| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
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| LEARNING FROM THE TOYS OF THE PAST |  |
| PDF link for printable transcription | Annemieke Willemsen |
Introduction After the toys of tomorrow, now the toys of yesterday. My name is Annemarieke Willemsen & I am an art historian & archaeologist. So, I am not an expert on modern toys, but I do have a view over 5000 years of toys, and across many cultural frontiers. I show you some of the oldest toys we know, dating from the 3rd millennium BC and thus indeed 5000 years old. I was asked to respond to Mitchel Resnick and I want to do that in the form of a mirror, for I believe history can & should be a mirror, in which you see yourself more clearly. It may make you realise that the highly praised innovations in toys may have a very modest place in a long history of play. In the toy world of today, there can be seen an always changing relationship or indeed a struggle between traditon and fashion. This struggle is not new: ever since there is a tradition in toys, there are also fashions to be detected. Fashion is more than innovation - it comes and goes. Viewed over thousands of years and thousands of miles, we must reckon that most of the things designed today will not last. They will be defeated by the traditional, basic, so you want archetypal toys. I want to illustrate this. In the 1997 European drawing competition for children of the first grades - up to 8 years old - the assignment was ìpicture yourself with your favourite toyî. The winning designs beautifully show tradition and fashion side by side: computer game and rollerblades, but also dolls, teddys and the bow-and-arrow. It was followed by some excavated children's bows made of wood, found at the site of the 'Rokin', dating from the 13th-14th C. Another illustration: The biggest craze in toys this year was, at least in Holland, not the newest gameboy or clickable toy, but the yo-yo, a plaything that is at least 2500 years old. This is shown by a Greek vase with a boy in the very characteristic pose of holding a yo-yo. Of course, the material is different, and this year there were fancy ones with light-patterns or sound. But that is nothing more than applying fashion to tradition. And this is also what Resnick does in the MIT Toys of Tomorrow project. Their designs are also based on traditional playthings, toys that have proved their continuous popularity with children - balls, bricks, beads. These were all there long time ago, like dolls, animals etc. Improvements were made to all of them at many points in history. To take dolls as an example - the rag doll, known from children in Egypt and pre-Columbian America, was replaced by wooden dolls with moveable limbs in Roman times, and again in the late Middle Ages, by self-moving automata in the 16th Century, and by talking and singing - & hair-growing - dolls in the 60s. But also the rag doll stayed. The other ones came - and went away again. Part of the reason is that toys are merely a help in the fantasy world of a child. In this, a silent doll is better than a talking doll, because the voice doll can say only one, or only ten things, while the rag doll can say anything you want. It is a strange paradox - but toys that are too sophisticated, may not be suited for play - wanted as they may be. They are the Christmas gifts that remain practically untouched. But why then the continuous designing of new toys, why then fashions, if the traditional things will win anyway? The answer for all times is the toy market. New things will be bought. Fashion and craze are market mechanisms. In my view the computerized balls and building bricks are not toys of tomorrow, but learning of tomorrow. The digital manipulatives are not meant as new playthings, but as new learning methods. They are explicitely designed to learn children specific things. Now there's nothing wrong with using the playfulness of children in giving directions to their learning. It does work. But then you are designing tools, not toys - as for children learning is merely work, and play is leisure. Of course these are not clearly separated, and sometimes it is a thin line between them. But they are not the same. It is usually assumed that toys from the past and from non-western cultures are always explicitely meant for children to learn the adult life, but actually we haven't been able to prove this for any period or region I have studied. This doesn't wipe out that many toys function in an educational and socializing process, and therefore do have an implicit learning function. It must however be realized that while children do imitate adults in their playing, when viewed closely - as was done by many anthropologists - this play is never a slavely imitation of the adult world. Usually it is some way or another also a parody. Throughout history, adults have tended to underestimate the creativity of traditional children's play. To conclude: What can be seen in the mirror of the history of toys, is that in the struggle between tradition and fashion, tradition will win. But fashion is what sells. |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
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