Child play and education
After the first night that I spent in a New Guinea Highland village, I woke up the next morning to hear the shouts of village boys playing outside my hut. Instead of playing hopscotch or pulling toy cars, they were playing tribal war. Each boy had a small bow, together with a quiver of arrows with tips of wild grass, which hurt but didn’t injure a boy when he was struck. The kids were divided into two groups, shooting arrows at each other, a boy in each group advancing to come close to an “enemy” boy before firing an arrow at him, but bobbing and darting from side to side to avoid being hit himself, and quickly running back to attach a new arrow. It was a realistic imitation of an actual Highland war, except that the arrows were non-lethal, the participants were boys rather than men, and they belonged to the same village and were laughing.
This “game” that introduced me to life in the New Guinea Highlands is typical of so-called educational play of children around the world. Much child play is imitation of adult activities that the children see, or hear about in stories told by adults. The kids play for fun, but their play serves the function of letting them practise things that they will later have to do as adults. For instance, among the Dani people of the New Guinea Highlands, the anthropologist Karl Heider observed that educational play of children imitates everything that goes on in the world of Dani adults, except rituals reserved for adults. Dani games imitating adult life include fighting battles with grass spears; using spears or sticks to “kill” “armies” of berries, rolled realistically back and forth to imitate warriors advancing and retreating; target practice at hanging moss and at ant hives; hunting birds for fun; building imitation huts and imitation gardens with ditches; dragging around a flower attached to a string, as if it were a pig, and calling it by the Dani words meaning “pig-pig”; and gathering at night around a fire, watching a burning stick fall, and pretending that the person to whom the stick points will become one’s future brother-in-law.
Whereas adult life and child’s play in the New Guinea Highlands revolve around wars and pigs, adult life among the Nuer people in the Sudan revolves around cattle. Hence the games of Nuer children also center around cattle: children build toy kraals (cattle enclosures) out of sand, ashes, and mud, and they fill the toy kraals with toy mud figures of cattle, which they then play at herding. Among the Mailu people who live on the coast of New Guinea and use sail canoes and catch fish, games of children include sailing a toy canoe, using a toy net, and using a toy fish spear. Yanamamo Indian children in Brazil and Venezuela play at exploring the plants and animals of the Amazon rainforest in which they live. As a result, they become knowledgeable naturalists at an early age.
Among the Siriono Indians of Bolivia, an infant boy only three months old already receives a tiny bow and arrow from his father, although he will not be able to use it for several years. By the time the boy is 3, he begins shooting at non-living targets, then at insects, next at birds, then at age 8 the boy begins to accompany his father on hunting trips, and by age 12 the boy is a full-fledged hunter. By age 3, Siriono girls begin to play with a miniature spindle, spin, make baskets and pots, and help their mother at household tasks. The boy’s bow and arrow and the girl’s spindle are the only Siriono toys. The Siriono have no organized games equivalent to our games of tag or hide-and-seek, except that boys wrestle.
In contrast to all those “educational games” that imitate adult activities and prepare children for them, there are other Dani games that Karl Heider considered non-educational, in that they were not obviously training children to execute small versions of eventual adult activities. They included making figures out of string, making designs of knotted grass, somersaulting down a hill, and leading around a rhinoceros beetle by a leash made of a grass stalk forced into the hole made by breaking off the beetle’s horns. These are examples of what is termed “child culture”: children learning to get along with other children, and playing games that have nothing to do with becoming an adult. However, the line between educational and non-educational games can be blurred. For example, one Dani game of string figures consists of making two loops representing a man and a woman who meet from each side and “copulate,” while leading a beetle on a leash could be considered practice for leading a pig on a leash.
A regular feature of the games of hunter-gatherer societies and the smallest farming societies is their lack of competition or contests. Whereas many American games involve keeping score and are about winning and losing, it is rare for hunter-gatherer games to keep score or identify a winner. Instead, games of small-scale societies often involve sharing, to prepare children for adult life that emphasizes sharing and discourages contests. An example is the game of cutting up and sharing a banana that Jane Goodale described for New Britain’s Kaulong people and that I related on page 91.
Modern American society differs from traditional societies in the number, source, and claimed function of toys. American toy manufacturers heavily promote so-called educational toys to foster so-called creative play (Plate 18). American parents are taught to believe that manufactured store-bought toys are important to the development of their children. In contrast, traditional societies have few or no toys, and any toys that do exist are made either by the child itself or by the child’s parents. An American friend who spent his childhood in rural Kenya told me that some of his Kenyan friends were very inventive, and used sticks and string to build their own small cars with wheels and axles (Plate 17). One day, my American friend and his Kenyan friend tried to harness a pair of giant Goliath beetles to pull a toy cart that they had built. The two boys spent a whole afternoon at their game, but despite hours of effort they could not get the two beetles to pull in coordination. When my friend returned as a teen-ager to the United States and watched American children playing with their plastic ready-made store-bought toys, he gained the impression that American children are less creative than Kenyan children.
In modern state societies, there is formal education: schools and after-hour classes, in which specially trained instructors teach children material set by school boards, as an activity separate from play. But education in small-scale societies is not a separate activity. Instead, children learn in the course of accompanying their parents and other adults, and of hearing stories told by adults and older children around the campfire. For instance, Nurit Bird-David wrote as follows about southern India’s Nayaka people: “At a time where in modern societies children begin schooling, say at age 6, Nayaka children independently go hunting small game, visiting and staying with other families, free from supervision by their own specific parents, though not necessarily from adults…. Teaching, additionally, is done in a very subtle way. No formal instruction and memorizing here, no classes, no exams, no cultural sites [schools] in which packages of knowledge, abstracted from their context, are transmitted from one person to another. Knowledge is inseparable from social life.”