As more children people play video games and use mobile devices as toys, they spend less time in outdoor play. The indoors rather than the outdoors have become the natural arena of play for the young. Some recent studies indicate that the typical child in America—unlike European children—spends an average of seven minutes each day playing outdoors. Other studies have noted the rising trend in elementary schools to reduce and minimize recess time. These developments reveal a view of play, recreation, and leisure that dominated Dickens’ Victorian Age, an outlook portrayed in his novel Hard Times in which the schoolmaster Mr. Gradgrind regards play as a waste of time and an inadequate preparation for the serious business of life.
Children are forbidden to read nursery rhymes and fairy tales, they are not allowed to attend a circus, and they are never encouraged to play outdoors, enjoy sports, and explore the natural world. Adults have imposed on children the idea that life is a grim battle that allots no time for idleness. Play does not prepare the young for the struggle for survival, and it interferes with the formation of the habits men need to succeed in a competitive world that worships force and grim determination. The Gradgrinds of the age reduce the art of living to the survival of the fittest. They instill in the young the idea that man lives to work, to make money, to rise socially, and to gain the respectability of material prosperity. Time is money, and play is a waste of time. Childhood is a state of idleness, and work cures the child of the nonsense and uselessness of play. Man does not work to live, to play, or to enjoy leisure, but lives to work and to be productive in the labor force.
All the classics of children literature, however, portray the child’s world of play as a time of enchantment, wonder, and joy in the outdoors. Play provides education, develops the imagination, and teaches a love of life. Children in these books revel in the outdoors in all four seasons and thrive in all the adventure, exploration, and learning they acquire from these experiences. In Frances Burnett’s The Secret Garden three young children fall in love with life as they discover “the magic” they discover outdoors. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book, the children go on outings and expeditions throughout the year. In the fall they relish the long walks to gather nuts: “They had planned a nutting expedition, and were impatiently waiting for the mists to roll up the hill-slopes, and for the sun to pour the warmth of the Indian summer over the fields and pastures, and into the nooks of the many-colored woods.” In the winter they look forward to other outdoor play in the forms of sledding, snowball fights, and snow forts: “Nevertheless, the children rejoiced greatly in the snowstorm. They had already made acquaintance with it, by tumbling heels over head into its highest drifts, and flinging snow at one another . . . .” Outdoor play is the norm, and children’s main source of play is to enjoy the varied pleasures that each of the four seasons brings. To be outdoors is to breathe fresh air and to be renewed and revitalized.
This same theme of the life-giving stimulation of outdoor play fills the child’s world in Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses that depicts the continual round of new play that awaits the child as he progresses through the year. In the summer he plays on the beach: “When I was down beside the sea/ A wooden spade they gave to me/ To dig the sandy shore.” He also revels in the hayloft: “Oh, what a joy to clamber there/ Oh, what a place for play, /With the sweet, the dim, the dusty air, / The happy hills of hay!” The autumn brings the burning of leaves and the smoke trails of bonfires: “The red fire blazes, / The grey smoke towers,” and the winter invites the child to venture abroad, leave his tracks in the snow, and “with a reindeer-sled, explore/ The colder countries round the door.” The cold air poses no obstacles to the child’s outdoor adventures as the child wears warm comforter and cap and makes light of “the cold wind” and “frosty breath.” Unlike Nature’s abundant sources of play, the indoor world does not capture the imagination of the child or whet the appetite for adventure.
Nothing compares to the enjoyment of the outdoors, the natural habitat of the fun-loving child. A new pleasure awaits the child in spring, the wonder of the flowers he calls “Fairy places, fairy things, / Fairy woods where the wild bee wings, / Tiny trees for tiny dames—These must all be fairy names!” For all these riches of delight and the copious variety of fun found throughout the year, the child compares his wealth of pleasure to a king’s magnificence: “The world is so filled with a number of things,/ I’m we should all be as happy as kings.” The child who lives indoors and feels no attraction to outdoor play deprives himself of all this kingly wealth of joy and knowledge that awaits him. The child who plays outdoors learns as he plays, for wonder is the beginning of knowledge as the Greek philosophers first taught. He discovers the world with his five senses and gains the fond memories of childhood, memories that remain for a lifetime and keep the child alive in the adult. The child tastes the deep goodness of life that teaches an invaluable lesson for a lifetime: all the seasons of life have a special pleasure to anticipate that awaits him in due time: “Sing a song of seasons! / Something bright in all! /Flowers in the summer, / Fires in the fall.”
Outdoor play also forms the imagination and cultivates the intellect. With the knowledge of the five senses and the happy memories they form, the child learns to play with the mind as well as with his body. Stevenson writes of the child who compares the moon to a clock (“The moon has a face like the clock in the hall”), the bed to a boat (“At night I go on board and say/ Good-night to all my friends on shore”), the sun to a playmate who plays hide and seek (“Though closer still the blinds we pull/ To keep the shady parlour cool,/ Yet he will find a chink or two/ To slip his golden fingers through”), and flowers to “fairy places.” The child’s playful mind sees analogies and makes metaphors, a product of intelligence. Because nothing can come from nothing and the mind needs food for thought, all the sights and sounds a child perceives with his five senses in the natural world provide the raw materials or images for the mind to collect, assimilate, and unify. To know is not only to have familiarity with all that is real in its great variety, “the number of things,” but also to seize a universal truth from this multiplicity of things: a recognition of the world as an inexhaustible “kingdom of play” especially designed for the happiness of both children and adults.
To remain indoors or to eliminate recess is an impoverishment of the spirit. The five senses remain starved for the sights, sounds, and touches of the real world. The memory retains and seizes nothing of outdoor enjoyment that allows them the joys of reminiscence. The imagination does not have sufficient material to use to do its creative, playful thinking. And the mind is deprived of its vital contact with the stuff of reality, the traditional four elements of earth, air, fire, and water vital for man’s relationship to Mother Nature. For a child to be limited or deprived of the outdoors compares to a form of homelessness, a life without the proper roots, nutriments, air, and sunshine to thrive emotionally, intellectually, and physically. Absent the physical life of the outdoors, children lose their childhood and grow old prematurely.
Mitchell Kalpakgian, Ph.D. has completed fifty years of teaching beginning as a teaching assistant at the University of Kansas, continuing as a professor of English at Simpson College in Iowa for thirty-one years, and recently teaching part-time at various schools and college in New Hampshire. As well as contributing to a number of publications, he has published seven books: The Marvelous in Fielding’s Novels, The Mysteries of Life in Children’s Literature, The Lost Arts of Modern Civilization, An Armenian Family Reunion (a collection of short stories), Modern Manners: The Poetry of Conduct and The Virtue of Civility, and The Virtues We Need Again. He has designed homeschooling literature courses for Seton Home School, and he also teaches online courses for Queen of Heaven Academy and part-time for Northeast Catholic College.
