The People in the Playground

"Yes. Iona and her husband Peter were folklorists, and they went out to try to understand children, in the same way that an anthropologist would go into a distant tribe or a folklorist would record the songs and stories of people in some distant place. Their great book, The Lore and Language of School Children, is a wonderful record of what schoolchildren do – the rhymes and songs, rituals and mythology of the school yard. What they discovered was that children have an incredibly powerful and wide-ranging social network – so that a rhyme would show up in a school somewhere in northern England, and within a year you could hear the same rhyme on the west coast of America. Yes, it is amazing that long before computerised ‘social networking’ they would have their own social network. They managed it through travel – for example, one child might move down to London and introduce something to a new school, and then someone from that school might move to America, and the chain would continue until it reached the west coast. What I particularly love about the Opies’ book is that they did this beautiful scholarship, and their key message was that, instead of thinking of children as defective grown-ups, we should see schoolchildren as people who are also creating their own world and trying to understand the world around them. Also, they are often creating a world that is richer than the one we can imagine as adults. This particular book is especially appealing because it is so personal and immediate. It is a kind of diary that Iona kept after her husband Peter died, a record of a year in the playground, just sitting in the corner and watching what the children were doing. She would go to a playground like an anthropologist would go to a village, sit in a corner, and get accepted by the children and find out all the things they were doing and talking about."