it's a greeny blue world that we live in (planet of the apes)

so horsemouth is up and about and no longer seeing red (it is a greeny blue world that we live in). argentina has defaulted on its debts to various vampire squid hedgefunds, israel keeps shelling gaza, it's probably all still going on in syria and iraq and ukraine (off camera) and two and a half thousand years ago the buddha achieved enlightenment.

he's been reading a large brick sized book about play - it's role in development and evolution which argues on the basis of children and young chimpanzees (and various other juvenille pongids) - it summarises research that has had an enormous impact on education (and has lots of articles about chimpanzee pant-hoots and playface).

 Sylvia, Brunner and Genova (here horsemouth thinks of them as 3 slightly older alice-type victorian children) worked with children aged 3 to 5 at fishing a prize out of a latched box - the group that was simply allowed to 'play' with the materials beforehand did nearly as well (39% spontaneous solution) as compared to those shown the solution (41%), the groups that were instructed in how to do it or shown part of the solution did less well. the value of play (by the Yerkes-Dodson law) is that it prevents the learner from getting frustrated, the animal/child doesn't need to find a solution he/she/it is just 'playing' - 'the more complex the skill to be learnt, the lower the optimum motivational level for fastest learning'. 

the corollary is that the young animal/ citizen must be supported to play - the starving and harrassed need not apply.

 there is another 'rule' - 'the young are more inventive' only young chimps, orang-utans etc. exhibit the valued trait of 'curiousity' , the older ones do not, in fact konrad lorentz puts it like this;

 'when I observe how such a young animal plays with building blocks or places boxes inside one another, I am repeatedly struck with the suspicion that thesecreatures were, in the distant past, once of much higher intelligence than they are today, and that in the course of their specialization they have lost abilities which now only appear as a silhouette in the young animals' play.' 

 one can imagine a french structuralist anthropologist remake of planet of the apes/ the monolith scene from 2001 aiming to answer herder's question 'what does the animal most similar to man - the ape- lack that prevented it from becoming man?' showing apes acquiring the skill to continually reassess activity (the one useful in hammering in a nail) and curiousity, are retaining it into adulthood. further with the shift into language and the division between knowing how to (skill) and knowing that (knowledge) and a structured series of opposites,

knowing how to (skill) - done/ spoken, embodied/ oral, and so less portable, less copyable, pro-play

knowing that (knowledge) - oral/ written, disembodied and so more portable, more copyable, anti-play,

there is a shift in the role of play in education we are given an evolution of educability (in Bruner's phrase) but not in a nietzschean sense (not a genealogy of educability). the sun is shining horsemouth is off for a wander. thank you for entertaining his musings.
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 he wandered down to the hollow ponds and then through leytonstone and across to wanstead park, then via wansted and snaresbrook and back - there's a lot of it out there.