larger number 440 plays and games and arranged the best of them in a course by
school grades, from the first to the eighth, inclusive, and also according to their
educational value as teaching observation, reading and spelling, language,
arithmetic, geography, history, and biography, physical training, and specifically
as training legs, hand, arm, back, waist, abdominal muscles, chest, etc. Most of
our best games are very old and, Johnson thinks, have deteriorated. But children
are imitative and not inventive in their games, and easily learn new ones. Since
the Berlin Play Congress in 1894 the sentiment has grown that these are of
national importance and are preferable to gymnastics both for soul and body.
Hence we have play-schools, teachers, yards, and courses, both for their own
value and also to turn on the play impulse to aid in the drudgery of school work.
Several have thought that a well-rounded, liberal education could be given by
plays and games alone on the principle that there is no profit where there is no
pleasure or true euphoria.
Play is motor poetry. Too early distinction between play and work should not be
taught. Education perhaps should really begin with directing childish sports
aright. Froebel thought it the purest and most spiritual activity of childhood, the
germinal leaves of all later life. Schooling that lacks recreation favors dulness,
for play makes the mind alert and its joy helps all anabolic activities. Says
Brinton, "the measure of value of work is the amount of play there is in it, and
the measure of value of play is the amount of work there is in it." Johnson adds
that "it is doubtful if a great man ever accomplished his life work without having
reached a play interest in it." Sully[21] deplores the increase of "agolasts" or
"non-laughers" in our times in merry old England[22] every one played games;
and laughter, their natural accompaniment, abounded. Queen Elizabeth's maids
of honor played tag with hilarity, but the spirit of play with full abandon seems
taking its departure from our overworked, serious, and tons, age. To requote
Stevenson with variation, as laborari, [To labor] so ludere, et joculari orare
sunt. [To play and to jest are to pray] Laughter itself, as Kühne long ago showed,
is one of the most precious forms of exercise, relieving the arteries of their
tension.[23]
The antithesis between play and work is generally wrongly conceived, for the
difference is essentially in the degree of strength of the psycho-physic
motivations. The young often do their hardest work in play. With interest, the
most repellent tasks become pure sport, as in the case Johnson reports of a man
who wanted a pile of stone thrown into a ditch and, by kindling a fire in the ditch
and pretending the stones were buckets of water, the heavy and long-shirked job