THE LEARNER AS SUBJECT AND THE PLACE OF PLAY AND GAMES IN THE EDUCATIONAL DEBATE IN NORTH-AMERICA AT THE END OF 19TH CENTURY

Abstract

The article examines the building of the idea of the learner as subject and related notions of play and games, in three of the pedagogical creeds published in The School Journal (New York and Chicago) between 1896 and 1897. The creeds are those of American William Torrey Harris (1835- 1909), a Hegelian humanist, Commissioner of the USA Bureau of Education; James L. Hughes (1846-1935), Canadian school inspector from Toronto, an advocate of Froebel’s ideas; and Edward W. Scripture (1864-1945), a professor of Psychology at Yale University, specialist in experimental psychology. Jerrold Seigel’s differentiation of the three dimensions of self-hood, material or corporal, relational, and reflective, provide the theoretical framework.

We argue that in Harris’s vision of the learner the relational dimension is dominant and aims at an integration of the individual in the social whole. Hughes conceives self-activity as a mediating element between control and spontaneity, having as frame of reference a notion of freedom that cannot be understood without a consciousness of what restriction meant. Scripture embodies the paradigmatic change taking place. His vision of the self and the learner as subject is influenced by the natural sciences and the emerging empiricist methodology, in line with positivist thinking. The three authors understand play and games as means to develop a self-controlled subject responding to an external intentionality even as the debate takes the shape of idealism versus latter expounded by Scripture). In the end, play and not only games lose their meaning as strictly ludic activities.