The Value of Work
Thursday, December 11, 2008 at 07:17AM 
A visiting teacher is standing in our preschool classroom, surrounded by three-, four-, and five-year-olds who are busily working and playing.
There are children in every part of the room doing every type of activity — reading, writing, drawing, painting, building, singing, dancing, playing house, putting on a puppet show.
Her: How much time are the children required to spend working on their project?
Me: None.
Her: So, they are required to do anything?!
Me: No.
Her: They why do they do it?!
Now, I understand what she was saying, but I still find it a little depressing. So, two ideas:
Work is enjoyable.
Healthy, happy people seek meaningful work.
Do you agree with these statements? Do you believe them for adults? Do you believe them for children?
Do you believe them for yourself?
In my experience, young children eagerly seek out meaningful work, and once they have the opportunity, they apply themselves to it joyfully.
The word “work” can have negative connotations — for grown-ups and children who associate it with “something I don’t want to do”. Play and leisure become identified with “things I want to do”. A child can be taught that “work” is something that he has to do, whether he wants to do it or not. And he can remember that lesson forever.
Many teachers — and administrators, and parents — beileve that children must be coerced to do work. They can’t believe that children would choose to work when other choices are available.
The other day we asked the question, Can you teach an autodidact without being an autodidact? Can we foster values in our children that we don’t actively live ourselves?
That teacher recognized something happening in our classroom that she wanted for her own students. But she was held back by her beliefs — her belief that work is a negative thing, and her further belief that children would never purposefully choose to work when they didn’t have to.
Can we help our children find the joy in meaningful work if we haven’t found it ourselves?
I believe children have the right to meaningful work as well as play, that there is joy to be derived from each, and that they are not mutually exclusive. I know that children don’t have to be coerced to work, but a school or family culture that celebrates work is more likely to introduce them to its pleasures. And once they have experienced it, they will seek it out on their own.
Once a child is on a path in which work brings as much joy as play, and the two mingle freely, I believe they are on the path toward a happy adult life. Not a life without problems, without mistakes, without strife, but a life rich with possibility. To give them that life, we may need to change our beliefs — we need to believe in what is possible in order to show it to them.
See also: The Work/Fun Conundrum
Reader Comments (33)
"Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play." Heraclitus
How do you define the difference between work and play? I suppose there is a more vested interest (perhaps) in the outcome with work vs play. But then I think of my sons playing Uno and I don't think so.
I think Heraclitus was really referring to flow...have you read any of what's his unpronouncable's name? I believe one book is titled "Flow" and about creativity, and how we hit a zone, in both work and play, when we are fully engaged and time seems to cease to exist.
Now I've just depressed myself because I know for my son time most certainly does NOT cease when he goes to school...
I found that after I was no longer working at a job, that I went through a period when I didn't want to do much, but then I got into a rhythm of being productive because I wanted to be. I started taking pictures again that people would pay me for. I make things. Sometimes I even do the laundry and the dishes or *gasp* mop the floors. And as I think about that, I realize that too often my message to the kids is that nobody likes to do things like housework - we do them because we have to. And that's not the right message at all. We do them because we want to live in a pleasant and clean environment, and we should honor the tasks that bring us the environment we want.
I could go on and on and on (and already did) but I'll sit here and ponder this one for a while. It's so pertinent to what is happening right now in our home. Thanks!
“It does not seem to be true that work necessarily needs to be unpleasant. It may always have to be hard, or at least harder than doing nothing at all. But there is ample evidence that work can be enjoyable, and that indeed, it is often the most enjoyable part of life.” -- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990
for a lot of people, hobbies are probably where play and work intersect for them.
even in Reggio Emilia, students leave the incredible world-renowned preprimary programs and go to “regular” schools.
children *can* be retaught; teachers and administrators *can* be reprogrammed; as a society, we *can* change our priorities.
but it’s not so much a matter of *teaching* kids that work can be fun. you can’t *teach* these things. it is more a matter of getting schools to acknowledge universally known truths — then get out of the way and allow children to have access to them.
who hasn’t had the experience of hearing, at school or at work, about a new project and thinking — hey! hey!! that actually sounds .. fun! — and then .. being terribly disappointed when it turns out that, rather than getting to do that fun-sounding thing in the way you had imagined, it was going to be done in such a (school- or work-) type way as to suck all the fun out of it.
How do we train ourselves? That’s what I wonder. Again, it is simply a truth. But if we are convinced that work, to be work, must be dull drudgery forced on us by someone else, measured and quantified and judged by others, then .. how do we push that away and accept a different truth? So we can share it with our children?
you are so right about the housework. i am so tired of hearing people say, “kids need to learn to do ‘real’ work — things they don’t enjoy — because that’s real life.” mopping the floor may not be super-fun but it is a single task that is part of a larger whole — making the home you want. should children learn that work can be tedious and they should just buckle down and do it anyway? or should they learn that *meaningful, enjoyable work* is comprised of many smaller steps, some of which are tedious? we need to examine our beliefs and figure out where we are making things unnecessarily negative. even tedious tasks can give a warm glow of accomplishment. *especially when they are freely chosen.*
thank you all for your great comments!
when my first son was around five, my mother asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. he said he wasn’t going to have a job. my mother pointed out that he would need to work to make money to live. he said, incredulously, “i’m going to *work*! i’m just not going to have a *job*!”
some people have jobs they love, jobs in which they can do their real work. so “job” really shouldn’t, and can’t, become the receptable for all our negative feelings about employment.
all of our children who are on that achievement conveyor belt, the one that goes from the montessori preschool all the way to the ivy league .. what message are we giving them? as parents and as a society, when we prioritize achievement, when we have them compete in sports and science fairs, when we cheer them on and want them to *win*, what message are we sending?
are we saying, i want you to live your most authentic, meaningful life. i want you to find your life work, the work that will give you joy?
and if we aren’t saying that, why not? and what are we saying instead?
And I'm right with you on the idea that we *can* change on how we approach work. My frustration is that the desire to achieve and to have measurable accomplishments for children (the same measurable accomplishments for every child) in the classroom puts a huge roadblock in front of change. Having any period of time where achievement isn't measurable is unacceptable to most school administrations, and unfortunately, to parents. It takes will to make change, and I don't think the will is there in most school environments, including the one my children are in.
I love "Flow", despite never being able to remember Csikszentmihalyi's name, and I suppose that is precisely what I want for my children, whether it be in work or play---that vital sense of being alive, fully engaged.
On a side note, my youngest brother is about to graduate from UI Champaign, and is extremely depressed about leaving what he has perceived as four years of play (not because of partying but because he loves learning) to begin what he perceives as a life of drudgery...of Willy Loman style work. I'm going to link him to this post because we've been having several conversations about how to crave out a life in which work and play overlap.
I'm rambling but one more note. A perpetual procrastinator, I read a great book last year called The Now Habit, and it talked about how we take work/play that we love and turn it into a chore--so that it becomes something we avoid even though, in truth, we really do want to do it. I see that happen so often in adults---whether it be exercise, knitting, writing, etc., we can get into a mind pattern that sucks the fun out of the things we love.
I am never going to love cleaning my bathroom floor...not with three sons, but I did appreciate the application of these ideas to work of home-making.
you are so right that allowing children to do authentic work means getting away from measuring .. and unfortunately, i agree with you that parents don’t find that any more acceptable than school administrators. everyone has something to prove -- administrators to the government, the government to society, parents to their community. true success is very *personal* and doesn’t necessarily look like much to someone else. sometimes it seems we would rather impress the neighbors than seek genuine fulfillment.
i think, though, that if children were brought up *knowing* what it was to do meaningful work, they would continue to seek it out as they grew into adults. the problem is how to convince society to give them that kind of education.
re: your brother .. he sounds like my husband. it’s not that he doesn’t like work, but he is addicted to learning. any j-o-b, once you master it, doesn’t fulfill that intense desire to keep learning something new. my husband has managed to find jobs that allowed him to tackle a large number of new and different challenges, but eventually he found self-employment was necessary -- he is the only boss he’s ever had who understand just how much he needs to always be learning something new. :^)
“the now habit” sounds really interesting -- i’m going to check it out at the library!
So much to think about, to do, the *change*...