Re: Work, Play and Alfie Kohn

["Dull, Chad" <DullC@westerntc.edu>]

Amen

________________________________

From: arn-l-owner@interversity.org [mailto:arn-l-owner@interversity.org]
On Behalf Of Brian LeCloux
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 11:16 PM
To: arn-l@interversity.org
Subject: Re: [arn-l] Work, Play and Alfie Kohn


I'm reading this book right now and this dualism you've constructed to
explain away Kohn's powerful critique of the homework myth just isn't
there.   For example, the kind of learning environments Kohn advocates
that teachers create are quite challenging and intellectually
stimulating, not play.  The constructivist classroom is far more
difficult to facilitate and far more challenging to the learner than the
transmission model most classrooms have suffered.   On that basis alone,
your framework fails.
 
What is there is plenty of evidence against the practice you seem to
deftly avoid talking about.   Actually the taking the bus metaphor
perfectly fits the homework practice, not Kohn's critique.    There are
many practices and habits about the public school that just get repeated
year after year, being done as they've always been done except when
there's reform and its more of the same only harder.    Well, it's 2006.
Let's start applying all of the research laying around---some of it for
decades now---that calls into question traditional practices. 
 
Folks, read the book.   In fact all of his books are very well
documented.
 
Brian LeCloux
Sun Prairie, WI 

	----- Original Message ----- 
	From: leoecasey@optonline.net 
	To: arn-l@interversity.org 
	Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 7:50 AM
	Subject: [arn-l] Work, Play and Alfie Kohn

	http://edwize.org/work-play-and-alfie-kohn
	
	Reading anti-homework evangelist Alfie Kohn is a very
predictable experience, not all that different from taking the same bus,
on the same route, over and over again. No matter the specific
destination, no matter the particular educational topic, it is not very
difficult to predict in considerable detail what Kohn will have to say
on it, before you have read his first sentence. This is so because there
is a simple formula which underlies all of his writing on education.
	
	For Kohn, there are two modes of human activity around which one
could organize education - work and play. In Kohn's hands, work and play
are a polarized dualism: play embodies the spontaneous, creative and
liberating side of human activity, voluntarily undertaken, while work is
alienated and oppressive drudgery, done in the service of the 'other.'
We play because it gives us pleasure; we work because we are forced to
do so, usually to provide the essentials of life. Real learning takes
place, Kohn believes, when we are engaged in creative, self-directed
play, and not stuck in alienated work.
	
	Kohn is the latest incarnation of an ultra-libertarian,
anarchistic tradition of educational thought, perhaps best represented
by A. S. Neill's Summerhill. Every educational issue he has addressed
has been seen through the same prism of the anarchic celebration of play
and derogation of work. Take assessments. Virtually every test and every
form of assessment - not just excessive and misused standardized testing
- is a form of oppressive work to Kohn. Even a rubric for a performance
based assessment is something to be avoided, because it imposes external
standards on the creative act of writing or speaking.
	
	The distinction between standards and standardization - so
central to most educators - is a distinction without a difference to
Kohn; for him, standards lead invariably to standardization and the
stifling of creative play. And Kohn's latest obsession, homework, is
understood literally, as work at home. It has to be boring and
unimaginative toil.
	
	Kohn's educational philosophy is problematic in a number of
important respects. There is a role for play in schooling, but it is a
developmentally appropriate role, not a universal one. Play is a central
component of early childhood education, when students are transitioning
into schooling. Among other functions, it is fundamental in socializing
young children into their roles as students. One of the negative effects
in the current NCLB induced climate has been the diminishment of play
time, as academic subjects are more and more pushed down into early
childhood grades - the 'kinder' is increasingly being taken out of
'kindergarten.' But as students develop, socially and academically,
their activities should assume more and more the form of intellectual
labor, and the role of play should diminish.
	
	The transition to academic work can, of course, involve sheer
drudgery, the robotic memorization of disconnected facts and the
mindless completion of meaningless exercises. What, after all, is the
infamous work sheet, if not just the latter? But there is no law that
says academic work must be so, that it can not be meaningful and
purposeful intellectual labor. This would seem a rather obvious, almost
commonplace observation, but it is still lost on Kohn. When he discusses
homework, for example, he provides only examples of poorly conceived and
thoughtless 'busy work' assignments, as if this was something intrinsic
in this category of work, and nothing else was possible. Yet would this
be a fair characterization of a Social Studies homework assignment that
had students read selections from oral histories of life under American
slavery, and then write a poem or a rap song about the experiences of
enslaved African-Americans? Or another Social Studies assignment that
had student
	s read about the First World War and the conditions on 'the
front,' and then write a letter home from a young soldier to his family?
Don't these assignments, which could be multiplied endlessly with
similar examples, require imaginative, thoughtful intellectual work on
the part of students, and involve real learning?
	
	In fact, Kohn's polarized dualism of creative, imaginative,
self-directed play, on the one side, and alienated, oppressive and
thoughtless work, on the other side, excludes the middle term which is
the actual ground of education - meaningful, purposeful intellectual
labor. The most profound of educational thinkers, from Socrates to
Dewey, have always understood it in such terms. What American students
need is not freedom from homework in a world of perpetual play, but
homework thoughtfully crafted to engage their minds and their
imagination.
	
	
	
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