Karin Litzcke
member
Registered: 09/04/07
Posts: 187
Loc: Vancouver, BC
|
Charity and Playgrounds - March 23, 2008
I am not a big fan of so-called adventure playgrounds for kids. These structures are thought to be a benefit to children both for purposes of play and physical development, but to me, they seem to take away the imaginative element in play from the kids and give it instead to the adults who design the play structure.
In contrast to a designed play structure, a school field can become anything the children want. The structure of their play can be physical or social, and the structure is dynamic; being something that exists only in their heads it can be different every day and can shift as needed in the course of the game. In addition, the physical activity done in a field can be different every day. There can be running, or squatting down examining rocks on the ground.
Children are, indeed, attracted to minutiae, of which they find much more in the field than they do on the structure. An open field with sticks and rocks in it enables them to move seamlessly between macro and micro environments and practice connecting the two.
The play structure offers only a macro experience, and since it is the same every day, it seems to impose a repetition of the same physical movements and the same games every day.
The structure also imposes certain social interactions on the children. Whereas the children can distribute themselves in a field so as to avoid their games overlapping with others and can negotiate when they do, the play structure is a focal point that causes different play groups to intersect more, often generating territorial battles. In particular, conflicts occur between age groups, with older children always winning.
Even though for older children the play structure no longer offers a challenging physical environment, they still have an interest in using it to add complexity to the activities they might otherwise pursue in the field - tag, pirates, drug dealers, house, or even just for sitting and talking. Even if the structure is not useful in their game, it becomes a goal to occupy the structure just to prevent its use by other children.
I can perceive some value in having structures designed for smaller children in parks, where children go only occasionally and thus may find the structure fresh and stimulating. But even in parks, you can see that children are drawn to the structure to the exclusion of other activities and that the vast majority of them will prefer to perform its scripted activities rather than doing something more spontaneous and imaginative in the open area. And in parks, children are usually accompanied by their parents who can protect them from being chased off the structure by bigger children.
But in a schoolyard, where children will see the same structure every day for 8 years, and where most of them have outgrown its physical challenge after the first two, I see little value, and possibly a detriment, in having an adventure playground structure... since it seems to limit adventure, not enhance it.
My ambivalence toward play structures is only part of the reason why I am far from heartbroken that parents at Vancouver's Queen Mary elementary school, in one of the city's wealthiest demographic areas, were stymied when they tried to donate a grant they'd received for a new playground to what they deemed to be a "needy" school.
My more compelling reason is that I am equally ambivalent towards charitable impulses like the desire to re-gift this grant.
I am a parent at one of these so-called "needy" schools. My socio-economic status is not "needy" however, and as a middle class person, I relate quite closely to the Queen Mary parents who are no doubt net donors to charity. I sympathize with the charitable impulse. But because I live within the community to which charity is donated, and often enough become an accidental recipient myself, I have been granted a 360 degree view of charity that most donors are unlikely to have.
As it turns out, there is an almost perfect parallel between charity and playground design.
The designers of playgrounds, believing they are doing good things for children, are actually sucking the creativity and variety out of children's play and hampering their development. Donors to charity are doing much the same thing. In the belief that they are doing good things for the poor, they are actually sucking most of the good feelings that come from personal growth and accomplishment out of poor people's lives and hampering their capacity to manage for themselves and raise their own children.
The best illustration of this principle is perhaps provided by the ubiquitous hot lunch programs that have become fixtures of the inner city schooling landscape around the world. It is my contention that these programs, by removing from poor people's hands the need to provide some meals for their children, actually result in them having less capacity to provide any meals for their children, and result ultimately in the children growing up completely clueless as to how to feed their own children in turn - rendering it necessary for meal programs at schools to continue and to expand.
This is how charity, far from alleviating poverty, actually contributes to entrenching it.
Charity not only entrenches poverty, but it also increases the gap between the rich and the poor because the process of providing charity enlarges the capacity and capabilities of the donor class as it reduces the capacity of the recipient class.
The proposed playground donation is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Let's say for a moment that a school playground would be a good thing. Let's say that some parents at a needy school really do wish to have a playground for their children. For them to do this, they have to arrange and run meetings among themselves, identify and articulate their needs, explore and approach sources of funding, make contacts and meet deadlines, and then compare structures and negotiate contracts.
It might strike you, as it has me, that one of the reasons poor people might be poor is because they are not that good at doing any of those things individually, never mind in groups. This might be why the Queen Mary parents, who are rich in part because they are good at doing those things, thought it would be a good thing to take some of those tasks off their hands by simply donating the money. But in the process of getting the money, the Queen Mary parents have become even better at holding meetings, navigating the channels of bureaucracy, and so on, while the poor parents have not become any better at doing anything at all. Which means that the Queen Mary parents exercise and build the skills that enable them to earn a living, while the needy parents remain limited to their current capabilities.
Needs usually drive an increase in capability because they motivate people to exercise their capacity. In charity, rich people use the needs of the poor to exercise their own capacity.
That ecstatic feeling experienced by people carried away by the joy of giving to others? That's the feeling of sucking up some one else's personal growth opportunities.
It is a fundamental truth of human nature that capacity not exercised is lost. This truth actually has an upside, in that it is why the descendants of the rich often grow up unable to take care of themselves or make good decisions. However, the corollary used to be that the poor, having to work so hard just to get through every day, had the capacity to pick up economic opportunities and become an emerging economic force whenever the scions of wealthy houses became unable to sustain their status. Thus over several generations, the poor and the rich have been known to change places.
But the charitable impulse, whether exercised by individuals or by the charity industry, is breaking that cycle. By reducing the need for the poor to exercise their capacity, while enabling the rich to increase theirs, charity makes it far less likely that a family living in social housing today will ever see a grandchild buy a house in Shaughnessy.
The only capacity that the poor are having to exercise these days is the capacity to appear needy. It's not much to pass on to your children, and its value is not enhanced by nice play structures at the children's school.
Meanwhile, the charity industry grows large and fat, so vested in neediness that it glorifies it and seeks to perpetuate it, as well as perpetuating the charitable impulse itself by grooming us to believe in charitable giving as a route to self-actualization and virtue and happiness. It is this message the the Queen Mary parents have uncritically absorbed, not realizing that this is no different from the old church idea of helping the poor in order to increase your own chances of going to heaven.
Donors would do well to understand that most donations to the poor do more for the donor and for the organizations channeling the donations than they do for the recipient.
|
The Schools We Need
