p To understand the nature of games is to understand the nature of childhood. What is childhood? Many wonderful words have been devoted to it by writers and thinkers of different historical ages and parts of the world.

p Childhood is a specific psychological state of a person who has discovered an eternally self-renewing world. It is an irrepressible striving for independence and creativity and is synonymous with spontaneity and moral purity. It contains the powerful secret to inexhaustible human energy, eternal inspiration and boundless human hopes.

p It is the world’s most prosaic and familiar miracle and expresses the primeval state of human existence. Like the first sparkling snow or the first warm rain, each child is made beautiful by his warm smile, the delicate pastel shades of his face, and his open earnest expression.

p And if one experiences a sudden feeling of invigoration when looking at children’s faces and listening to their clear sonorous voices, then one has not yet lost one’s freshness and vitality. And if, on the other hand, one is irritated by children, then one is immensely tired and requires either rest or medical treatment.

p Many books have been written about childhood that describe how a child’s life may be perverted through the use of gam.es in such a way as to rear amoral persons.

p In a science fiction novel entitled Brave New World, the well-known British writer Aldous Huxley describes how 17 attractive toys that produce electric shock are used to make children of poor families lose their sense of what is beautiful in life. Instead, khaki workers’ overalls are represented as a source of pleasure. A similar point is made in another wellknown novel that has been called monumental. This is Hermann Hesse’s The Class Bead Game.

p In it Hesse persuasively shows that when a game is separated from actual life it is transformed not merely into an empty pastime but rather into a cruel, amoral instrument that can produce soulless forms of activity and a brutal functionalism.

p The events that are described take place in approximately the year 2200 in the imaginary Pedagogic Province, Castalia. There, elitist schools completely separated from actual life train young people not in practical matters but how to play a game involving glass beads. The novel’s hero, an intelligent boy named Joseph Knecht, arrives at an understanding of the subtle magic and "crystal logic" of a harmonious combining of glass beads. As an adult he becomes the Master of the Glass Bead Game—Josephus III—one of the highest ranks in the Castalian hierarchy. The Game is a symbolic representation of the refined spirituality of intellectuals and a means for finding life’s harmony and meaning through endless combinations of signs, codes, abbreviations, signatures, diagrams, positions, and conventional figures expressed either through formulas or entire "dialogues of formulas”. The Master of the Game is like a superb mathematician who commands a universal game language that allows him to express spiritual values in terms of meaningful symbols and conjugate them with each other, conveying the meaning of Leibniz’s formula or Bach’s fugue, the laws of freedom and the discord of emotions and human communities.

p The teaching method, too, is the most modern one, problem oriented! In training Knecht, his teacher stresses that one must learn to correctly recognize contradictions, first as contradictions proper, and secondly as poles of some integral unity.

p And Knecht, who is extremely bright and intelligent, and an incarnation, as it were, of spiritual sensitivity and devotion to science, is ready to fight in order to exchange the burdens of everyday life for an intelligent game of the immaterial world, a dance of elves.

p He believes in the glory of the game of glass beads as a means for transforming the world. Deceived by the elite of priests he betrays his people. And he does this not because 18 of egotistic motives, but because he is captivated by the game’s magic perfection. Knecht is more than just deceived. His tragedy is that of the intellectual teacher who finds himself, because of the world’s unfair organization, to be a cog in an immense machine designed to stultify everyone who is outside the elite community.

p How did this happen? Where and by whom was such a terrible and irreversible tragedy programmed? Hesse answers this question with a philosophical calmness: "... Rather they dwelt anxiously among political, economic, and moral ferments and earthquakes, waged a number of frightful wars and civil wars, and their little cultural games were not just charming, meaningless childishness. These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles—for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defences, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason ... they moved sporadically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow...”  [18•* 

p Plinio Designori, Knecht’s former schoolmate, rebels against the artificial, illusory world of formulas and sign systems. "... Fed by others and having few burdensome duties,” he explains, "you lead your drones’ lives, and so that they won’t be too boring you busy yourselves with all these erudite specialities, count syllables and letters, make music, and play the Glass Bead Game, while outside in the filth of the world poor harried people live real lives and do real work.”  [18•** 

p That disharmony between the elite’s parasitic way of life in the Pedagogic Province and the stifling atmosphere of surrounding reality gives Plinio Designori no peace.

p The questions that are posed in The Glass Bead Game are unambiguous. What is the essence of genuine spirituality? Can children be reared in separation from life’s actual problems, from the specific threats of their own historical times? Through his entire brilliant narration Hesse proves that life and upbringing form an integral unity, and that genuine harmony is achieved when man expresses himself in society 19 actively and sufficiently fully, without neglecting the suffering of others and without becoming an appendage of a social hierarchy’s upper layers.

p Why did I feel a need for this literary excursion into the world of The Glass Bead Game! Simply in order to stress that games should assert moral democratic principles, and awaken imagination, fantasy and creativity in children.

p Why then are these wonderful human properties—- imagination, fantasy, creativity—needed? This is by no means an empty question, since it leads to such practical inferences as how members of creative professions should be selected, who should study at institutes of higher learning, either technical or in the humanities, and who does not need post- secondary education after completing high school.

p In his remarkable work entitled Grammatica della fantasia Gianni Rodari, a well-known Italian writer, answers such questions simply and categorically: creativity and imagination are needed by everyone—scientists, engineers, housewives, artists, bakers, farmers and workers. In stating this Rodari finds support for his views in the theoretical and methodological propositions of Lev Vygotski, a prominent Soviet psychologist. Rodari writes that "L. S. Vygotski’s book Imagination and Creativity in the Age of Childhood is woven of silver and pure gold; although it has now been written some time ago, first it describes imagination clearly and simply as a type of thinking activity, and secondly it recognizes that a propensity for creativity exists in all persons and not only among a select few (artists) or a few chosen ones (selected with the help of tests and financed by some ‘foundation’) and that expresses itself in different ways, that largely depend on social and cultural factors.”  [19•* 

p Human mind is single. Man’s creative capacities can and should develop comprehensively. Rodari considers that a complete mastery of all of the potentials of one’s own native language is one of the approaches to man’s creative development. Why? Because "a child’s imagination that is encouraged to invent new words will then apply that same method to all other types of activities’ requiring a creative approach. Mathematics needs fairy-tales just as fairy-tales need mathematics. 20 They are also needed by poetry, music, Utopia, and political struggles. In short, they are needed by each integral personality and not only by those who live in the world of fantasy. They are needed precisely because at first sight, like poetry and music, theatre and sport (unless they are turned into a business), they seem to serve no purpose.”  [20•* 

p Rodari is uncompromising and categorical: "Every person should gain a full command of his language,” and adds "...this is a sound democratic slogan. It is not its aim that everyone should become an artist, but no one should become a slave.”  [20•** 

p In his book Rodari provides many concrete approaches to arousing imagination and fantasy in children, so that they may always be creative, sincere, active, inventive, and capable of social action. Adults playing with children possess a certain advantage: they have extensive experience, know the essence of the game and the means for achieving success. Yet there is something that adults can also learn from children; especially in theatrical improvisations children react spontaneously and possess a heuristic capacity for finding the correct word, text or even subtext. This is why adults can “overtake” their small partners in games only by recalling their own long- forgotten experience from a distant past. Each equal participant (big and small) in a collective game contributes to the general movement of thought. This is the higher equality of joint social creativity. And this should be remembered by every teacher.

p Much is said about childhood. Rousseau and Tolstoy considered children to be a primeval image of good, harmony and beauty. Dostoyevsky and Gorky noted with sadness that children could be cruel. They spoke from a position of defence of childhood, which they stressed has a need for sensitive and kind teachers.

p In this respect Tolstoy and Rousseau, as well as Gorky and Dostoyevsky, found countless opponents. Their philosophy is that one should be strict with children, and that occasional thrashing is for their own good. A child should not be pampered, this will do him good in dealing with life’s hardships.

p As one studies the history of human destinies one continuously asks oneself eternal questions. Where is the boundary after which primeval good and beauty begin to be tarred with evil? At what point does a naturally harmonious being begin 21 to turn into an unscrupulous money grabber, a vicious woman, a traitor, or a sadist?

p Where is that boundary beyond which good turns into evil, and childhood, lowering its original line of flight, gathers speed in pursuit of evil?

p Where are the sources of these metamorphoses to be sought: are they biological or social?

p Human history provides numerous examples of the fact that specific social conditions can distort the normal course of childhood and produce characters that henceforward reproduce themselves on and on in increasingly ugly forms. Millions of people in Nazi Germany were examples of such a crippled fate.

p Childhood is created by social environment which introduces its amendments in heredity. It either destroys harmony or consolidates it. It either sullies it or cleanses it.

p But social factor cannot operate independently of natural ones. The key to the-mysteries of childhood, and perhaps the secrets of upbringing as well, lies in an integral unity of social and biological factors. Upbringing is a social phenomenon that also involves the biological aspect. Forms of upbringing that do not take biological factors into account, thus ignoring the very nature of childhood, are doomed to failure. In the present context the term biological factors refers not to physiological growth but to the specific psychological state that characterizes childhood. The biological intensity of the development of today’s children also determines new forms of socialization. The concept of man’s boundless possibilities is more than mere words. But this capacity is destroyed if biological factors are not taken into account. There is no guard board that will signal overload pressures on a child’s integral unity. It is the function of the teacher to define stages in the development Of such a unity and encourage it. It is the teacher who is always engaged in a synthesis of the biological and the social, and who is always in search of optimal ways to organize the entire process of socialization so that children’s natural endowments are encouraged to blossom.

p A strong-willed, temperamental, and choleric type of personality cannot always be soft, calm and inert, for its biological code continually programs outbursts in its communication with other people. Naturally these outbursts acquire a moral colouring and display specific moral aspects in interpersonal relations. A type of habitual response to one’s own “outbursts” develops; for some this is regret and remorse, for others it 22 is indifference, and sometimes even a feeling of self- satisfaction with one’s strength.

p Naturally, all biological types lend themselves to socialization through upbringing and self-training. But that is another matter. The fact remains that from the point of view of social communication it is convenient to deal with a mild, calm, and balanced type of personality. And yet most often life, gets its impulse from those who are given to outbursts, cause disquiet and arouse the mind’s curiosity.

p What relation can there be, one may ask, between social and biological factors in the case of games? Actually one that is most direct. When a child plays, he is independent of the intervention of adults. Games are one of the leading forms of socialization, of assimilating rules of joint living. And an individual’s upbringing depends largely on whether the games that he plays are good or evil.

p Soviet pedagogics is interested in creating games that are conducive to happy childhood, that help develop true citizens, and that ennoble the natural impulses of children.

p We need neither "glass bead games”, nor games that alienatf children from their own selves.

We need games both as a method for developing creative activity in children, and as a way of perfecting the pedagogical skills of millions of teachers and parents.