# 13  Play

Lavoisier goes to Kindergarten

                Lavoisier is widely considered to be the ‘father’ of modern chemistry.  One of signature accomplishments that contributed to this acclaim is his building of the laboratory at the Arsenal and his use of increasingly precise and precisely recorded measurements.  In other words, he made chemistry more ‘scientific.’  It would be hard to argue that chemistry and physics didn’t benefit from this development.  It’s a little less clear that fields like psychology have really been able to use the method as productively.  One of the problems with the way Lavoisier’s methods ‘travel’ to other disciplines is the linguistic slippage between terms like oxygen and terms like knowledge and stress.  One is a much more finite and reliable signifier than the other.  Can we really ‘measure’ something that only has a signifier and no real signified?

                We’ll let the Psychologists fight over that one as they divide into more and more subdivisions of their discipline at their next convention.  In Epistemology the problem of measurement is grounded in the inability to define what it means to know something or what it means to be intelligent.  We simply don’t know what it means to say we know something or that someone is intelligent.  At first blush, that seems crazy.  There have never been more, and more precise, instruments of measurement that claim to measure ‘intelligence.’  The problem is that there is no concrete way to define intelligence or knowledge outside of the cultural and linguistic bounds that give rise to the term.  All we’ve really done in public education in America is to find a way -decades and billions of dollars later – to find a series of measurements that confirm rich people’s kids are ‘smarter’ than poor people’s kids.

                We’ve brought Lavoisier into Kindergarten with disastrous effect.  In the name of more ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’ treatment of ‘data,’ we have locked in on a limited and instrumentalist definition of knowledge that is profoundly biased by socio-economic factors.  We start ‘testing’ kids years before there is any developmental stability to the results and base their education on instruments that in some cases are so flawed that they do little more, in the words of one critic, than ‘turn nonsense into data.’  We do not’ know’ or ‘learn’ the same things in the same way.  We are not an experiment, and we cannot define knowledge the same way in every culture or circumstance.  Sure, there are some things that we can agree are facts and might even agree that everyone should learn those facts or be able to execute the functions that produce them.  That is not, however, the same thing as being able to say that mastery of those things is ‘intelligence,’ or even that the people who mark the right bubble ‘know’ those things.

                In the drive to make education more scientific we have squeezed out play.  We have restricted recess and replaced it with more testing.  We have limited the role that creativity and imagination play for both students and teachers.  We are producing a second generation of students who are more concerned with answers than they are thought and invention.  All of that might be tolerable if we lived in a time where traditional knowledge was adequate, but we don’t.  We are preparing exactly the wrong kind of students with the wrong kind of intelligence for the world we live in.  As Hutchins says in Cognition in the Wild, intelligence is a cultural variable that is only valuable if it solves that culture’s problems.  The genius of the next generation isn’t going to get the highest score on the test; they are going to be able to imagine and tell a new story. 

                Play, like paradox, has always played a role in wisdom traditions.  There are no stock answers to questions that haven’t been formulated yet.  Piaget once remarked that you can tell how bad schools are because they routinely take five- year- old kids who want nothing more than to go to school and turn them in eighteen- year- old students who want nothing more than to stop going.  The fact is that we really don’t know what intelligence is or what it really means to ‘know’ something.   We have a very clear idea about what the cooperate interests that are increasingly in control of our educational system value, but really no idea at all about the ‘intelligence’ that is required to live in today’s world.  School is probably exactly the wrong place to go to nurture and develop that intelligence.