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 students 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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