assessment in an early education and childcare setting.

DF4Y 34 - Working in an early education and childcare setting.

DF58 34 - Promoting language, literacy and numeracy in early education and
childcare.

DF55 34 - Children and young people with additional support needs.

DF54 34 - Understanding and supporting children's behaviour.

DF56 34 - Contemporary issues for children and families.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

An investigation into the most appropriate curriculum and instruction for boys.

National Curriculum.

The two broad aims for the school curriculum are reflected in section 351 of the Education Act 1996, which requires that all maintained schools provide a balanced and broadly based curriculum that:

  • promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of society

  • prepares pupils at the school for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of adult life.

The Act requires the Secretary of State, local authorities and the governing body and headteacher to take steps to achieve these requirements. The Secretary of State meets his responsibilities in this area by providing a national framework which incorporates the National Curriculum, religious education and other statutory requirements. This framework is designed to enable all schools to respond effectively to national and local priorities, to meet the individual learning needs of all pupils and to develop a distinctive character and ethos rooted in their local communities.

The four main purposes of the National Curriculum

To establish an entitlement

The National Curriculum secures for all pupils, irrespective of social background, culture, race, gender, differences in ability and disabilities, an entitlement to a number of areas of learning and to develop knowledge, understanding, skills and attitudes necessary for their self-fulfilment and development as active and responsible citizens.

To establish standards

The National Curriculum makes expectations for learning and attainment explicit to pupils, parents, teachers, governors, employers and the public, and establishes national standards for the performance of all pupils in the subjects it includes. These standards can be used to set targets for improvement, measure progress towards those targets, and monitor and compare performance between individuals, groups and schools.

To promote continuity and coherence

The National Curriculum contributes to a coherent national framework that promotes curriculum continuity and is sufficiently flexible to ensure progression in pupils' learning. It facilitates the transition of pupils between schools and phases of education and provides a foundation for lifelong learning.

To promote public understanding

The National Curriculum increases public understanding of, and confidence in, the work of schools and in the learning and achievements resulting from compulsory education. It provides a common basis for discussion of educational issues among lay and professional groups, including pupils, parents, teachers, governors and employers.

Developing the school curriculum

While these four purposes do not change over time, the curriculum itself cannot remain static. It must be responsive to changes in society and the economy, and changes in the nature of schooling itself. Teachers, individually and collectively, have to reappraise their teaching in response to the changing needs of their pupils and the impact of economic, social and cultural change. Education only flourishes if it successfully adapts to the demands and needs of the time.

What changes have impacted on the curriculum?

ADVANCES IN WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT TEACHING AND LEARNING

As Tony Wagner (2001) observes, teachers are like craftspersons: the profession "attracts people who enjoy working alone and take great pride in developing a degree of expertise and perfecting 'handcrafted products'" — their special units and courses — whose identity may be threatened by attempts to impose structure on what they love to do. "The educational 'fads of the month' that have swept through schools for the past 30 years have served to reinforce the belief of many teachers that innovations are the fleeting fancy of leaders who are here today and gone tomorrow — and so are not to be believed" (Wagner, 2001, 378).

But research on teaching and learning has advanced in the last decade perhaps more than in the previous half-century combined, and the resulting discoveries contribute to a growing foundation for "best practices of instruction," most of which find their way into teacher certification programs for public school educators and eventually into the national education conference circuit. However, unless veteran educators actively pursue innovative advances in the profession, they may be unaware of an array of research-based "best practice" methods that are transforming teaching and learning in classrooms nationwide.

Among those research-supported advances in teaching and learning that have proven their value in the classroom are the theory of multiple intelligences, differentiated instruction, formative and "backwards design" assessment, opportunity to learn (OTL), cognitive neuroscience ("brain research"), demographics and learning, and inquiry science methods. This sampling is a fraction of the work completed and underway to assist teachers in better serving children and families in our schools — and it's important to acknowledge that many educators are already employing updated research-based best practices in their work today.




Multiple intelligence theory

Multiple intelligence theory: a now-familiar notion that there are at least eight different ways to measure human potential, rendering traditional I.Q. testing far too limited — has been extended by many researchers to offer direct applications in the classroom. Gardner asserts that schools (and our culture) heavily prioritize linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences, and fail to recognize or reinforce other aptitudes and gifts in children. Multiple intelligence theory has extended our understanding of what "success" in school means — and the classroom applications of the theory present a mandate for educators to rethink assessment in light of the many ways children can excel (or be slighted) in schools. Teachers need training in ways to present learning in a wider variety, incorporating cooperative learning, music, role play, project- and problem-based activities, and more, and many schools are re-evaluating how to do this; but many schools and teachers in practice are still delivering and assessing instruction in largely traditional ways. (Gardner, 2002; Armstrong, 1994).



Latest initiatives - even more boy inappropriate nonsense

As well as cutting out subjects, Sir Jim proposes a greater emphasis on life skills, including making lessons about emotional well-being and social skills a compulsory part of the curriculum.

Pupils should have the "personal, social and emotional qualities essential to their health, well-being and life as a responsible citizen in the 21st Century".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7770469.stm


Politics.

The Conservatives' Children's Secretary, Michael Gove, said the shift away from subjects meant a dilution of learning.

"The government’s changes to the primary curriculum will lead to children learning less not more. The move away from traditional subject areas will lead to a further erosion of standards," said Mr Gove.

Liberal Democrat Children's spokesman David Laws said schools needed greater freedom to set their own teaching priorities, not a new set of government directives.

"While IT skills are extremely important, they must not come at the expense of giving children a good grounding in the basics of literacy and numeracy."

The National Association of Head Teachers welcomed the emphasis on well-being, saying that such an "ethos of holistic education" was one of most important aspects of primary school.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7770469.stm


Curriculum for Excellence

Curriculum for Excellence aims to achieve a transformation in education in Scotland by providing a coherent, more flexible and enriched curriculum from 3 to 18.

The curriculum includes the totality of experiences which are planned for children and young people through their education, wherever they are being educated.

It is underpinned by the values inscribed on the mace of the Scottish Parliament - wisdom, justice, compassion and integrity.

The purpose of Curriculum for Excellence is encapsulated in the four capacities – to enable each child or young person to be a successful learner, a confident individual, a responsible citizen and an effective contributor.



The needs and interests of boys.

Why investigate a new approach to cater for boys?

Even when leaving the proven developmental and biological differences between males and females aside, there is an obvious difference in the way boys and girls think and learn which can be clearly seen in the classroom. Examining the average classroom the difference between the boys and girls engagement and attitude towards school are obvious. Boys, in general, are disinterested and disengaged from the classroom experience compared to their female peers, this difference in engagement is particularly pertinent from the age of 9 before the boys have even reached high school.

This disengagement of many boys has been evident from the data collected in the thirteen schools in the Boys Education Project in the Diocese of Broken Bay.
A Queensland Government Report states that,

“….As a group, boys are at higher risk of failing to achieve at school than girls as a group. Boys on the whole are less likely to complete high school and more likely to be suspended or excluded. Community concerns about boys' engagement and performance at school link with broader social issues for some young men. These include a worrying suicide rate, significant violence and harassment, and alienation from wider society. ..”.

www.ep.liu.se/ecp/021/vol1/010/ecp2107010.pdf - 24/3/2009.

As educators of the future generation of men, it is vital that we focus on adapting the curriculum to cater for boys, to thereby change their attitudes and engagement toward learning and school in order to best prepare and educate
them for their future. We have come to point where the classroom just is not developmentally appropriate for young boys particularly below the age of 7.



What do boys need?


We know that learning is strongest when certain conditions are met:

* Critical tasks are practised at an appropriate frequency and intensity.
* Practice takes place at the right skill level for the individual student—a skill level that continuously adapts to keep the student challenged, but not frustrated.
* Multiple skills are “cross-trained” at the same time for lasting improvement.
* Rewards build as a student progresses, maximizing motivation.
* The learning environment feels “safe,” so students are encouraged to take risks.
* The content is age appropriate and engaging.

It is widely recognised in the educational community that in general, boys below the age of 7 have not yet developed the fine motor skills essential for writing. Additionally, the language centres in their brains mature up to 6 years later than their female counter-parts. With so much societal pressure on achieving literacy over the last 30 years we have seen a pushing down of the curriculum to younger and younger children. Before this time, the nursery curriculum was primarily focused on socialisation and getting the child ready for school, not trying to get a jump start on academics. Literacy and numeracy exposure was in the form of being read a story, chanting rhymes or singing songs only. Now children are expected before entering school to recognise and write the numbers 1-10 and most of the letters of the alphabet. Failing to achieve this standard leads to extra focus groups in school. These children quickly realise that they are in the 'dumb' group. Consequently, their already diminished perception of school drops through the floor. Consequently, the cycle of poor academic achievement continues. The politicians will shout to further increase the focus on literacy at this early age. The fatal flaw in this thinking is that they are failing to see that for most boys literacy before the age of 7 is simply inappropriate the male brain just does not have the language centres to cope with it. Their attempt at a solution only serves to further frustrate and alienate boys especially as it tends to be gym or break time that is sacrificed in favour of extra literacy time.


How do boys relate to each other?

A good source of the needs and interests of boys is to simply watch how they interact with each other. They are quite physical, always pushing and shoving each other

Table of p84 - WGM...sax



The difference may be characterised this way: boys' friendships are shoulder-to-shoulder, a group of boys looking out at some common interest. Girls on the other hand are face-to-face, two or three talking with each other.
[Tannan, Deborah. You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, rev ed. New York: HarperCollins, 2001]

The implications of this are that when working with a boy, sit next to him, shoulder-to-shoulder and spread out the materials in front of you so you are both focusing on the materials. Holding eye contact face-to-face is almost certain to make them uncomfortable.


Status.

For most boys, being friends with a teacher is a sign of being a geek. They recoil at the idea of being the 'Teachers Pet' and will do almost anything to prove that this is not the case. Professor Bishop at Cornell University writes:

"In the eyes of most students, the nerd exemplifies the 'I trust my teachers to help me learn' attitude that prevails in most elementary school classrooms. The dominant middle school crowd is telling them that trusting teachers is baby stuff. It is 'us' [the boys] versus 'them' [the teachers]. Friendship with teachers make you a target for harassment by peers....Boys are not supposed to suck up to teachers. You avoid being perceived as a suck-up by avoiding eye contact with teachers, not raising one's hand in class too frequently, and [by] talking or passing notes to friends during class (this demonstrates that you value relationships with friends more than your reputation with the teacher).
[Bishop, John H. Bishop, Matthew. Gelbwasser, Lara. Green, Shanna. Zuckerman, Andrew. Nerds and Freaks: A Theory of Student Culture and Norms
Brookings Papers on Education Policy - 2003, pp. 141-199]


Different sequence of maturation.

Researchers at Virginia Tech. examined brain activity in 508 'normal' children - 284 boys and 224 girls - ranging in age from 2 months to 16 years. This study demonstrated that various regions of the brain develop in a different sequence in boys compared with girls. It is incorrect to claim "Boys develop along the same lines as girls, only slower". The truth is invariably more complex, for example, the researchers found that the areas of the brain involved with language and fine motor skills matured around 6 years earlier in girls while the areas involved in targeting and spacial memory mature about 4 years earlier in boys. They concluded that:

"In the areas of the brain involved in language, in spatial memory, in motor coordination, and in getting along with other people develop in a different order, time and rate in girls compared with boys."


Literature.

In my initial investigation I referenced the research done at Harvard University into the brain image of children experiencing emotion. It revealed that boys process those feeling in the primitive nucleus of their brain which has few direct connections to the areas of the brain responsible for language whereas girls emotional centres are located in the same area as those responsible for language. Consequently, females are more able to discuss their feelings whereas when a boy experiences intense emotion, they talk less. Those feelings are locked away never to be spoken about. That is why it is futile to ask a young boy "How would you feel if ...." It is asking the brain to do two unrelated tasks.

We can see how this translates in the appeal of literature for boys. Touchy feely books just aren't appropriate for young boys. They will not enjoy it and again it risks turning them off reading altogether. One of the most consistent findings in education research is that most girls prefer fiction: short stories and novels, where they can be analytical about the character's motives and behaviours. Boys on the other hand prefer non-fiction: descriptions of real events (generally, battles or adventure) or illustrated accounts of the way things work. Stories have to involve action and a strong male protagonist. Hence the attraction of superhero comics to the young male population. [Simpson, A. Facts and Fiction: An investigation of the Reading Practices of Girls and Boys, English Education 1991]

Some educators have found assigning articles from the daily newspaper is a good motivator for boys. Edward DeRoche, a director at the University of San Diego, has reviewed many studies of the effectiveness of newspapers for motivating below-average readers, particularly boys. The studies show that "students in such classes score significantly higher in spelling, vocabulary development, and comprehension than comparable students who did not use the newspapers" [DeRoche, Edward. READ ALL ABOUT IT: THE CASE FOR NEWSPAPERS IN THE CLASSROOM, Education Week,29/1/2003]

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Investigation into the physiological and psychological differences between developing boys and girls.


There are many clear differences between men and women, however, when we think of young boys and girls we have a tendency to think that there isn't too much that separates them. Since the 70's we've been bombarded with feminist inspired theories that any differences between the sexes are socially constructed. Consequently the advice to parents and teachers as been to switch the traditional gender stereotypes. For example, giving girls the toy cars and getting boys a little pram with a baby-doll in it. There has been a fair amount of research during this same time period indicating that the reason boys like cars and girls like dolls is because of differences at the genetic level and that the difference in the way boys and girls perceive the world is much greater than we had previously guessed.


We have known for some time that mature adult brains differ according to gender. The functions in the male brains are more compartmentalized while in female brains they are more holistic. Up until very recently the scientific community explained these differences as been due to hormonal differences. This belief reinforced the view that differences between the sexes were negligible before puberty.


Different Brains.


In 2004 scientist at UCLA examined a 'lateral gynandromorphic hermaphrodite' bird. Basically, every cell of this birds body was male on the right and female on the left. However, the blood contained a mixture of male and female hormones. If the conventional thought at the time was correct there should have been little difference between the two hemispheres of the brain. But there was, the two sides were dramatically different from each other. The scientists who studied this bird concluded that male and female brain tissue is “intrinsically different” because of the sex chromosome and not sex hormones. The difference is genetic, so young boys and girls brains are already different at day one.

[ARNOLD and BURGOYNE, “Are XX and XY Brain cells Intrinsically Different?” Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism, 2004]


Hearing Ability.


A study done on the effect of music therapy on premature babies in the late 80's revealed more physiological variation between the sexes. The babies were played soft music in their cribs along with a control group that heard no music. An unexpected discovery was made. Girls on average left the hospital nine and a half days earlier than the control group. Whereas, with boys the music had no effect at all. A follow up study done with humming a lullaby revealed a more dramatic difference with the girls leaving hospital around twelve days earlier while the sound still appeared not to have any observable effect on the boys. The researchers concluded that the most “plausible explanation was that the boys simply could not hear the music as well or in the same way as the girls.”

[CAINE, “The Effects of Music on the Selected Stress Behaviors in a Newborn I.C.U.” Journal of Music Therapy, 1991]


With the advances in technology experienced in our time we are now able to see the response of the brain as music is played. A more recent study of 350 newborns used this brain imaging technology to track the 'acoustic brain response' across the full spectrum. Their findings were that girls had substantially more sensitive hearing “especially in the 1000-4000Hz range (soft sounds) which is important for speech discrimination”. Confirming that girls do in fact hear better than boys, further studies on older children and adults reveal that this gap also increases with age.

[CASSIDY and DITTY, “Gender Differences among Newborns on a Transient Otoacoustic Emissions Test for Hearing,” Journal of Music Therapy, 2001.]



This has important implications in the classroom where status for boys is often structured from the back of the class forward. The boys may simply be out of range of the teacher speaking in a soft voice.


Visual Differences.


It has been well documented that females are more adept at interpreting facial expressions and few would dispute it. Scientists at Cambridge University set out to discover if this was innate or a consequence of social factors. They set up an experiment where they dangled a mobile that would slowly turn on the left side of a baby's field of vision and a smiling woman would be on the right. The 102 babies in the study had their eye movements recorded and analysed to determine which they preferred. It turned out that most of the girls favoured the woman's face while the boys were more than twice as likely to prefer the mobile. They concluded that it was “beyond reasonable doubt that sex differences in social interest are, in part, biological in origin”

[CONNELLAN and BARON-COHEN, “Sex Differences in Human Neonatal Social Perception,” Infant Behavior & Development, 2000.]


The answer lies in the anatomy of the eye. The eye is divided into layers, in one of these layers (the ganglion layer) there are two types of cell. Small P – cells and much larger M – cells. P – cells take in information about texture and colour while M – cells compile information about direction and movement. Basically P – cells answer the question “what is it?” and the M – cells are for “where is it and where's it going?” The male retina is considerably thicker than the female because it is made up of of mostly M – cells, whereas females have mostly P – cells.

[KAPLAN and BENARDETE, “The Dynamics of Primate Retinal Ganglion Cells,” Progress in Brain Research, 2001.]


This serves to at least partially explain why the boys preferred to track the mobile; why they like to play with toys that require action and may be the reason why most boys seem to be predisposed to kinaesthetic learning. In light of this we can also understand why girls are more likely to appreciate objects for being colourful and richly textured. However, this difference in the ganglion layer has a knock on effect. The various receptor cells that are wired to the M-cells differ in ratio to the ones that are wired to P-cells so the effect is that boys prefer 'cold' colours such as black, grey, silver, and blue. Girls on the other hand, prefer 'warm' colours like red, orange, green and beige. Simply because they are wired to have an abundance of receptor cells for these respective colours.


I have observed in the classroom that praise for artwork tends to be more enthusiastic from the overwhelmingly female staff if it's colourful while the black scribble of a spaceship crashing into the moon gets an unenthusiastic “Oh, that's nice...how about adding a bit of colour to brighten it up?” It is this lack of understanding that can turn a boy off artistic activities as he quickly comes to realise that he has to change his approach to suit the female eye. To test this theory, I set up an experiment in the class room where I created 2 bunches of coloured crayons – one with the warm colours described above, the other with the cold colours. I then allowed the children to choose a picture to colour in – 3 of the pictures were of some sort of action (verbs) the other 3 were of objects (nouns). According to the research on the anatomy of the eye, we should find that most boys prefer drawing verbs with the cold colours and most girls the nouns with the warm colours. XXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXX



Geometry and Navigation.

Scientists have discovered that males and females use different parts of their brain from each other when dealing with tasks involving geometry and navigation. Young men use the primitive nucleus deep inside our brain, the hippocampus. While females use the cerebral cortex for these tasks, the more advanced part at the front of the brain. The result is that when you ask a female for directions the typical response will be filled with landmarks you can see, hear or smell. Whereas a males are more likely to use absolute directions and distance. The opinion of brain experts is that the hippocampus acts somewhat like a G.P.S.


Maturation.

I sure we've all heard this opinion that girls mature on average 2 years faster than boys. And while it's true that certain areas of the brain mature faster in girls, there are also aspects in which boys mature before girls. To study this, Researchers examined brain activity in 508 children from the age 2 months to 16 years to show that the brain develops in a different sequence in boys compared with girls. They found that the areas of the brain involved with language and fine motor skills mature around 6 years earlier in girls. However, the area of the brain used for spatial memory and targeting mature around 4 years earlier in boys. Their conclusion was that it was too simple to claim that girls matured faster than boys and the truth was that while girls are maturing faster in some areas of the brain, the boys are maturing faster in others.

[HANLON, THATCHER and CLINE, “Gender Differences in the Development of EEG Coherence in Normal Children,” Developmental Neuropsychology, 1999]


When applying this to early education which still has its main focus reading and writing. Skills that are more appropriate con with the development of girls


Thursday, February 5, 2009

Action Plan

Kris Martin, Words – 971



The general topic that I’m investigating is: Learning through play. It is now recognised that this is the natural way children acquire and master the skills necessary to survive and thrive in the world. However, this is a very wide subject area and as such requires to be more focused.


Aim

The aim of my research will be to consider how the curriculum may be constructed if it was to cater specifically to the needs and interests of boys. I chose this aim because growing up I was in constant conflict with my school and its teachers. The subjects I did well in were those that I had an extra-curricular interest. If school did anything it made me like my favourite subjects less - damaging my interest in Art and Maths by taking the fun out of them and making them seem like hard work. As a result of my experience and knowledge acquired through units in this HNC course (DF54 34, DF55 34, DF52 34), I believe that the curriculum may be damaging to children's natural learning instinct and enthusiasm. This belief motivated me to read widely on the subject of learning, informing my decision to investigate this subject further. I decided to tailor it to focus on boys because I feel that many of the difficulties I had while at school was because the teaching (apart from P.E.) was gender-neutral, I want to investigate the validity of this claim.


Differences between the sexes.

The starting point of my investigation will be into the physiological and psychological differences between developing boys and girls. It is clear that there is behaviour which we consider typical of a particular sex; we have to begin by demonstrating what these differences are and what potential impact has on learning.

In the past 30 years the consensus has been that gender is socially constructed (DF56 34). In this time there has been a definite shift toward being gender-neutral (DF51 34). Boys for the first time were being encouraged to put down their trucks, go dress up in girly clothes and play in the house corner with a doll. If gender is indeed socially constructed, after 30 years of gender-neutral education we should find that the interests and behaviour of boys and girls show no notable differences (DF54 34). I shall consider the alternative theory that gender may be hard-wired in to our genetics. I will draw on several large scale studies investigating differences in the brain, hearing and vision that I have sourced in various books and university journals. These insights will be triangulated with my own observations in the classroom (DF4Y 34).

The needs and interests of boys.

Having now settled the differences between the sexes and establishing that my original aim is worthy of pursuing, I can now focus more on boys by investigating their needs and interests (DF50 34). I will at the latest insights describing the best conditions for learning and relate how pushing down the focus on literacy to younger children particular boys is 'inappropriate' and therefore conflicts with the ideal conditions for learning. I will use a study which demonstrates that the various regions of the brain develop in a different sequence in boys compared with girls to back up the claim that early teaching of literacy is inappropriate for boys (DF58 34). The study will also serve to show that there are other brain functions that develop at a different rate, time and sequence which will be important to consider when trying to come up with a specific curriculum for boys.

I will then look at how boys relate to each other (DF54 34) in an attempt to understand what interests them as a whole and how they behave and view the world in general when in the comfortable surroundings of their friends. My next point will be to consider the importance of status to boys, and how this manifests itself in a school environment, where any boy who publicly takes school and the teachers seriously is considered to be a 'geek'; which as far as boys are concerned, is a very low rank in terms of status.

The final part of this investigation will be to into the kind of literature that appeals to boys (DF58 34) and which type of literature risks turning them off reading. I will attempt explain with the help of a Harvard study why and then look at solutions to the problem of getting boys interested in reading.


The Curriculum

In my final investigation I will look at how the curriculum changed from being teacher driven to the current state driven model with the introduction of the National Curriculum (DF51 34). The reasons behind it and how this has impacted on boys.

I will consider how the 'Curriculum for Excellence' (DF51 34) has attempted to reconcile the negative impact the National Curriculum has had in terms of being too focused on measuring progress rather than progressing learning itself. With a greater emphasis on kinaesthetic learning it is certainly more appropriate, I will review whether the advances made have gone far enough to get boys enthusiastic about school.

I will look at the latest innovations in teaching (DF52 34) and highlight those that appear to be especially appropriate for boys in order to tie together what they should be taught, when it is appropriate to teach those particular subjects and the best methods of instruction to create a curriculum which at the right skill level for the young male population—a skill level that is challenging , but not frustrating.


Conclusion

I will conclude with my findings, my own thoughts on the matter, and attempt to outline what the most appropriate curriculum would be considering the research and latest innovations that I have uncovered in the course of this investigation.

Friday, January 23, 2009

Take Play Seriously.

NYTimes

On a drizzly Tuesday night in late January, 200 people came out to hear a psychiatrist talk rhapsodically about play — not just the intense, joyous play of children, but play for all people, at all ages, at all times. (All species too; the lecture featured touching photos of a polar bear and a husky engaging playfully at a snowy outpost in northern Canada.) Stuart Brown, president of the National Institute for Play, was speaking at the New York Public Library’s main branch on 42nd Street. He created the institute in 1996, after more than 20 years of psychiatric practice and research persuaded him of the dangerous long-term consequences of play deprivation. In a sold-out talk at the library, he and Krista Tippett, host of the public-radio program ‘‘Speaking of Faith,’’ discussed the biological and spiritual underpinnings of play. Brown called play part of the ‘‘developmental sequencing of becoming a human primate. If you look at what produces learning and memory and well-being, play is as fundamental as any other aspect of life, including sleep and dreams.’’

The message seemed to resonate with audience members, who asked anxious questions about what seemed to be the loss of play in their children’s lives. Their concern came, no doubt, from the recent deluge of eulogies to play . Educators fret that school officials are hacking away at recess to make room for an increasingly crammed curriculum. Psychologists complain that overscheduled kids have no time left for the real business of childhood: idle, creative, unstructured free play. Public health officials link insufficient playtime to a rise in childhood obesity. Parents bemoan the fact that kids don’t play the way they themselves did — or think they did. And everyone seems to worry that without the chance to play stickball or hopscotch out on the street, to play with dolls on the kitchen floor or climb trees in the woods, today’s children are missing out on something essential.

The success of ‘‘The Dangerous Book for Boys’’ — which has been on the best-seller list for the last nine months — and its step-by-step instructions for activities like folding paper airplanes is testament to the generalized longing for play’s good old days. So were the questions after Stuart Brown’s library talk; one woman asked how her children will learn trust, empathy and social skills when their most frequent playing is done online. Brown told her that while video games do have some play value, a true sense of ‘‘interpersonal nuance’’ can be achieved only by a child who is engaging all five senses by playing in the three-dimensional world.

This is part of a larger conversation Americans are having about play. Parents bobble between a nostalgia-infused yearning for their children to play and fear that time spent playing is time lost to more practical pursuits. Alarming headlines about U.S. students falling behind other countries in science and math, combined with the ever-more-intense competition to get kids into college, make parents rush to sign up their children for piano lessons and test-prep courses instead of just leaving them to improvise on their own; playtime versus résumé building.

Discussions about play force us to reckon with our underlying ideas about childhood, sex differences, creativity and success. Do boys play differently than girls? Are children being damaged by staring at computer screens and video games? Are they missing something when fantasy play is populated with characters from Hollywood’s imagination and not their own? Most of these issues are too vast to be addressed by a single field of study (let alone a magazine article). But the growing science of play does have much to add to the conversation. Armed with research grounded in evolutionary biology and experimental neuroscience, some scientists have shown themselves eager — at times perhaps a little too eager — to promote a scientific argument for play. They have spent the past few decades learning how and why play evolved in animals, generating insights that can inform our understanding of its evolution in humans too. They are studying, from an evolutionary perspective, to what extent play is a luxury that can be dispensed with when there are too many other competing claims on the growing brain, and to what extent it is central to how that brain grows in the first place.

Scientists who study play, in animals and humans alike, are developing a consensus view that play is something more than a way for restless kids to work off steam; more than a way for chubby kids to burn off calories; more than a frivolous luxury. Play, in their view, is a central part of neurological growth and development — one important way that children build complex, skilled, responsive, socially adept and cognitively flexible brains.

Their work still leaves some questions unanswered, including questions about play’s darker, more ambiguous side: is there really an evolutionary or developmental need for dangerous games, say, or for the meanness and hurt feelings that seem to attend so much child’s play? Answering these and other questions could help us understand what might be lost if children play less.

‘‘See how that little boy reaches for a pail?’’ Stuart Brown asked one morning last fall, standing with me on the fringes of a small playground just north of the Central Park Zoo. ‘‘See how he curves his whole body around it?’’ Brown had flown to New York from his home in California to pitch a book about play to publishers. (He sold the idea to an editor at Penguin.) He agreed to meet me at the zoo while he was in town, to help me observe playfulness in the young members of many animal species, including our own.

Social play has its own vocabulary. Dogs have a particular body posture called the ‘‘play bow’’ — forelegs extended, rump in the air — that they use as both invitation and punctuation. A dog will perform a play bow at the beginning of a bout, and he will crouch back into it if he accidentally nips too hard and wants to assure the other dog: ‘‘Don’t worry! Still playing!’’

Other species have play signals, too. Chimps put on a ‘‘play face,’’ an open-mouthed expression that is almost like a face of aggression except that the muscles are relaxed into something like a smile. Baboons bend over and peer between their legs as an invitation to play, beavers roll around, goats gambol in a characteristic ‘‘play gait.’’ In fact, most species have from 10 to 100 distinct play signals that they use to solicit play or to reassure one another during play-fighting that it’s still all just in fun. In humans, the analogue to the chimp’s play face is a child’s smile, an open expression that indicates there is no real anger involved even in gestures that can look like a fight.

The day Brown met me in the park was a cold one, and the kids were bundled up like Michelin Men, adding more than the usual heft and waddle to their frolicking. Even beneath the padding, though, Brown could detect some typical gestures that these 2- and 3-year-olds were using instinctively to let one another know they were playing. ‘‘Play movement is curvilinear,’’ he said. ‘‘If that boy was reaching for something in a nonplay situation, his body would be all straight lines. But using the body language of play, he curves and embraces.’’

In their play — climbing up a slide, running around, passing buckets back and forth — the kids we watched were engaging in a pattern of behavior that many scientists believe is hard-wired. Their mothers and nannies were watching, too, no doubt having dragged the kids out of comfortable Upper East Side apartments because they thought daily play was important somehow, perhaps the first step in the long march toward Yale. To me all that little-kid motion looked just a bit silly — because play is, in many ways, a silly thing. Indeed, an essential component of play is its frivolity; biologists generally use phrases like ‘‘apparently purposeless activity’’ in their definitions of play. The definition proposed by Gordon Burghardt, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Tennessee, refines that phrase a little. In his 2005 book, ‘‘The Genesis of Animal Play,’’ he wrote that play is an activity of ‘‘limited immediate function.’’

Burghardt included several other factors in his definition too. Play is an activity that is different from the nonplay version of that activity (in terms of form, sequence or the stage of life in which it occurs), is something the animal engages in voluntarily and repeatedly and occurs in a setting in which the animal is ‘‘adequately fed, healthy and free from stress.’’ That last part of the definition — that play requires that an animal be stress-free and secure — suggests that play is the biological equivalent of a luxury item, the first thing to go when an animal or child is hungry or sick.

This makes evolutionary scientists prick up their ears. How can a behavior be crucial and expendable at the same time? And play is indeed expendable. Studies of vervet monkeys found that playtime decreased to almost zero during periods of drought in East Africa. Squirrel monkeys won’t play when their favorite food sources are unavailable. In humans under stress, what happens with play is more complicated. Even under devastating circumstances, the drive to play is unquenchable. As George Eisen wrote in ‘‘Children and Play in the Holocaust’’: ‘‘Children’s yearning for play naturally burst forth even amidst the horror. . . . An instinctual, an almost atavistic impulse embedded in the human consciousness.’’

Yet play does diminish when children suffer long-term, chronic deprivation, either one at a time in abusive or neglectful homes, or on a massive scale in times of famine, war or forced relocation. And children can still survive, albeit imperfectly, without it.

For humans and animals alike, truly vigorous, wholehearted, spontaneous play is something of a biological frill. This suggests one possible evolutionary function: that in its playfulness, an animal displays its own abundant health and suitability for breeding. But a skeptic might see it differently: if a behavior is this easy to dispense with when times are hard, it might suggest that the behavior is less essential than some advocates claim.

If play is an extravagance, why has it persisted? It must have some adaptive function, or at least a benefit that outweighs its cost, or it would have been winnowed out by the forces of natural selection. One answer can be found through ethology, the study of animal behavior, which takes as one of its goals the explication of how and why a behavior evolved. Nonhuman animals can be more easily studied than humans can: the conditions under which they are raised can be manipulated, their brains altered and probed. And if there is an evolutionary explanation for a human behavior, it could reveal itself in the study of the analogous behavior in animals. Because of nature’s basic parsimony, many aspects of the brain and behavior have been conserved through evolution, meaning that many of the observations that ethologists make in rats, mice and monkeys could apply to humans too.

When it comes to animal play, scientists basically agree that it’s mostly mammals that do it, and they basically agree that it’s a mystery why they do it, since there are so many good reasons not to. It all seems incredibly wasteful, and nature does not usually tolerate waste.

Play can be costly in terms of energy expenditure. Juveniles spend an estimated 2 to 15 percent of their daily calorie budget on play, using up calories the young animal could more profitably use for growing. Frisky playing can also be dangerous, making animals conspicuous and inattentive, more vulnerable to predators and more likely to hurt themselves as they romp and cavort. Biologists have observed many play-related calamities, like bighorn lambs being injured on cactus plants as they frolicked. One of the starkest measures of the risk of play was made by Robert Harcourt, a zoologist now at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, who spent nine months in 1988 observing seal pups off the coast of Peru. Harcourt witnessed 102 seal pups attacked by southern sea lions; 26 of them were killed. ‘‘Of these observed kills,’’ Harcourt reported in the British journal Animal Behaviour, ‘‘22 of the pups were playing in the shallow tidal pools immediately before the attack and appeared to be oblivious to the other animals fleeing nearby.’’ In other words, nearly 85 percent of the pups that were killed had been playing.

So play can be risky. And, under stress, it tends to disappear. What then would justify, in evolutionary terms, the prevalence of play?

One popular view is the play-as-preparation hypothesis. In this perspective, play evolved because it is good preparation for adulthood. It is a chance for young animals to learn and rehearse the skills they will need for the rest of their lives, and to do so in a secure environment, where mistakes will have few consequences. Proponents of this hypothesis say play is a way — and, not incidentally, a pleasurable way — of getting into muscle memory the generalized movements of survival: chasing, running, probing, tussling. Through play, these movements can be learned when the stakes are low and then retrieved in adulthood, when the setting is less safe and the need more urgent.

The play-as-preparation hypothesis seems logical, and each new observation seems to confirm it. Watch wolf pups at play, and it is easy to see how the biting and wrangling could be baby versions of the actions the pups will need later to assert their dominance or to help the pack kill its prey. Watch 2-year-olds playing at a toy workbench with little wooden mallets and blocks, and you can picture them as adults employing those same muscles to wield a full-size hammer.

But one trouble with the hypothesis is that the gestures of play, while similar, are not literally the same as the gestures of real life. In fact, the way an animal plays is often the exact opposite of the way it lives. In play-fighting, if one player starts to edge toward victory, he will suddenly reverse roles and move from the dominant to the submissive posture. Or he will stop fighting as hard, something the ethologists call self-handicapping. This is rarely done in real fighting, when the whole point is winning. The targets of play are different, too. In rats, real fighters try to bite one another on the back and the lower flanks; in play fights, they go for the nape of the neck. The gestures players use to nuzzle the neck are not the same ones they need to rehearse if they are to win a serious fight.

Nor is there much experimental evidence to support a connection between youthful playing and adult expertise. One Scottish study of kittens, for instance, tested the hypothesis that ample object play early in life would lead to better hunting later on. The investigator, a psychologist named T. M. Caro then at the University of St. Andrews, found no difference in hunting skills between one group of 11 cats that had been exposed to toys in their youth and a control group of 8 cats that had not.

Now an alternative view is taking hold, based on a belief that there must be something else going on — play not as a literal rehearsal, but as something less direct and ultimately more important. It focuses on the way that play might contribute to the growth and development of the brain.

John Byers started thinking about the brain and play almost by accident. A zoologist at the University of Idaho, Byers had spent years studying the playful antics of deer, pronghorn antelopes and the wild mountain goats called ibex. He knew that play was risky — he had observed ibex kids falling off steep cliffs as they romped — and at first he thought maybe the animals were taking such risks because the motor training helped them get in physical shape for adulthood. But something about this idea troubled him. Play can be exercise, he reasoned, but it was of too short duration to lead to long-term fitness or build muscle tone.

Byers preferred an alternate theory. In almost every species studied, a graph of playfulness looked like an inverted U, increasing during the juvenile period and then falling off around puberty, after which time most animals don’t play much anymore. One winter afternoon in 1993, Byers was roaming the stacks at the University of Idaho library, flipping through books the way you do when you’re not quite sure what you’re looking for. One book contained a graph of the growth curve of one important region of the brain, the cerebellum, over the juvenile period in the mouse. The growth curve of the mouse cerebellum was nearly identical to the curve of mouse playfulness.

‘‘It was like a light went on in my head,’’ Byers told me from Washington, D.C., where he is temporarily working at the National Science Foundation. ‘‘I wasn’t thinking specifically about play, but I sort of had a long-term interest in behavioral development.’’ And there it was: a chart that made it look as if rates of play in mice synchronized almost perfectly with growth rates in one critical region of the brain, the area that coordinates movements originating in other parts of the brain.

Intrigued, Byers enlisted the help of a graduate student, Curt Walker, who looked through the scientific literature on cerebellum development in rats and cats. ‘‘Then we compared those rates to what was known about the rates of play in those species,’’ Byers said. ‘‘And rats and cats showed the same relationship as mice: a match between when they were playing and when the cerebellum was growing.’’

The synchrony suggested a few things to Byers: that play might be related to growth of the cerebellum, since they both peak at about the same time; that there is a sensitive period in brain growth, during which time it’s important for an animal to get the brain-growth stimulation of play; and that the cerebellum needs the whole-body movements of play to achieve its ultimate configuration.

This opened up new lines of research, as neuroscientists tried to pinpoint just where in the brain play had its most prominent effects — which gets to the heart of the question of what might be lost when children do not get enough play. Most of this work has been done in rats. Sergio Pellis, a neuroscientist at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, is one of these investigators. He studies how brain damage in rats affects play behavior, and whether the relationship works in reverse: that is, not only whether brain-damaged rats play abnormally but also whether play-deprived rats develop abnormalities in their brains. Pellis’s research indicates that the relationship might indeed work in both directions.

In a set of experiments conducted last year, Pellis and his colleagues raised 12 female rats from the time they were weaned until puberty under one of two conditions. In the control group, each rat was caged with three other female juveniles. In the experimental group, each rat was caged with three female adults. Pellis knew from previous studies that the rats caged with adults would not play, since adult rats rarely play with juveniles, even their own offspring. They would get all the other normal social experiences the control rats had — grooming, nuzzling, touching, sniffing — but they would not get play. His hypothesis was that the brains in the experimental rats would reflect their play-deprived youth, especially in the region known as the prefrontal cortex.

At puberty the rats were euthanized so the scientists could look at their brains. What Pellis and his collaborators found was the first direct evidence of a neurological effect of play deprivation. In the experimental group — the rats raised in a play-deprived environment — they found a more immature pattern of neuronal connections in the medial prefrontal cortex. (This is distant from the cerebellum; it is part of the cerebrum, which constitutes the bulk of the mammalian brain.) Rats, like other mammals, are born with an overabundance of cortical brain cells; as the animal matures, feedback from the environment leads to the pruning and selective elimination of these excess cells, branchings and connections. Play is thought to be one of the environmental influences that help in the pruning — and, this research showed, play deprivation interferes with it.

Figuring out what these findings mean in terms of function involves a certain amount of conjecture. Pellis interprets his observation of a more tangled, immature medial prefrontal cortex in play-deprived rats to mean that the rat will be less able to make subtle adjustments to the social world. But maybe the necessary pruning can happen later in life, through other feedback mechanisms having little to do with play. Maybe there were already compensatory changes happening elsewhere in the brains of these young rats where no one had thought to look. Current research in Pellis’s lab, in which the brain is damaged first and the rat’s playing ability is measured afterward, seems to confirm that the medial prefrontal cortex has an important role in play. But the exact nature of its action is still not clear.

Many of the other important studies on play and the brain have come from the lab of Jaak Panksepp, a behavioral neuroscientist who trained most of the neurological investigators in the field during the three decades he was at Bowling Green State University in Ohio (though Pellis, who studied at Australia’s Monash University, was not among them). In the 1980s, Panksepp and a graduate student, Stephen Siviy, located the play drive in the thalamus, a primitive region of the brain that receives sensory information and relays it to the cortex. More recently, Panksepp has been exploring the connections among the play drive and certain human conditions, in particular attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (A.D.H.D.).

Panksepp has been studying A.D.H.D. in rats since the 1990s. In one experiment, to create a rat model of A.D.H.D., he and his colleagues took 32 newborn rats and destroyed in each the right frontal cortex, the region of the brain responsible for paying attention, planning ahead and being sensitive to social cues. (Human studies have shown that in children with A.D.H.D., frontal-lobe development is often delayed.) As a control, they performed sham surgery on 32 other rats, making the incisions but leaving the brain intact to be sure that any observed change would be due to the cortical destruction rather than the surgery itself. When the scientists compared the play behavior of the two groups, they found that the rats with the damaged right frontal cortex had higher levels of overall activity, as well as increased rates of roughand- tumble play, as compared with the controls. The rats with damaged frontal cortices behaved much like children described as hyperactive.

Panksepp and his colleagues then exposed these superplayers to extra opportunities for play. One extra hour a day of play, which generally took the form of play-fighting during a critical early stage, sufficed to reduce hyperactivity. The scientists thought similar play therapy might work for children with A.D.H.D., particularly if it was undertaken in early childhood — between ages 3 and 7 — when the urges are ‘‘especially insistent.’’

Panksepp’s current view of human A.D.H.D., he told me from his office at Washington State University, where he moved two years ago, is that it is in part ‘‘overactivity of play urges in the nervous system.’’ His ideas have made some impression on the human A.D.H.D. community, but not much. Benedetto Vitiello, the head of child and adolescent treatment and research at the National Institute of Mental Health, remembers hearing Panksepp give a talk at the institute around the time his article appeared in 2003. But he said he has not heard of any clinical studies since then that investigate whether extra play in early childhood helps ease the symptoms of A.D.H.D. Besides, Vitiello adds, there are many differences between a rat with a brain injury and a child with an intact but slowly developing brain. So even though he considers Panksepp’s research ‘‘interesting,’’ he says that it has not quite led to a complete animal model of A.D.H.D.

Animal-play experiments have focused largely on the most vivid form of play — social play, in particular the kind of social play known as play-fighting. But it’s clear to anyone who thinks about it that play-fighting is a very narrow definition of play. Wrestling is not the same as chasing. For that matter, playing tag is not the same as playing dress up; playing in a soccer league is not the same as shooting hoops in a neighborhood park; and none of these are the same as playing Scrabble or Uno or video games. For all its variety, however, there is something common to play in all its protean forms: variety itself. The essence of play is that the sequence of actions is fluid and scattered. In the words of Marc Bekoff, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado, play is at its core ‘‘a behavioral kaleidoscope.’’

In fact, it’s this kaleidoscopic quality that led Bekoff and others to think of play as the best way for a young animal to gain a more diverse and responsive behavioral repertory. Thus, the currently fashionable flexibility hypothesis, a revival of an idea Bekoff first proposed in the 1970s. If a single function can be ascribed to every form of play, in every playful species, according to this way of thinking, it is that play contributes to the growth of more supple, more flexible brains.

‘‘I think of play as training for the unexpected,’’ Bekoff says. ‘‘Behavioral flexibility and variability is adaptive; in animals it’s really important to be able to change your behavior in a changing environment.’’ Play, he says, leads to mental suppleness and a broader behavioral vocabulary, which in turn helps the animal achieve success in the ways that matter: group dominance, mate selection, avoiding capture and finding food.

The flexibility hypothesis is something of a bridge between the play-aspreparation hypothesis and more recent findings about play and neurological growth. It works best when explaining play-fighting. With its variable tempo, self-handicapping and role reversals, play-fighting is like the improvisation of a jazz quartet, forcing an animal to respond rapidly to change.

Players riff off one another. One thrusts, the other parries; suddenly the one that was on top is pinned on the bottom and then just as suddenly is on top again. As in jazz, the smoothness of the improvisation matters as much as the gestures themselves. ‘‘Ability to use and switch among alternative sequences,’’ Maxeen Biben, an ethologist formerly at the National Institutes of Health, wrote in an essay in ‘‘Animal Play,’’ ‘‘may be as valuable as getting a lot of practice at the most effective sequences.’’

The physical movements of playfighting provide the environmental input needed to prune the developing cortex, as Sergio Pellis’s research suggested. This pruning is one way an animal achieves the ability to predict and respond to another animal’s shifting movements. Some play scholars say that such skills will come in handy in adulthood, not only in fighting but in other real-life situations as well, like evading capture and finding food. A more skeptical view would be that play-fighting might not really teach much at all about an animal’s subsequent skills — there was that Scottish study about object play in kittens, remember, that showed no connection to hunting ability in adulthood — but it does one thing for sure: it makes the animal that play-fights a better play-fighter. And there might be something to be said for that. The more a young animal plays, the richer the animal’s life, the more fun, the more stimulated, the more social. There might possibly be an immediate benefit just from that simple fact.

Which reveals an important rift in the study of the purpose of play: a debate among play scholars about how to tell the story of play’s possible short-term and long-term benefits. The flexibility hypothesis imposes one such story, but it might not be the best story. Just because it’s possible to see how playing might contribute to a suppler brain and a more varied behavioral repertory, it does not follow that playing is the only way to achieve such flexibility. This relates to the concept of equifinality, an idea from systems theory that says there are usually more ways than one to arrive at a particular end. The fact that play offers one way of getting to an end need not mean it is the only way — nor need it mean that getting to that end is the ultimate purpose of play.

The problem of equifinality troubled Anthony Pellegrini, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, when he tried to interpret his findings about rough-and-tumble play in fifth-grade boys. He and his colleagues studied the recess behavior of 37 boys and scored a play episode as rough-and-tumble when a boy engaged in one from a list of behaviors — ‘‘tease, hit and kick at, chase, poke, pounce, sneak up, carry child, pile on, play-fight, hold and push’’ — while displaying a wide smile or ‘‘play face.’’ Knowing that earlier studies found a connection between roughand- tumble play and a child’s peer affiliation and social problem-solving flexibility, the scientists hypothesized that the most vigorous players would also be the most socially competent. But Pellegrini found no clear benefits in the boys who played the most. Maybe, he wrote in an essay about this research in ‘‘The Future of Play Theory,’’ it’s because other things that happen at recess — ‘‘cooperative social games, comfort contact and conversation’’ — might be just as good as pouncing or chasing at achieving a sense of connection.

‘‘Developmental systems tend to be highly redundant,’’ wrote Patrick Bateson, a noted biologist at Cambridge University, in a book of essays called ‘‘The Nature of Play.’’ This means, Bateson wrote, ‘‘that if an endpoint is not achieved by one route, it is achieved by another. Playing when young is not the only way to acquire knowledge and skills; the animal can delay acquisition until it is an adult.’’

Nonetheless, even Bateson, a prominent play scholar who recognizes the quandary posed by equifinality, suggested that play is the best way to reach certain goals. Through play, an individual avoids what he called the lure of ‘‘false endpoints,’’ a problem-solving style more typical of harried adults than of playful youngsters. False endpoints are avoided through play, Bateson wrote, because players are having so much fun that they keep noodling away at a problem and might well arrive at something better than the first, good-enough solution.

But maybe the flexibility hypothesis is itself a false endpoint. Maybe the idea that play is the best route to a whole host of good results — creativity, social agility, overall mental suppleness — is just the first idea scientists landed on, and they were inclined to accept it because it fit so well with their innate ideas about the nature of childhood. This is the view of a small group of play scholars we’ll call the play skeptics. What worries the play skeptics is that most people in the industrialized West — scientists in the field, play advocates and all the rest of us, parents, teachers, doctors, scholars, all the children and all the aging children — have been ensnared by what skeptics call the ‘‘play ethos.’’ By this they mean the reflexive, unexamined belief that play is an unmitigated good with a crucial, though vaguely defined, evolutionary function.

‘‘Play ethos’’ comes from Peter Smith, a psychology professor at the University of London and a leading authority on play’s effect on children’s emotional development. He uses it as a cautionary term, a reminder that most conclusions about play’s adaptive function have so far been based not on scientific evidence but on wishful thinking.

For Smith to suggest that scientists have fallen under the spell of the play ethos is a kind of apostasy, because some of the earliest bits of evidence used to establish the play ethos in the first place came out of Smith’s own laboratory at the University of London in the late 1970s. But it was in the execution of those experiments, and the follow- up studies that revealed their fatal flaw, that Smith came to understand, more than most, the importance of caution.

In one of his early experiments, Smith and his colleagues put 3- and 4-year-olds in two different play settings. In one group the children were allowed to play, in whatever way they felt like, with several wooden sticks. In the other group they were shown by an adult ‘‘play tutor’’ how to fit two sticks together to make a longer one. Then the children were given two tasks. First they had to retrieve a marble by connecting two sticks. Both groups performed this task, which Smith called ‘‘direct’’ problem solving, about equally well. Then they had to retrieve a marble that had been pushed farther away, so they could reach it only by connecting three sticks, not just two — what Smith called ‘‘innovative’’ problemsolving. The children who had played with the sticks performed this task significantly better than the ones who had been shown how to join together only two sticks.

‘‘At this point I was happy,’’ Smith recalled years later, writing in ‘‘The Future of Play Theory.’’ His findings were taken as evidence that spontaneous free play led to more creative thinking. But then he started to wonder whether he himself had fallen victim to the play ethos.

A single investigator had conducted the entire experiment, serving as both play tutor and evaluator on the problem-solving task. Might the experimenter subconsciously have favored the free-play children, Smith asked himself, maybe by giving subtle nonverbal cues or scoring more leniently? He ran the experiment again, bringing in a second investigator who could test the children without knowing whether they were in the free-play or the tutored group.

This time Smith found no difference in innovative problem solving between the two groups. At first he didn’t believe his new results, thinking that maybe the sample size was too small or that the groups were somehow poorly matched. But further studies bore out this nonfinding, and Smith realized, on reflection, that he and his colleagues had probably been giving inadvertent hints to the free-play group the first time around. He ascribed it to his own subconscious idealization of play.

Idealization is a trap. And it seems most seductive when it comes to play, especially one particular kind: pretend play. This is the kind ethologists tend to ignore, since it is difficult to argue — though a few scientists have tried — that animals are capable of pretending. Yet for humans, pretend play is one of the most crucial forms of play, occupying at its peak at about age 4 some 20 percent of a child’s day. It includes some of the most wondrous moments of childhood: dramatic play, wordplay, ritual play, symbolic play, games, jokes and imaginary friends. And it is the kind of play that positively screams out for hyperbole when outsiders try to describe it. This is where even coolheaded scientists get florid in their prose — and where play advocates like Stuart Brown and play skeptics like Peter Smith engage in their most vivid disagreements about the ultimate purpose of play.

Brown talked about pretend play at the New York Public Library last month, saying that a playful imagination ‘‘can infuse the moment with a sense of magic.’’ But skeptics find such comments annoying. ‘‘Despite the heartwarming rhetoric we dish out in our teacher-training classes, children do not have unlimited imagination,’’ wrote David Lancy, an anthropologist at Utah State University. ‘‘Their make-believe and, by extension, other play forms, is constrained by the roles, scripts and props of the culture they live in.’’ Lancy pointed to field studies of a Mayan community in which children teach their younger siblings how to pretend in the most pedestrian of ways, ‘‘focusing their attention on washing, caring for babies and cooking’’ — no magic there.

The skeptical Smith does see some value to fantasy play: when children dress up, make and use props and devise story lines to playact, he says, they learn to use sophisticated language, negotiate roles and exchange information. But he adds that many of these benefits could be gained just as well through other forms of play, work activities and plain old-fashioned instruction. Smith does not deny that playing is great fun — his own children were playing noisily in the background when I phoned him at his home in London, and he never once asked them to hush — but he wants everyone to keep it all in perspective.

Keeping play in perspective means looking at it not just clearly but fully. Not everything about childhood play is sweetness and light, no matter how much we romanticize it. Play can be dangerous or scary. It can be disturbing, destabilizing, aggressive. It can lead to misunderstandings and hurt feelings, leaving children out of the charmed circle of the schoolyard. The other side of playing is teasing, bullying, scapegoating, excluding, hurting.

I well remember this darker side of play from my own girlhood. Like many other klutzy kids, I hated recess, since it stripped me of the classroom competence that was such good cover for my shyness. Out in the schoolyard, there was no raising your hand with the right answer. I had to wait to be asked to play jump-rope and had to face embarrassment if I missed a skip or — worse, much worse — if nobody ended up asking me. Even pretend play could take an ugly turn if my playmates made their dolls say nasty things.

Recognizing play’s dark side is not difficult, if we are really willing to search our memories. To play scholars, thinking about play’s negatives can be clarifying and might even generate new ideas, not only about play but also about the double-edged nature of pleasure itself. Why is it that something so joyous, something children yearn for so forcefully, can be so troubling too? If you’re accustomed to looking for evolutionary explanations for perplexing behavior, here is something meaty to chew on: what could be the adaptive advantage of using play to wrestle your demons?

Demons do indeed emerge at playtime, in part because children carve out play spaces that have no room for the civilizing influence of adults. This is what happened in the recess ‘‘fort culture’’ that arose spontaneously in 1990 at the Lexington Montessori School in Massachusetts, when the elementary-age children shunned the organized play their teachers had arranged and instead started building forts on their own in the surrounding woods. An intricate and rule-bound subculture developed, one that is still going on.

Mark Powell, then a graduate student at Lesley University in Cambridge nearby, observed the recess fort culture for several years in the 1990s and described it in 2007 in the journal Children, Youth and Environments. For the first few years, he wrote, petty conflicts, stick stealing and ejections for minor infractions were a constant background hum in a play culture that was otherwise high-spirited and fun. But it finally erupted into a miniwar one autumn, sparked by the hostile actions of a fort of 6- year-olds headed by a tyrannical little boy who called himself the General. Within a month of the General’s appearance, Powell wrote, the fantasy war play ‘‘had become a reality with daily raids and counterattacks, yelling, the occasional physical scrape and lots of hurt feelings.’’ It took the intervention of some other children, teachers and the General’s parents finally to persuade the child to call a truce.

Brian Sutton-Smith, one of the nation’s most eminent play scholars, has seen eruptions like the General’s many times before, but they don’t worry him. In fact, he embraces them. In such an elaborate play culture, he wrote, where so many harsh human truths come to the fore, ‘‘children learn all those necessary arts of trickery, deception, harassment, divination and foul play that their teachers won’t teach them but are most important in successful human relationships in marriage, business and war.’’

Sutton-Smith’s 1997 classic, ‘‘The Ambiguity of Play,’’ reflects in its title his belief that play’s ultimate purpose can be found in its paradoxes. During his years at Columbia’s Teachers College and the University of Pennsylvania, Sutton- Smith, a psychologist and folklorist, took careful note of how play could be destabilizing, destructive or disturbing. He collected renditions of the stories children told in their imaginative or dramatic play, stories of ‘‘being lost, being stolen, being bitten, dying, being stepped on, being angry, calling the police, running away or falling down.’’ Are these really the thoughts percolating inside our children? And is expressing these thoughts through play somehow good for them? Sutton-Smith called this underbelly of imaginative play part of the ‘‘phantasmagoria,’’ where children’s thoughts run wild and all the chaotic bits of the real world get tumbled together and pulled haphazardly apart in new, sometimes even scarier confabulations.

Why would such an enriching activity as play also be a source of so much anarchy and fear? Sutton- Smith found one possible answer by reading Stephen Jay Gould, the author and evolutionary biologist. The most highly adaptive organisms, Gould wrote, are those that embody both the positive and the negative, organisms that ‘‘possess an opposite set of attributes usually devalued in our culture: sloppiness, broad potential, quirkiness, unpredictability and, above all, massive redundancy.’’ Finely tuned specific adaptations can lead to blind alleys and extinction, he wrote; ‘‘the key is flexibility.’’

What Gould called quirkiness, Sutton-Smith called play. ‘‘Animal play has been described by many investigators as fragmentary, disorderly, unpredictable and exaggerated,’’ Sutton-Smith wrote, and ‘‘child play has been said to be improvised, vertiginous and nonsensical.’’ The adaptive advantage to a behavior that is multifaceted, then, is that pursuing it, enjoying it, needing it to get through the day, allows for a wider range in a play-loving person’s behavioral repertory, which is always handy, just in case.

Playing might serve a different evolutionary function too, he suggests: it helps us face our existential dread. The individual most likely to prevail is the one who believes in possibilities — an optimist, a creative thinker, a person who has a sense of power and control. Imaginative play, even when it involves mucking around in the phantasmagoria, creates such a person. ‘‘The adaptive advantage has often gone to those who ventured upon their possibility with cries of exultant commitment,’’ Sutton-Smith wrote. ‘‘What is adaptive about play, therefore, may be not only the skills that are a part of it but also the willful belief in acting out one’s own capacity for the future.’’

It’s a pretty idea, the notion that play gives you hope for a better tomorrow, but science demands something a little less squishy. Science demands that if there are important long-term benefits to play, they must be demonstrated. That is why studies of play-deprived rats are so fascinating; they offer objective evidence that in at least some animals, insufficient play can have serious consequences.

Even when science suggests certain answers, however, it cannot easily make the leap from young rats to young humans, nor tell us much of anything about how those young children should behave. What if all the things we hope children derive from free play — cognitive flexibility, social competence, creative problem-solving, mastery of their own bodies and their own environments — can be learned just as well by teaching these skills directly? What if the only clear advantage to the vanishing 20-minute recess is that it makes kids less restless in class, something that can be just as easily accomplished by a jog around the all-purpose room?

Which brings us back to wondering what would be lost if the Cassandras are right, whether children would suffer if free play really does turn out to be a thing of the past. It seems almost ludicrous to ask such a question. Of course play is good for something; it is the essence of good. Watch children at play, and the benefits are so obvious: just look at those ecstatic faces, just listen to those joyful squeals. Stuart Brown alluded to it in his library talk last month. ‘‘Look at life without play, and it’s not much of a life,’’ he told the audience. ‘‘If you think of all the things we do that are playrelated and erase those, it’s pretty hard to keep going.’’ Without play, he said, ‘‘there’s a sense of dullness, lassitude and pessimism, which doesn’t work well in the world we live in.’’

In the end, it comes down to a matter of trade-offs. There are only six hours in a school day, only another six or so till bedtime, and adults are forever trying to cram those hours with activities that are productive, educational and (almost as an afterthought) fun. Animal findings about how play influences brain growth suggest that playing, though it might look silly and purposeless, warrants a place in every child’s day. Not too overblown a place, not too sanctimonious a place, but a place that embraces all styles of play and that recognizes play as every bit as essential to healthful neurological development as test-taking drills, Spanish lessons or Suzuki violin.