School-Play/Work-Play

The Psychosis of Disunity

I should make it clear, my life is totally regulated by the clock, even now, when there is no reason to do so. I cannot remember when I did not attempt to schedule my hours and try to accomplish as much in any given time period.  But I tried to control my own schedule as much as I could and not allow others to do so. I am also not anti-learning.  The problem of the educational system as we have it, is that it does not lend itself to the best environment for learning.  Because it is dedicated to not only a schedule of hours in each day and ordered by a period of time in one’s life, it also attempts to regulate what is to be learned and when one is “old enough” to comprehend.  And even though some schools were beginning to try to explain social inequities, besides some more recent backlash, schools had a limited ability to do so. And despite desegregation, the social divide is still prevalent within schools, though more by class than race.

So the answer is usually centered on more money to be invested in poorer (usually public) education which is resented by those who can afford to send their children to private schools. Public schools will always be more violent, even without the current attack against schools targeted by unhappy souls to express their angst by taking the lives of children and employees of the school.  But that angst is both a failure of our educational system and a consequence of the structures that deny individual personality. 

Most of us begin life in our society in individual (nuclear) families and our first learning experiences are the parent-child interplay. The extended family, or community has little interplay in the child’s life, they more or less belong to the parents to do with as they will, sometimes with severely negative consequences.  There are other factors involved, like urban, suburban, or rural environment, family income, etc, but the result is the same where children are prevented from the wider experience of a community learning experience and confined to the direction that their only teachers–the parents-direct them.  Then they are marched off to become educated in schools that tell them what they are supposed to be learning and when they are supposed to be learning it.  Neither are tailored to meet the proper learning experience that would be optimal for learning that begins shortly after birth when the child begins to explore the environment.  Confining the environment, no matter how many “learning toys”  are presented to the child, denies the initial experiences and needs for tactile, gustational and observational exploration.  

There are many options to the “classroom” experience, Montessori being one of the oldest, but there are other variations and I have no expertise in any of them. The key of course is that learning is just plain misunderstood I feel, in exactly how a human learns. It doesn’t take that much observation to observe that the normal paradigm is contrary to that observation which from what I understand led to the development of the first Montessori efforts that were an attempt to focus more directly on the actual way learning occurs.  It begins shortly after birth as the child begins to explore his environment and limits on that exploration.  Toys are an artificial inducement to focus the child on certain objects instead of allowing the child to explore the environment and “play” with whatever object attracts his fancy.   Instead we tell them that is “dirty” and we guide them to what we want them to focus upon.  Left to his own designs, his curiosity increases, and he attempts to develop what the physical interactions mean and so he seeks to understand what they are made of, how they can be used.  If the community of his early life is expanded beyond the nuclear community he also has the opportunity to observe more people in a wider variety of activities and again the natural curiosity lends itself to attempting to understand and then to participate in a wider variety of pursuits.  Of course I am saying nothing new here.

But the issue I am leading to, and I seldom see discussed, is this divide between a time to play and a time to learn.  They should be the same because we learn through play.  If you divide them then learning is a task, a chore, a job, and one can not wait til the school day ends to go play.  When learning and playing are separated we are, however, getting ready for our jobs, our work that we must take on, to support ourselves  and we constantly long for “leisure”, the end of the day, the vacation—the time that is not  work time

But for what purpose do we work?  .Well of course to earn a living to buy food to support ourselves, and then to find shelter, and then, of course to buy more toys and play.  

The issue is not should we work, but the separation of work, and once again, from play.  If separation of the two in childhood is counterproductive to natural curiosity, in adulthood it is a tediousness that forces people into split personalities and work is not about surviving but about possessing.  

So if we turn once again to less structured communities the focus is to make survival itself the play.  Part of surviving becomes the rituals around which one survives.  In the dance, singing, and crafts they reward each other for the part each plays in enabling the survival of the whole.  Stories are designed to tell their story.  Yes spirits, or perhaps gods are invoked but these spirits and gods and the rituals are not designed to separate work from play but to combine.  It is not following the commands of a god, but celebrating the gods or spirits for helping them survive,

And there is a difference.  Built around rituals of celebration there is little commanding of the gods and a great deal of praising the gods for allowing them to survive.  When the corn crop is abundant it is the corn that is thanked for filling the belly.  When the command of a god is to work hard to grow the corn or you won’t survive, or shouldn't survive, then that enslaves one to growing the corn, rather than rejoicing in the corn that feeds.  The perspective may not seem relevant to those who have grown up believing you earn your way, they may say it is the same thing.  If the corn grows because of my effort then I must put forth more effort by trying to conform the environment to my effort.  I become separated from the community because it is my effort alone upon which I must survive.  So I become selfish to my efforts and take possession over them and blame the others in the community whose efforts are not the same.

If the effort is transferred to the business, the businessman takes possession of his work and resents the worker for not producing as much, or not being smart enough, than he is to have the business, the worker works to support him, not him to support the worker.  The worker resents the owner, but also the other worker who may not seem to be doing his share. Communities dissolve and the only absolution is going to the lake in a powerboat on the weekend or flopping on the sofa to watch the big screen TV and one’s possessions, or how much one possesses.  My house, my boat, my TV, and then my family, my children.    

My children, to teach to live my life, to obtain a better life, or whatever. My separate identity however is unfilling and grants me no identity, in fact, it destroys my identity because my life has been splintered both by what I have to do to distinguish my possessions and what I have to accomplish to earn the toys of my leisure.  The person’s identity becomes fractured by this separation and so he must not only play to escape the commands of the need to work in order to play but he attempts to alter his identity.  He escapes with alcohol or drugs to numb how this separation has destroyed his identity, the substances often become essential elements to the play, which is often unsatisfactory in fulfilling this split-life. (And the same separation can lead to the same consequences before “adulthood”.)  Or he follows the commands of a cult and tries to earn a place in the heart of a God who might reward himself in some future existence.

Of course. The goal of every young person is to seek some type of fame, wealth or power to release him from this bondage.  But then he becomes bound to the same need to continually maintain his wealth, power, or fame.

The so-called lives of the rich and famous do not decrease their dissatisfaction, but often increase by adding the trepidation of losing this relevance.  What Donald Trump proclaimed on Access Hollywood may not be that “when you’re famous they let you do it” but the projection of what drove the desire to achieve the fame or power over others in the belief that they will let you do it.  They are still seeking their individual supremacy over the community by possessing the community.  But it is not fulfilling.  If you have a big house you need another, if you have one person submit to your will, another must also.  There is no more individuality in any form of “success” that there is without it.  

And so the individuals, lacking, or fearing the lack of being relevant to the community, leads to mental illness, psychosis, and despair.  When sent to a psychiatrist because I was told I was told I was depressed, I responded by saying, “I am not depressed, but the world is very depressing.”  I believe that that was the truth.  My dream, as a youth, was not to be famous but for the people in the world would come to heal themselves and release themselves from their singular individuals seeking to become individuals that stood out by some singular achievement  that awarded them for their singularity.  To somehow understand that only within a group of people that honored the importance of each individual.  Being more powerful lessens my individuality, because in subduing the community to my singularity then my only relevance is continuing to be more powerful and gaining more control over more.  And the more control one needs to exert the cheaper I am to myself because my only relevance is my control.  If I lose that control, I lose who I am.   

So this work-play divide, this dividing ourselves creates the depression and prevents us from learning the most important teaching of all—that the greatest reward to becoming an individual and becoming important is not what I can possess, but what I give to the community.  The recognition for what I give to the community to increase its survival and gives the importance of my role in its fulfillment.  And so by confining learning into the duality between schooling and play we develop the psychosis and dissatisfaction that will continue to haunt us.

Okay, if I am wrong, why is the world ridden with so much despair? And why can no one, no matter the fame or wealth ever achieve the satisfaction and stability that their achievements were supposed to grant?  If our individuality only depends on our achievements, why are those achievements so unsatisfactory?