The Power of Play
I don’t know what idiot first said “your school days are the best days of your life”, but he obviously didn’t go to my school.
Come with me, if you will, back in time and place to England in the late 1960’s where I was serving a lengthy if not actually, as it seemed at the time, life sentence at a boys’ preparatory boarding school. Outside the school walls, Flower Power might have been in the air, mini-skirts might have been on the streets, England might, in the words of the song, “swing like a pendulum do”, but none of this was allowed to trouble our boyish minds. What we got, instead, was Latin, Greek, and Ancient History. OK, we also got taught less antique subjects like English, geography, science etc. but what sticks most in my mind are the dreaded, dry as old bones and dull as dish water “classics”. As Evelyn Waugh wrote in Decline and Fall, “anyone who has been to an English public [i.e. private] school will always feel comparatively at home in prison”.
Not that I’m saying this to make you feel sorry for me. All that was many years ago, and the system’s changed since then. I’m doing just fine now, thanks – apart from occasionally jolting awake in a cold sweat from dreams of being chased down dark alleys by accusative gangs of second declension Latin nouns. Nor is it anything specifically to do with teaching “classics” per se (he said, sneaking in a Latin tag). No, I’m saying this because the rote-learning instruction of Latin, Greek, and Ancient History that prevailed is illustrative of the worst possible way to inculcate knowledge, let alone the joy of learning, into any student. I doubt it was much more fun for the teachers.
The fact is, though, that even the driest and dustiest of classroom subjects can be made entertaining, educational and even (dare I say it?) memorable with a little bit of imagination and play.
I might never have realized this were it not for the efforts of one lone hero among the teaching staff at the correctional facility that masqueraded as my prep school. His name was Mr. Burstow, and though he has long-since passed into that great classroom in the sky, he deserves to be enshrined in the roll call of great educators who sought to make learning fun. His trick was simple. Once every week or so, he would spread huge copies of antique maps of the Roman world across his floor, scatter cushions, and invite us to escape the shackles of our desks and join him on the ground to march empty matchboxes representing Roman legions or Germanic armies across hitherto mysterious and magically-named provinces such as Illyricum, Dalmatia, and Gallia Sisalpina. He would allow us each to role-play so that one week we might be Julius Caesar deciding how best to conquer Gaul with our limited supply of matchboxes; on another week we might be Hannibal, using our matchboxes to encircle the (differently colored) Roman matchboxes at the battle of Cannae. It was cheap, low-tech, and utterly, utterly wonderful. If only more lessons could have been more like that.
And the net result? Sitting here, 40 years later, my Latin is rustier than the Titanic and my Greek virtually non-existent, but I can still trace in my mind the geographical ebb and flow of the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, or chart a mental progress of the gradual defeat of glorious Athens by numbskull Sparta. All because of sitting on the floor, playing pretend with a bunch of empty matchboxes.
It is a testament to the power of play in the classroom. It’s also a testament to the fact that, even on the tightest budget, all it takes is a little imagination to transform the dreariest of lessons. Of course, I’d love to see every classroom in the land boasting a copy of at least one of the educational board games that we and other companies produce (for one thing, I could use the income on a remedial Latin course!), but I doubt that will happen. However, although the games we produce at HL Games have (at least so far) nothing to do with Latin and don’t (at least intentionally) contain any empty matchboxes, they owe a huge debt to Mr Burstow in their attempt, like him, to make education fun.
As the German poet, Heinrich Heine, once said, “the Romans would never have had time to conquer the world if they had been obliged to learn Latin first.”
