I have been puzzling over the op-ed “Plato’s War on Play” by Mark C. Carnes, professor of history at Barnard College and author of Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College. (The op-ed is behind a paywall in The Chronicle of Higher Education.) Carnes argues that philosophers and educators from Plato onward have distinguished between the “good play” that is appropriate for the classroom and “bad play” that must be kept outside its bounds. In doing so, they have denied themselves a powerful classroom motivator; harnessing “bad play” for academic purposes can do wonders, as the role-playing game Reacting to the Past suggests.
Role-play may indeed motivate students. But why assume that “traditional” instruction cannot do the same? Why assume, moreover, that slower and quieter kinds of engagement lack value?
But during the past decade, some faculty members and administrators have discovered that the motivational power of “bad play” can be harnessed to academic purposes. Perhaps the most vivid illustration of the phenomenon is the spread of Reacting to the Past, a pedagogical system I helped start, in which students play monthlong games, set in the past, with roles informed by classic texts. For the game set in Athens in 403 BC, for example, students become democrats or oligarchs, and compete by debating the respective merits of Pericles and Plato; for the game set in the Holy Office in Rome in 1632, students pretend to be mathematicians, natural philosophers, and conservative cardinals, and debate whether Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems proves that the Earth moves. During the past decade, Reacting—the epitome of Platonic bad play—has spread to more than 350 campuses.
All well and good–but underlying this movement is an assumption that lectures, discussions, seminars, presentations, etc., are not interesting for students. In a reply to my comment (on a different matter pertaining to the piece), the author writes:
I didn’t mean to suggest that Plato was the originator of the concept of “bad play”. I argue that he was an influential proponent of the idea that competitive role-playing is bad form of play, seductive and dangerously powerful, which must be suppressed. And so it is that the chief proponents of educational play–from Plato to Piaget, and from Rousseau to Dewey–have denounced role-playing games. Which explains why professors embrace “good play”–a lively seminar discussion, a witty lecturer. The problem is that often our “playful” seminars and lectures aren’t all that much fun–for students or for us.
Two questions: Is it true that seminars and lectures–playful or not–aren’t all that much fun? Must they always be fun?
I hear the frequent mantra that the “old” methods no longer engage students and that new ones are needed. I find this strange. I attended my first lectures–about the Moon–at age eleven, and found them captivating; since then, I have almost always enjoyed lectures and seminars for the substance and exchange. In fact, I appreciate classes that give me room to think, where I don’t have to jump in immediately and do or make something. There’s fun in this–but it’s fun that doesn’t always have to be fun. Am I an outlier? Is the world at large clamoring for more “bad” fun? If so, should educators meet the demand, or should they push back a bit?
I am not against role-play as one of many instructional formats. I have used it at times. But month after month of it could get dreary. Even actors could find role-play limiting, since it both is and isn’t acting. I question the widespread assumption that traditional education (with all its variety and permeability) has failed us so deeply and badly that we must embrace something new.