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Historian enlists Plato in campaign to win converts to an exciting way to teach history

"Life should be lived as play." Plato’s famous dictum appears as the preamble to countless books and syllabi on learning. It also helped inspire the pedagogical revolutions of the modern world. From Rousseau to Dewey, Froebel to Piaget, educational theorists have insisted that one learns best through play.

But while Plato endorsed play in principle, his Socrates denounced Athenians for playing in the wrong way. He disapproved of their habit of transforming everything, whether beard growing or choral singing, into contests. He was especially appalled by the battles among rival orators in the Assembly, where Athenians stomped and cheered "till the rocks and the whole place re-echo."

Worse than the Athenians’ love of competition was their passion for make-believe. They would sit transfixed as Homeric orators pretended to be Achilles or Odysseus. They would spend entire days at the theater, identifying with mighty warriors and deathless gods. Little wonder, Socrates observed, that dim-­witted shoemakers and shepherds thought themselves competent to govern by public vote. For him, much of what was wrong with ancient Athens was due to the Athenians’ bad play—their addiction to social competition and make-believe....

Few professors or college administrators keep Plato’s Republic on their nightstands, much less the works of Rousseau, Dewey, Piaget, or Erikson. But opposition to "bad play" nevertheless remains embedded in the academy. Many professors regard competitive games and "make-­believe" as tolerable among children or adolescents but obviously inappropriate for college classrooms. The purpose of college is to prepare students for work as adults: Welcome to the real world.

By insisting that competitive and make-believe play is bad, the intellectual titans of enlightened pedagogy succeeded in banning it from higher education. But they did not so much win the war against bad play as push it out of the classroom. In fraternity and sorority houses, football stadiums and dorm rooms, bad play has prevailed. Students continually plunge into brutal social competitions—fraternity hazings, beer pong, Lulu and Tinder. And they spend much of every day pretending to be someone else—assuming new identities as fraternity "brothers," as better versions of their real selves on Facebook, as misogynistic car thieves or bloodthirsty warriors in online games. The simple fact, which Plato’s Socrates well perceived, is that bad play is often fun. Which is why efforts to suppress it have failed.

But during the past decade, some faculty members and administrators have discovered that the motivational power of "bad play" can be harnessed to academic purposes. Perhaps the most vivid illustration of the phenomenon is the spread of Reacting to the Past, a pedagogical system I helped start, in which students play monthlong games, set in the past, with roles informed by classic texts. For the game set in Athens in 403 BC, for example, students become democrats or oligarchs, and compete by debating the respective merits of Pericles and Plato; for the game set in the Holy Office in Rome in 1632, students pretend to be mathematicians, natural philosophers, and conservative cardinals, and debate whether Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems proves that the Earth moves. During the past decade, Reacting—the epitome of Platonic bad play—has spread to more than 350 campuses....


Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Ed