Dog people in Chicago know that Dog Beach is a space of boundless curiosity, delight in strangers, and freedom. Usually dogs live their lives bounded by separate houses, yards, streets; their encounters with each other and the world are multiply controlled. At Dog Beach I never see fights; tensions are quickly dissolved in the sand, the flying feet, and in the sheer multiplicity of dogs.
We human companions exult in our dogs’ romping that so pungently expresses our own love of play. Even when we aren’t partaking of the sniffing, capering, pissing extravaganza, we do loosen up with the other humans on the beach following their dogs around. We are all offleash.
The dog beach is the best analogy I can find to the mode of learning I saw during my night at the San Francisco Exploratorium last Thursday. Hundreds of people running around following their noses, their senses, leaving their marks in sand, in light, in sound waves, reeling past crazy mirrors as omnipresent and enticing as the lake here at Chicago’s Dog Beach. A dazzling display of curiosity.
I had stumbled upon Adult Night at the Exploratorium, which I think much more closely resembles Dog Beach than the usual family experience during the day. While the Exploratorium specializes in “offleash” play, “Adult play” at the Exploratorium is an especially offleash experience. True, kids don’t get enough chances to play and explore, but generally they get more than adults. And adults are cripplingly play-deprived.
For me it was a novelty to be at the Exploratorium without kids in tow, observing, wandering, listening, touching – just taking it all in. I realized how habitually I formulate, distill, analyze, express – focusing on output and not a whole lot on input.
Back in schools, we teachers also habitually concern ourselves with the output of our students; the economy of learning in this country dictates that the value of inputs is measured by output.
Play defies this economy. Play is input that resists measurable conversion into output. This doesn’t mean the input just sits there though. When I look at some of the ripples of the input of my childhood experiences of the Exploratorium, I realize they are actually waves – forceful and generative. For example, playing with the many different kinds of mirrors in the Exploratorium, the way faces and bodies merge, shift, and multiply, entered into my developing understanding of multiple and overlapping identity. It drew me to be fascinated by complexity and ambiguity, and attentive to patterns – interests that enable me to keep learning.
There is an extravagance and dignity to the activity of taking in without having to put out right away. It is vital that people have as much access as possible to exploration that is not constricted by forced output and rigid measurements, whether they be tests for children or evaluations for adults. Even in places like Chicago, sorely lacking an Exploratorium, we can trust in “offleash” play to help our children — and we adults — grow as human beings.