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From the Archives: The Politics of Play
Posted August 19, 2025
The Politics of Play
by Alexander Bernstein
as published in the 1992 Fall issue of Prelude, Fugue & Riffs
My father created the Bernstein Education Through the Arts (BET A) Fund* with the conviction that all people, throughout their education and after it, do want to learn, can find joy in learning, and that the arts are essential in that process. He believed that through "playing" music, math, theater, history, words, etc., people learn not only about the subject itself but about the connections between disciplines, the happy results of hard work and, most importantly, about themselves. He saw learning as an active process, not one of merely receiving knowledge. As is the case with other views he assumed obvious and unarguable, his educational philosophy is a political thicket.
Last year I taught drama for middle-schoolers in Brooklyn, NY. One day an administrator warned me that he felt the kids were “having too much fun” in my class. Perhaps we did get a little loud on some days – it was Drama, after all – but I think he was equating “fun” with “not learning” and, by implications, “no fun” with “learning.”
In the United States, school is conceived as a joyless place. After a few years of “play” in elementary school, children are suddenly told, “OK, it’s time for serious studying. NO MORE PLAYING AROUND!” Not only are most children unprepared for this splash of cold water, but it transforms the experience of going to school – of learning itself – from one of “wanting to” to one of “having to.” Students learn to sit silently in rows as they are told what is important, good, bad, beautiful, worthy, and true. The arts, active learning, collaborative learning, and creative thinking have no place in such a classroom. They would (and do) subvert it.
Learning through the arts requires personal, emotional investment on both sides. It forces the learner to ask hard, often unanswerable questions. At this point, the role of the teacher becomes that of collaborator in discovery, not authority with all the “right answers.” In facing and accepting ambiguity, teacher and student together transcend what is known and comfortable. The prospect that a teacher may not have all the “right answers” – that the new cliché, “empowerment of students,” implies the relinquishing of absolute power by teachers and a sharing of responsibility with students – is, for better or worse, a political matter of the classroom and, in the end, of society.
*The BETA Fund has since evolved into what is now known as Artful Learning®