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only wares heavily made up with cosmetics." I understood her to mean that industrial products "speak" to their
customers about their allurements and not about their nature. Industry has surrounded people with artifacts whose inner
workings only specialists are allowed to understand. The nonspecialist is discouraged from figuring out what makes a
watch tick, or a tele-phone ring, or an electric typewriter work, by being warned that it will break if he tries. He can be
told what makes a transistor radio work, but he cannot find out for himself. This type of design tends to reinforce a
noninventive society in which the experts find it progressively easier to hide behind their expertise and beyond
evaluation.
The man-made environment has become as inscrutable as nature is for the primitive. At the same time, educational
materials have been monopolized by school. Simple educational objects have been expensively packaged by the
knowledge industry. They have become specialized tools for professional educators, and their cost has been inflated by
forcing them to stimulate either environments or teachers.
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The teacher is jealous of the textbook he defines as his professional implement. The student may come to hate the lab
because he associates it with schoolwork. The administrator rationalizes his protective attitude toward the library as a
defense of costly public equipment against those who would play with it rather than learn. In this atmosphere the
student too often uses the map, the lab, the encyclopedia, or the microscope only at the rare moments when the
curriculum tells him to do so. Even the great classics become part of "sophomore year" instead of marking a new turn
in a person's life. School removes things from everyday use by labeling them educational tools.
If we are to deschool, both tendencies must be reversed. The general physical environment must be made accessible,
and those physical learning resources which have been reduced to teaching instruments must become generally
available for self-directed learning. Using things only as part of a curriculum can have an even worse effect than just
removing them from the general environment. It can corrupt the attitudes of pupils.
Games are a case in point. I do not mean the "games" of the physical education department (such as football and
basketball), which the schools use to raise income and prestige and in which they have made a substantial capital
investment. As the athletes themselves are well aware, these enterprises, which take the form of warlike tournaments,
have undermined the playfulness of sports and are used to reinforce the competitive nature of schools. Rather I have in
mind the educational games which can provide a unique way to penetrate formal systems. Set theory, linguistics,
propositional logic, geometry, physics, and even chemistry reveal themselves with little effort to certain persons who
play these games. A friend of mine went to a Mexican market with a game called "'Wff 'n Proof," which consists of
some dice on which twelve logical symbols are imprinted. He showed children which two or three combinations
constituted a well-formed sentence, and inductively within the first hour some onlookers also grasped the principle.
Within a few hours of playfully conducting formal logical proofs, some children are capable of introducing others to the
fundamental proofs of propositional logic. The others just walk away.
In fact, for some children such games are a special form of liberating education, since they heighten their awareness of
the fact that formal systems are built on changeable axioms and that conceptual operations have a gamelike nature.
They are also simple, cheap, and--to a large extent--can be organized by the players themselves. Used outside the
curriculum such games provide an opportunity for identifying and developing unusual talent, while the school
psychologist will often identify those who have such talent as in danger of becoming antisocial, sick, or unbalanced.
Within school, when used in the form of tournaments, games are not only removed from the sphere of leisure; they often
become tools used to translate playfulness into competition, a lack of abstract reasoning into a sign of inferiority. An
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