Play Ground Or Testing Ground?

Recently I visited a modern playground with four of my grandchildren and their mothers.  The playground was designed in the style of The Wizard of Oz movie.  It had Auntie Em's house with a table and chair, a chicken coop built next to a "barn" with platforms and a slide, a cornfield of metal sunflowers, and Emerald City with more platforms, slides, etc.

The children ran around from one contraption to another, not spending much time on any one particular activity.  They enjoyed themselves, and the playground was fun to look at.  But I felt that something was missing, something essential.

I walked around and began thinking of my childhood elementary school playground, trying to figure out why there was such a difference between them.  My school playground, built in the 1950s I believe, was built of steel pipe set into concrete postholes, with the eight or ten-inch bed of  cushioning sand on top of the dirt below.

We had four swings, an over-under bar, a tri-level set of pull-up bars, a jungle gym, a set of small stationary rings, a set of large swinging rings, an overhead ladder, a tall slide, and three tetherball circles.  There was also a chainlink backstop for when classes played kickball.  The asphalt next to the classroom buildings had three types of Hopscotch painted on it, sets of Foursquare squares to play with a ball, and a large double ring of circles for when classes played Dodgeball or Three-Deep.  Girls could bring their bags of Jacks and sit on the sidewalks to play Jacks with their friends.

Each piece of equipment or game presented its own challenges.  They were suited for a variety of skills, and ages and heights.  We were free to choose what we would play on.  When I was young, there was dirt between the old asphalt and the steel playground equipment.  The boys would play marbles there.  Later, they poured new blacktop in place of the dirt, and painted a Fifty-yard dash diagonally across it.

Remembering how we used to stream out of our classrooms at recess time, and head for the playground (ignoring any bathroom needs for the moment), I realized that we all would choose which equipment or game to start with, and line up at the beginning.  If the line was already long when we got to our first choice, we'd break away to a shorter line at a second choice, or third choice.  Eventually the lines WERE shorter because kids realized that the 20 minute recess was almost over and they'd better get to the restroom before the bell rang and they had to line up by classes to go back inside.

Then I thought of how I had worked to go across the small fixed rings, each hand reaching out for the next ring, swinging my body just enough to help me catch hold of it, finally dropping down to the ground if I couldn't make it across.  When I tried the large swinging rings, it required timing, because the rings would swing with my body.  Sometimes another player would start the farther rings swinging for you, and you would try to time your movements to catch them as they swung towards you.  Sometimes it helped, sometimes it didn't.

The overhead ladder took a fair amount of arm strength, because we dangled from our handgrip on the rungs above our heads.  Once again, we could swing our bodies back and forth and reach for the next rung, and even skip a rung as we got stronger and our arms grew longer.  It was a great day when you could go all the way across!

That was when I realized that the Play Ground I grew up with was actually a Testing Ground for each of us.  We made our choices, and did our best to learn the skills needed to use the equipment or play the game.  We grew stronger, and cheered or jeered our classmates as they tried to go all the way across.  We accepted that we would fail and fall sometimes, but we got up and tried again another day, if we didn't feel like getting into line again right then.

Come to think of it, even the park playgrounds had equipment that required us to learn and grow.  The merry-go-round wouldn't go unless someone held onto it and pushed it, walking and then running alongside it and finally jumping on for the ride when it was going fast enough.  The teeter-totter wouldn't move unless you had two people on it, and you had to work at staying balanced and not let your end of the teeter-totter hit the ground too hard.  That was painful.  The swings wouldn't move until you got someone to push you, or you learned how to pump your feet back and forth.  And of course, the slide was reached by the ladder that you had to climb up and then you got the fun of sliding down.

That is the Essential Difference between modern play grounds and the older play grounds.  Nowadays a play ground does not offer many opportunities for learning a physical skill, for testing your body, for showing your classmates that maybe you aren't so good at the times table, but you can spin around the over-under bar with your leg locked over it, or hit that tetherball at such an angle that your opponent can't even touch it before it wraps itself around the pole and the game is over.

A Testing Ground is a lot more fun and interesting than a Play Ground!