The Play Ethic

Schools in the streets: John MacBeath

In The Play Ethic book's education chapter, I quoted with approval the ideas of Ivan Illich, whose Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality - when I encountered them, almost 20 years too late, in the early oughties - seemed amazingly prescient. His vision of an education liberated from schools and into cities - using computer technology to turn offices, parks, factories, museums into opportunities for learning - is becoming credible again, as the internet (and children's literacy in it) shakes up existing models of schooling. 

The de-schooling option has always interested me, as an answer to how to educate 'players' instead of 'workers' - that is, enterprising, adaptable, mobile, energetic pupils. Perhaps unleash them on the city or town, get them engaging with public space and specific problems, than keep them in the crowd-control corralls that too many schools are.

However it was lovely to read today, in the Guardian's education section, of how Illich (and his Scottish - and equally radical - contemporary, A.S.Neill) has affected the seemingly most establishment figures. John MacBeath is the head of Educational Leadership at Cambridge University, and the shaper of self-inspection schemes for the English educational ministry Ofstead. All very solid. But McBeath (as befits his bearded lefty image) has a wild seventies past:

MacBeath visited the celebrated School Without Walls in Philadelphia. "The kids were being educated on the parkway, in hospitals, shops, any place where you could learn. They were 14 and 15 and, hearing the way they talked about how the city worked, local government and politics, I thought, boy, oh boy, they were getting an education they would never have got inside the classroom."

MacBeath started his own free school in Barrowfield, a working-class area of east Glasgow, close to Celtic football ground and then notorious for gang warfare. With surprising encouragement from the Scottish inspectorate, he rented premises above a local taxi firm. "Our kids didn't come 9am to 4pm. They drifted in about 10.30, but they'd be there till 10 or 11 at night, and they'd

The school inevitably got flak, particularly from neighbouring heads, and before each of his college lectures, MacBeath's departmental head would announce that the views expressed in them had nothing to do with the college. The experiment came to an end when the children decided a boy should be banned from the next trip for stealing. While everyone else was gone, he burned the building down.

Would Macbeath have sent his own two daughters there? He hesitates. "In my more idealistic moments, I would have said yes. In greater maturity, I would say the prime reason parents choose a school is the other children who go there. Many of the kids at Barrowfield were on the verge of criminality, their language wasn't good, they smoked like chimneys and they probably did a little bit of drinking as well."

Relevant last question there. I've met quite a few rueful old radicals in my consulting journeys through the public services in the last few years - most of them trading loon-panted tales of guerrilla educating or social care among themselves at the end of a night's drinking, than something they draw on for their current managerial careers. But MacBeath seems to be different:

He is now moving back to the thinking that inspired Barrowfield. He has concluded that schools make a difference only at the margin, which he puts - that precision again - at "between 9% and 15%". He continues: "If you're bright and do your homework, and surf the net intelligently, and have supportive parents, school's fine, school's enough. But some kids, as one head said to me recently, go home to hell. That's why schools now have breakfast clubs, extended hours, summer schools and so on. I'd like to go further."

MacBeath's eyes gleam as he talks of reviving the half-forgotten Children's University (started in Birmingham in 1994). "We are looking at airports, docks, museums, art galleries, theatres, football clubs, racecourses as places where children can go and do 10-week modules and get credits."

So the de-schooling movement, albeit older and wiser, lives again.

But it's worth noting here that de-schooling becomes an option again, as a response to the domestic chaos and turmoil that too many children face. Is it right that educationalists seek to extend their service throughout society, providing safe havens for children's learning, as an answer to them "going home to hell"? 

At least it's a positive and supporting vision from Professor MacBeath. But play isn't enough, if you don't address the basic nurturing and social conditions that make it really function as a form of development. Not just a "play ethic", but a "care ethic" too. Or: education, education, education can't make all the difference. Politics, politics, politics is needed also.

The Play Ethic and the Toy Industry

A fascinating morning recently, delivering a keynote speech to the Toy Industries of Europe 'Toy Safety' conference in Brussels. The toy industry has had its troubles to bear in 2007 - many safety recalls of toys from major manufacturers, largely located in their Chinese factories (80% of all toys in Europe are made in China, 95% in the US). As I said to the audience at the conference, with books like Eric Clark's The Real Toy Story being published (which tries to do for the toy industry what Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation does for convienience food), they are an industry which risks a lot by not lining up their ethical business practice, with the trust that parents put in them to provide safe, ethically and sustainably created products. But if they extend 'play ethics' throughout their business - from labour conditions in China to the nature of the toys they produce - the opportunities for their business (exemplified by the turnaround in Lego, whose CEO Jorgen Knudstorp delivered the other keynote) are major, given the general shift of social values in a 'play-friendly' direction.

NOTE: I'm using the embedding function of Slideshare for the first time here - if you go through to the actual link, you can download the PPT of the presentation with extra notes.

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Getting a little ragged at 'In the Wild'

Very much enjoyed my time at Channel Four's latest incarnation of In The Wild, their forum series exploring wellbeing, kids education and Web 2.0 - this time as a sideshow to the Scottish Learning Festival in Glasgow. I have to say I enjoyed it mostly for sparring with Carol Craig, the head of the Centre for Confidence and Wellbeing - whose speech clarified a lot of my problems with the hidden normativity, and neo-Puritanism, of the 'happiness' debates. I'm perhaps not the most objective person to report on this, so let me point you to a very useful account of our debate from an edublogger (a new category of blogger, of which Ewan Macintosh is the pertest possible exemplar) called Alan Coady.

New school based on computer gameplay

Startling news from a Play Ethic friend, Eric Zimmerman of GameLab, that they're getting over a million dollars to start up a new school in New York which uses "gaming and design" as its primary teaching methodology. The full press release is in extended post, and they've also included a piece on NPR by Heather Chaplin (another PE friend, and a co-author of the videogame history Smart Bomb.) Here's an exciting chunk of ludological pedagogy for ya:

“We are conceiving the school as a dynamic learning system that takes its cues from the way games are designed, shared and played,” said Katie Salen,Executive Director of the Gamelab Institute of Play. “All players in the school – teachers, students,parents and administrators – will be empowered to innovate using 21st century literacies that are native to games and design. This means learning to think about the   world as a set of in interconnected systems that can be affected or changed through action and choice, the ability to navigate complex information networks, the power to build worlds and tell stories, to see collaboration in competition, and communicate across diverse social spaces. It means that students and teachers will engage in their own learning in powerful ways.”

Rachel O'Connell from Bebo, at Channel Four's In the Wild conference

            Taken from the trusty NokiaN70 in the gallery, but a really interesting speech from Rachel O'Connell, Bebo's Safety Officer at Channel Four's In the Wild Conference on 10th May (in which I spoke, on the topic of informal learning - more on that later). She outlines their new service Bebo Be One, providing civic, activist, enterprise and well-being services for their users. We spoke after her talk, and she really "got" the Play Ethic perspective.

Play Ethics @ Channel Four

Heads up for an interesting event I'm appearing at next month, called In The Wild: Well being, the Web and the future of Education, on 10 May 2007, organised by Channel Four Education. Here's the blurb:

... A unique event which brings together young people , educators, policy makers, and representatives from the digital and broadcast media worlds into a conversation about the challenges and dilemmas facing those growing up in the UK today. In the Wild will explore some of the defining issues facing young people as make the transition to adulthood.

Featuring a mix of presentations and provocations from some leading edge thinkers and practitioners, panel discussions and facilitated conversations this event will explore among other topics:

Get Happy! - responding to the UNICEF report on children’s well being   

In the Wild – remagicalising the world through informal learning;

Living Online – work, rest and play with the Web generation

Alive and Kicking! – How schools are responding to the challenges of the ‘innovation century’

My Collective Brain @ del.icio.us

I've just discovered this, and I have to blog it... Like many others, I use del.icio.us to catch the fragments of my surfing in a day - and also find out whether there are any other like minds out there. I just visited my del.icio.us home page, and found out (to my total delight) that I have about thirty 'fans' who are subscribing in some way to my feed. And what's even more delightful, I seem to have a page which captures all the recent postings of my 'network of fans'.

I find this very, very lovely: what seems like an instant symposia of conceptual buddies, or at least a pulsing 'collective brain' that I am already dipping into for many riches. Brillant stuff. Isn't it amazing the way the web can still surprise you?

Creature discomforts

Thanks to Jonathan Rutherford for sending me a copy of my review (PDF) for the forthcoming edition of Soundings, to which I contributed an essay on play a few months ago. The book was Wendy Wheeler's The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture (Lawrence and Wishart). It really focussed my thinking about the impact of what could be called the 'complexity' sciences - to which I can now add 'biosemiotics' - to my understanding of play. And what a vision of a thoroughly  'communicational' human nature might (or might not) enable politically.

Though I am critical of the social and political prescriptions the book draws from its utilisation of the science, I must give tribute to Wendy for pulling together such disparate material, in such an accessible and passionate way. Her book demands many strong responses, and is at least much more diversely sourced than most of those riding on the 'well-being' bandwagon at the moment (see below).

To infinity and beyond

Finally broke my blogger's block on Comment is Free yesterday, with a piece that wrote itself - about the crisis of physics studies in the UK, and how my beloved daughter is bucking the trend.

Soulitarian City @ Urban Learning Space

One of my favourite partnerships around the Play Ethic is with Urban Learning Space, Glasgow's 'learning lab' (in the style of the MIT Media Lab), situated in the city's beautiful design centre The Lighthouse. I've produced two papers for them, and fully support their ambition to re-think learning models in the light of new technology, urban mobility, youth culture and the politics of well-being. I did my latest seminar for them, entitled Soulitarian City, and they've now been open-source enough to put the material on the web for full access. The paper is accessible here (pdf file), and Powerpoint presentation is here. If you're a visiting academic in Glasgow, I'd thoroughly recommend attending their seminar series, if you have the time.