No More Learning

Assemblies are still another institutional ceremony of great importance
in camps and boarding schools. Flag ceremonies are common in those set-
tings, especially military schools. Assemblies can be occasions for just about
anything in a residential institution, from talks by visiting dignitaries to
"town meeting" affairs. Once more, the folklorist's interest in the assembly
is how the staff and residents may discover ways to "break frame" and as-
sault the fragile collective construction. One is reminded, for example, of
the closing scenes in Lindsay Anderson's film If (1968).
Rituals of incorporation and rituals of separation are the last two
institutional ceremonies I would commend to the folklorist's attention. Both
sorts of ritual are dramatizations of a change in status. They occur at the
borders of the residential institutions themselves and at interior borders.
Turner (1974a) reminds us to follow Van Gennep's lead (1960) in looking
at the threshold situations in cultural processes. A residential institution usu-
z83
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:03 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/usu. 39060010034923 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#cc-by-nc-nd-3. 0
? ? ally has an official orientation session, sometimes including artifacts that are
symbolic adjuncts to the ritual (Fortes 1968). Thus, campers may receive a
distinctive item of clothing and prisoners may get haircuts and be stripped
naked before donning the institutional uniform. Once past this initial thresh-
old, the child or adolescent may face unofficial forms of initiation into the
folk culture of the group. The "mock ordeal" described by Ellis (1981a) is
one such initiation ritual, as are a "snipe hunt" and assorted other forms of
hazing. The folk group tests the neophyte, through verbal assault, exploit-
ative games, and dares (R. Johnson 1978).
The rituals of separation come at the other threshold, the border the
child crosses to rejoin everyday society. Awards ceremonies often cap the
residential period and camps and schools may have true "graduation" cer-
emonies. We have no studies of these folk rituals, but Myerhoff's insightful
analysis (1978) of a concocted graduation ceremony at a senior citizen cen-
ter provides good folkloristic questions to pose in the case of graduation
ceremonies for youngsters.
Having added four ceremonial occasions-meals, assemblies, rituals
of incorporation, and rituals of separation-to Goffman's list, we now have
at least eleven sorts of performance occasions in which to look for the emer-
gence of children's folklore. So far this discussion has taken genre and per-
formance context as primary categories, treating as roughly interchangeable
the four sorts of residential institutions. To offset the impression that these
performance contexts across the four institutions are really the same, I shall
turn now to each sort of institution to comment briefly upon its unique char-
acteristics and the extant scholarship.
SPECIAL FEATURES OF EACH INSTITUTION
Summer camps certainly are the most benign of the total institutions for
children and adolescents, fitting closest the adult's romantic notion of what
the child's folk culture should be. The folklorist should note, however, that
there are many kinds of camps, from the general recreational, to the ones
connected with youth groups (Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, YMCA, etc. ), to
camps featuring single activities (sports, art, cheerleading, computer), to
camps for special populations (handicapped, ill, disadvantaged, delinquent).
The day-camper's experience will overlap with that of residential campers,
so it is good to ask what features of the campers' folk culture we can at-
tribute to the long-term stay.
Unfortunately, we do not yet have much in the way of folkloristic
study of camps. Chandler's 1981 essay on a Girl Scout camp, Wells's 1988
study of a Girl Scout camp, Rashap's 1982 work on a camp for overweight
2,84 CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE IN RESIDENTIAL INSTITUTIONS
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:03 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/usu. 39060010034923 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#cc-by-nc-nd-3. 0
? ? teenagers, Ellis's (1981a, 1981b, 1982) several essays on a camp for under-
privileged urban children, Savin-Williams's work on summer camps (1980a,
1980b), Tillery's 1992 ongoing work on a YMCA camp, and my own work
on a Boy Scout camp are the only sustained studies of camp experiences from
a point of view valuable to folklorists. Most other studies of camps feature
an interventionist frame of mind coming out of normative social science's
view of socialization. The investigation of camp experiences created to serve
some other goal, such as better racial relations (Eaton and Clore 1975) or
the treatment of emotionally disturbed children (Behar and Stephens 1978),
rarely includes evidence of the campers' folk culture.
The scholarship on boarding schools is more plentiful than that for
camps, thanks largely to research on the British public school. McLachlan's
1970 history of the boarding school in America provides good background
for understanding whose children go to boarding schools and why (see also
Levine 1980). For work taking the children's point of view, however, it is
still hard to surpass the work done by the British. Lambert and Millham
(1968) and Ashley (1968) I've already praised for their collection of the ac-
tual lore of children. On American schools we have less data, but Gillespie
(1970) is a good example. More recently, noted feminist psychologist Carol
Gilligan and her coworkers (1990) have been working at a private girls'
school in upstate New York as part of a larger "Harvard Project on the Psy-
chology of Women and Development of Girls. "
The study of the folklore of children and adolescents in hospitals suf-
fers somewhat the same interventionist fate as the study of camps. Krell's 1980
survey is folkloristic, but the folklorist might also get something out of the
work of the interventionists who are interested in using play as an adjunct to
medical treatments (M. Adams 1976; D. Hall 1977; Miura 1981). Bluebond-
Langner's work (1978, 1981) with dying children also contains some insight
into the ways the children and parents construct reality, though one wishes
the author had paid more attention to the ways in which dying children cre-
ate expressive support groups among themselves. Bergmann's 1965 case his-
tories of children in a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, include incisive observa-
tions on the denials, regressions, defensive devices and "constructive resources
the children use to battle fears. " But, again, the folklorist wishes Bergmann
more often stepped aside from her etic, psychoanalytic perspective (Anna Freud
was a collaborator) and presented a more emic account of the children's ex-
pressive culture in the face of disease, amputation, and death. Beuf's 1979 study
of the lives of children in hospitals is our most complete ethnographic study,
and that contains much of use to the folklorist.
It is an odd paradox that the children's residential institutions for
285
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:03 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/usu. 39060010034923 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#cc-by-nc-nd-3. 0
? ? which we have some of the best folklore data are the residential correctional
facilities, the institutions in which it would be the most difficult for the out-
side folklorist to penetrate the folk group. This paradox ought to warn us
that the plentiful data has some hidden contextual conditions. Most of the
studies of group homes, residential treatment centers, and prisons clearly
espouse an adult, interventionist point of view, and we easily may dismiss
these studies (for example, Balbernie 1966; Tizard, Sinclair, and Clarke 1975)
as unlikely to provide much of use to the folklorist.
But there is a whole middle range of studies done by sociologists and
psychologists who are interventionist in their goals while, at the same time,
displaying an ethnographic respect for the small-group culture of the chil-
dren and adolescents in these institutions. These fieldworkers practice some-
thing closer to the "interpretive" rather than the "normative" approach to
socialization. As is the case in the study of children's lore in boarding schools,
some of the best work on the folk cultures of children in residential correc-
tional institutions comes out of England, where studies on the "Borstal boys"
already constitute a long research tradition. Walter's 1977 critique of research
in British "approved schools" is a good introduction to this literature, es-
pecially in light of Walter's view that the best work is done by those who
attempt to present the boys' or girls' perspective. Walter admires the work
of Gill (1974) in this regard.
Turning to American institutions for juvenile offenders, the folklor-
ist would do well to begin with Polsky's classic Cottage Six study (1962). A
young postdoctoral fellow at the time, Polsky entered Hollymeade residen-
tial treatment center as a participant-observer. He discovered in this coedu-
cational institution what we now recognize as the folk culture of the 195
inmates (boys aged eight to eighteen, girls twelve to eighteen). In the words
of Leonard Cottrell, Jr. , from the introduction to Polsky's book, "Dr. Polsky
demonstrates beyond cavil that it is possible for at least a significant seg-
ment of the resident population of even a first-rate institution like
Hollymeade to create, maintain, and transmit a separate deviant subculture
that supports values and a social system that are counter to the institution
itself and in substantial part negate even the most intensive and skillful in-
dividual therapeutic efforts" (Polsky 1962, 6-7).
Polsky had found, in short, the folk culture of the cottage, of the resi-
dential group, that persisted beyond members' coming and going and that
was the cultural context for sustaining deviant behavior. Polsky's book is full
of ethnographic detail that will delight the folklorist, including a close reading
of a dining-hall incident in which one group's control over access to certain
foods becomes a symbolic performance of power. Polsky's typology of de-
2. 86 CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE IN RESIDENTIAL INSTITUTIONS
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:03 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/usu. 39060010034923 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#cc-by-nc-nd-3. 0
? ? viant interactive modes-namely aggression, deviant skills and activities,
threat gestures, ranking, and scapegoating-translate into familiar folk
genres. Especially enlightening is Polsky's candid, confessional chapter on
the "Participant Observer in a Deviant Subculture," wherein he recounts how
the boys tested him by making him smoke (against the rules), by "ranking"
him with their ritual insults, and occasionally by physically attacking him.
In many ways Polsky's accomplishment in the Cottage Six study has
not been duplicated. Even Polsky's later study of another residential treat-
ment center (Polsky and Claster 1968) is too preoccupied with applying a
Bales/Parsons scheme and quantifying the results, failing to match the rich
ethnographic detail of the Cottage Six work. Empey and Lubeck (1971) simi-
larly fail to describe in detail the delinquent subculture the authors know
exists at such residential facilities. The surveys by Street, Vinter, and Perrow
(1969), by Cole (1972), and Feld (1981) hint at the subcultures of the in-
mates of a broad range of residential institutions for juvenile offenders, but
ultimately they fail to deliver the details the folklorist wants.
Fortunately, there are a few ethnographic studies by folklorists who
were able to penetrate to some extent the cultures of children in custodial
institutions. R. Roberts's 1965 study of an industrial school for boys is an
early example. Cohen and Eilertsen (1985) discovered through interviews a
broad range of folklore at a New Jersey correctional institution for boys,
but they were unable to do the follow-up fieldwork that would have located
these folk genres in their natural contexts (see Bennett 1981 for a history
and overview of the uses of the delinquent's life history). The research by
Horan while he worked as a staff member at a New Jersey boys' home holds
the most promise, and in his study of play fighting (1988) and of patterns
of sharing and withholding possessions (1984) Horan displays deft control
of the folklorist's inquiry.
We still do not have the data we would need to determine, for ex-
ample, if the folk cultures of the inmates differ significantly across kinds of
institutions (private/public, large/small, open/closed, religious/secular, rural/
urban). Clearly, we need to replicate Hawes's (1968) sort of study for all these
institutional variations. Giallombardo's (1974) very fine work on imprisoned
girls is a good model in this vein. There is still much to do.
SPECIAL ISSUES AND PROSPECTS
The discussion so far has been something of a survey of the existing litera-
ture on the folklore of children and adolescents in residential institutions,
organized in the first section by genres in performance settings, in the sec-
ond by types of institutional ceremonies, and in the third by type of institu-
2z87
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:03 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/usu. 39060010034923 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#cc-by-nc-nd-3. 0
? ? tion. In this final section I want to address more what needs to be done by
folklorists, alerting the reader to certain problems and certain possibilities
that seem to me unique and exciting.
Regarding the special problems of fieldwork in residential institutions
for children, there is not much more to be added to the warnings and ad-
vice offered by Fine and Glassner (1979), Fine (1987, 222-44), and Foley
(1990, 206-31). Obviously, the fieldworker will have more and more trouble
establishing a trusting relationship with the informants the closer the insti-
tution gets to being a "total institution. " Nonetheless, Giallombardo's suc-
cess (1974) is encouraging. Most folklorists will probably enter these insti-
tutions through the staff world, so the great task is to establish a relation-
ship of trust with the residents. I would recommend Polsky's chapter seven
(1962) as a reminder to fieldworkers what they might have in store for them
in the process of building that trust.
Folklorists working in these settings might try some special fieldwork
techniques. Sol Worth's film projects, teaching first Philadelphia black gang
members, then Navajo gang members, how to use 8-mm cameras to make
films of their worlds (Worth and Adair 1972), seem to me a promising model
for work in residential institutions, where the folklorist could provide the
children with low-cost video equipment. Of course, the children would have
to be assured that their own narratives would not be "used against them"
by the adult authorities, and the folklorist should keep that promise.
Csikszentmihalyi, Larson, and Prescott's technique (1977) of using beepers
to signal adolescents to enter into diaries what they are doing is another idea
that could be used in residential settings. Caughey (1982) seems to get good
results asking students to use introspective reports as data, and these tech-
niques could be added to the institutional repertoire of interviews and pro-
jective tests.
As may be evident in some of my examples above, I also believe that
the folklorist will find in some unlikely places examples of the folklore of
children and adolescents in residential institutions. In literature, for example,
John Knowles's novel A Separate Peace (1959), James Kirkwood's novel
Good Times, Bad Times (1968), and Robert Morasco's play Child's Play
(1970) are all set in boarding schools and contain examples of the lore of
the schools. Autobiographies are another literary genre that may contain a
participant's comments on the folk cultures of residential institutions. Walter
(1977) discusses autobiographies and memoirs by men who attended Brit-
ish approved schools.
Commercial feature films, such as Meatballs (1979) and Little Dar-
lings (1980), are set in summer camps, as are the several Friday the Thir-
288 CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE IN RESIDENTIAL INSTITUTIONS
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:03 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/usu. 39060010034923 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#cc-by-nc-nd-3. 0
? ? teenth films that dramatically render adolescent legends wherein the pen-
alty for teenage sex is mutilation by a crazed monster. Lindsay Anderson's
cult film If (1968) is set in a British boarding school, and Bad Boys (1983)
is filled with ethnographic detail of an Illinois prison for adolescent males.
In addition to the commercial films are a few folklore or ethnographic
films set in residential facilities for youthful offenders. Broomfield and
Churchill's Tattooed Tears (1978) is a powerful film about a California youth
detention center and training school. A dramatized version of this sort of
scene is Juvie (1976). The CBS News special report What Are We Doing to
Our Children? -Locked Up, Locked Out (1973) follows a ten-year-old de-
linquent boy through the legal system and into the threatening world of a
modern "children's treatment center. " These are merely examples; folklor-
ists should be on the lookout for similar films on residential settings.
I mentioned above, in my discussion of the literature on residential
institutions for youthful offenders, that we lack enough rich ethnographies
of the folk cultures of several sorts of institutions to be able to determine if
there are significant variations across settings. The comparative approach
is essential to the study of folklore. Eventually, we would like to know how
folk performance texts vary across contexts. What difference, for example,
does gender make in the folklore of children's residential institutions? I have
found the little work there is on Girl Scout camps (such as Chandler 1981
and Wells 1988) to be immensely helpful in my understanding of a Boy Scout
camp. Giallombardo (1974) makes much of the influence of gender upon
the expressive culture she found in women's prisons. She noted significant
differences between the adolescent women's inmate culture and that of ado-
lescent males. Why the difference? To be sure, admits Giallombardo, "the
adult male and female inmate cultures are a response to the deprivations of
prison life, but the nature of the response in both prison communities is in-
fluenced by the differential participation of males and females in the exter-
nal culture . . . . The family group in female prisons is singularly suited to
meet the inmates' internalized cultural expectations of the female role"
(1974, 3). Hawes's 1968 interpretation of the meaning of "La Llorona" simi-
larly rests upon the fact that this is a legend told among female adolescents.
Barrie Thorne's (1993) book on the ways children construct and deconstruct
gender in their play on school grounds provides several hypotheses which
folklorists might test for residential insitutions.
Folklorists will want to attend, as well, to the confounding effects of
other variables in addition to setting and gender. Do ethnicity or social class
matter? What of religion? One of my Boy Scout informants had worked as
a staff member in both a Boy Scout camp and a YMCA camp, and he was
289
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:03 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/usu. 39060010034923 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#cc-by-nc-nd-3. 0
? ? sure there were differences in style and values attributable to the explicit
religious orientation of a Y camp (see also Tillery 1992). The comparative
approach also must include cross-cultural perspectives. We have the British/
American comparison on boarding schools and residential treatment cen-
ters, but what of camps and hospitals?
Finally, I want to comment briefly on what I see as the implications
of study in this area for what is known as "applied folklore. " First, for the
sake of getting folklorists into these institutional settings, we ought to train
staff members to be folklorists. A folklore education for continuing students
with jobs in residential institutions will simultaneously yield an increasing
body of ethnographic descriptions of the folk cultures of these institutions
and, in the bargain, make these staff members better caretakers. I mean "bet-
ter" in the sense that they will have a new cognitive respect for the expres-
sive culture of their wards; and better, too, in the sense that the very act of
collecting the lore becomes a mode of communication between caretaker and
ward. Savin-Williams (1980a) gathered his information thanks to his role
as program director for two groups of counselors-in-training, and there is
no reason that we cannot have an army of folklore fieldworkers living and
working in residential institutions and bringing their studies back to the class-
room. I see Outward Bound programs and special camps (public and pri-
vate) for "troubled teens," for example, as two fieldwork settings desper-
ately in need of the folklorist's perspectives.
There is also something the folklorist has to offer the adult caretaker,
even if that caretaker does not wish to "join up" and become a participant-
observer. On one level, the folklorist can offer his or her services as a paid
consultant, to come into a residential institution, study the folk cultures of
both staff and inmates, and make recommendations to the administrators
of the institution. Folklorists are doing this already for businesses and not-
for-profit organizations, so I see no reason why we cannot offer our exper-
tise to the organizations that have as their wards millions of American chil-
dren.
There are seductions to beware of here, and I want to be realistic
about this.
Some folklorists will be ineffective because they will maintain too
romantic a notion that folkloristics can ameliorate the sometimes awful con-
ditions in these institutions. And some folklorists, no doubt, will be coopted
early and find themselves serving the manipulative, interventionist goals of
the bureaucratic managers. But I am counting on the good sense and good
sensibilities of the greater number of folklorists who apply their expertise
to these "practical" settings with a proper sense of what folkloristics can
and cannot do.
290 CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE IN RESIDENTIAL INSTITUTIONS
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:03 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/usu. 39060010034923 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#cc-by-nc-nd-3. 0
? ? I began this chapter by saying that American children sometimes feel
like prisoners in the institutions controlled by adults. I declared that I pre-
fer the interpretive to the normative approach to socialization, and every-
thing I wrote thereafter betrays (no doubt) that my sympathies lie more with
the vibrant, resisting folk culture of the residents and inmates than with the
adult staff. But the staff often feel like prisoners, too, and this may be the
final truth of this chapter-that the nature of modern civilization is such that
we all feel like prisoners. I am not sure if it is uniquely folkloristic to side
with the oppressed, any more than I am certain this is a uniquely American
trait, but I do know that a large part of the exhilaration I get from studying
the expressive folk cultures of children in residential institutions is to see how
resilient are human beings in controlled settings. No matter how deeply we
folklorists probe into the most awful and alienating human situations, we
usually find those humans able to make an artistic performance out of the
little left to them. Children are neither the innocents nor the enemy within.
They are just human beings, like us, a fact we sometimes forget.
291
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:03 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/usu. 39060010034923 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#cc-by-nc-nd-3. 0
? ?
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:03 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/usu. 39060010034923 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#cc-by-nc-nd-3. 0
? ? CONCLUSION
THE PAST IN THE PRESENT
THEORETICAL DIRECTIONS FOR CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Felicia R. McMahon and Brian Sutton-Smith
We believe that with this collection of articles the groundwork has been laid
for future studies of children's folklore. The articles themselves vary between
older or newer approaches to the discipline-in that respect they are fairly
representative of the field as it currently stands-and they also indicate the
areas in which more work needs to be done. In an attempt to advance the
field, we begin this final chapter by analyzing past scholarship before pre-
ceding with suggestions for future directions. Mechling, for example, is con-
fident that the "interpretive" trend will become the major force in children's
folklore; that we will have more studies like those of Beresin and Hughes
of specific children in specific places and in consequence a more multifari-
ous set of children's subcultures-and less children's folklore composed sim-
ply of collections or only of an historical kind. The authors in this
Sourcebook are split about evenly among traditional, ethnographic, perfor-
mance, and interpretive kinds of approach.
THE OLDER TRADITION
The field of folklore began with an interest in origins, with survivals, and
with history, and this interest will probably continue; many of the problems
of historical origins and historical change have not been solved. Iona and
Peter Opie, for example, present us with an interesting test case. They are
undoubtedly the world's most famous children's folklorists, and over the past
forty years they have turned out classic after classic on children's lore
(rhymes, poems, tales, sayings and games). Their latest book, The Singing
Game (1985), is a product of anecdotal collections from many informants
and historical sources using meticulous literary scholarship. In this work they
largely eschew theory and interpretation and provide instead a grand
colligation of items organized in an encyclopedic manner. Insofar as there
is a main theme, it is that human nature is constant and continuous and gives
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:03 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/usu. 39060010034923 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#cc-by-nc-nd-3. 0
? ? forth in different eras similar expressions in play, game, and song. They sup-
port this theme by offering sporadic evidence of ancient games or songs per-
sisting into modern times. In their present collection of 133 games, however,
of which eighty-two are singing games-the others being clapping, chant-
ing, or dramatic games-no more than half of those listed have persisted
beyond World War II, and only a handful of those that have persisted ex-
hibit much vigor in modern play. The exceptions appear to be Big ship sails
(a modern and reduced version of the ancient Thread the needle), Oranges
and lemons, A duke a riding, Rosey apple, Sally water, wallflowers, old
Roger, Jenny Jones, Romans and English, Nuts in May, the Mulberry bush
and Dusty bluebells.
Despite their interest in origins, what the Opies actually give us is a
picture of historical change as much as a picture of historical continuity. In
general, modern children, being younger players at these games than their
forebears, prefer games of simpler organization: circles with central persons,
chain games rather than couple games, or contest games and processional
games, which were once played so frequently by what we would now call
teenagers. Most striking in their work, and not commented on by the Opies,
is the remarkable upsurge in post-television years of games of buffoonery,
impersonation, dance routines, and clapping. These are by and large the sim-
plest unison games with all players acting in concert, singing either nonsense
or topical songs, and with players taking turns in the center. While there are
historical forerunners to many of these games, what most strikes our atten-
tion is their fadlike character and their ephemerality. Children's folklore
appears in many games to have taken on the character of modern mass-me-
dia culture, with its cycles of fashion and popularity. Dance routines, in par-
ticular, come and go as quickly as the topical songs that stimulate them.
There is, in addition, a more explicit vulgarity and sexuality in many of these
than was the case in the singing games of the prior century (Sutton-Smith
1987, 239-40).
But the most interesting picture of change in these fascinating pages
of The Singing Game is that which takes place from the lusty Middle Ages
to the bowdlerized late nineteenth century. These singing games were origi-
nally for couples with marital interests (at the advanced ages of twelve to
fifteen), who, through wild and bawdy actions, could try out their choices.
But in the 1800s, after centuries of church and civil suppression, they came
finally to be the games of unsophisticated girls who could make their choices
among other girls largely without the presence of boys at all. The games
became an enacted fantasy of marriage without the prospect that one might
in fact find one's real partner in the course of the play. But then the same
294 CONCLUSION: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:03 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/usu. 39060010034923 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#cc-by-nc-nd-3. 0
? ? kind of domestication occurred during the nineteenth century to nursery
rhymes, children's literature, and dangerous outdoor games. Children were
put into schools, and their recreation was increasingly organized and super-
vised to remove from it remnants of mediaeval excess. Although the Opies'
work on "survivals" is itself something of a theoretical survival in modern
folklore, the beauty of their work The Singing Game, with its songs and
games, reminds us that authentic description and systematic scholarship
within a field are often the greater gift. One can, for example, review Lady
A. B. Gomme's collections from the 1890s of the traditional games of the
British Isles, which are not in any way modern surveys, and still respond with
wonder at the unique accounts to be found therein.
It may well be as Susan Stewart has asserted in an insightful and pro-
vocative analysis that these written accounts of folkgames and children's
folklore in general are examples of what she terms "crimes of writing"
(1991a). Stewart convincingly argues that the recording of these folk mate-
rials helped to establish an academic orthodoxy about the way in which these
games should be perceived, and that that perception had very little to do with
the original conditions of their play, deceiving us about their folk original-
ity. The forces for the organization of children's play, including the venera-
tion of a few selected game and folk traditions, also had its source, how-
ever, in many other Enlightenment-derived pressures for the education of the
nineteenth-century child. We need to concede that these collected game
records (whatever their biases) are better than most other things collected
about the play of children in prior centuries. If this is indeed a crime of writ-
ing in the Foucaultian sense, it seems from our present distance to have been
better than no writing at all.
THE MODERN CONDITION
All of which is to argue that although we agree with Jay Mechling about
the current trend in children's folklore scholarship, the work of the Opies
and Gomme is an illustration both of an earlier viewpoint and of the neces-
sity of continuing scholarship on the nature of both origins and historical
change. Their work is also a commentary on the view that childhood as we
know it is disappearing. What we have just noted is the way in which much
of children's folklore has taken on the velocity of the fads and fashions of
the modern entertainment world. If modern mass entertainments are, as
Raymond Williams (1979) has opined, the spectator "culture" that goes with
modern industrial society, then children's imitation of these fads indicates
that their folklore is also shifting rather than disappearing. Given that mod-
ern work life is largely nonmanual and schooling is universal, we would also
295
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:03 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/usu. 39060010034923 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#cc-by-nc-nd-3. 0
? ? expect much of children's folklore now to be increasingly more verbal or
symbolic rather than physical. We suspect that the emphasis on rhymes,
riddles, humor, tales, and verbal tricks in the chapters by McDowell, Roemer,
Sullivan and Tucker, is not just an outcome of their own sociolinguistic train-
ing but a response also to the greater importance of these kinds of materi-
als in modern childhood. One can't help but note that when one compares
the Opies' Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959) with their Children's
Games in Street and Playground (1969) and their Singing Game (1985), the
earlier collections consist of more traditional material than the later, which
have less to say about origins and more to say about current practices. Simi-
larly, the American equivalent, One Potato, Two Potato by Mary and
Herbert Knapp (1976), is about two-thirds given over to verbal play. More
than one half of the more recent book American Children's Folklore by
Simon Bronner (1988) is about speech play. This contrasts with the earlier
books by Newell (1883) and Gomme (1894), in which there is relatively little
mention of verbal play.
So childhood is not disappearing; it has perhaps become more ver-
bal and harder to locate in concrete behavioral space. That is always sup-
posing that this change between the books of earlier days and the books of
today does in fact correspond to a real change in children's behavior. In A
History of Children's Play (Sutton-Smith 1981a) based on comparing the
reminiscences of the elderly with the play of the young, such change certainly
seems to have occurred. Perhaps current childhood does indeed occupy more
verbal crevices and less obvious physical space than used to be the case. Play-
grounds were initially events in the cultural taming of rural childhood and
urban vagabonds, as Mergen makes clear. The idea of "the playground"
persists, however, in part as a romantic fantasy among adult playground
advocates who talk about the child's rights to play, while confining it in their
own select forms of physical space. We have tried to move in a contrary and
less domesticating direction by talking about the playground as a festival
(Sutton-Smith 1990b). The reality is, however, that in some places play-
grounds have been abandoned because of their imagined or real dangers and
have been replaced by physical-education lessons. It is possible that playing
verbally in the cracks of so much powerful adult organization is often the
only alternative left for some children. Which is to say, the shift from physical
to verbal play may reflect not only the general cultural changes in the world
of adult work, from manual to symbolic, but also changes in the actual free-
dom that children have to carry on their older traditions of play.
In the meantime, today's more symbolically mobile children are some-
times more likely to be found in their own bedrooms or in front of a televi-
296 CONCLUSION: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:03 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/usu. 39060010034923 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#cc-by-nc-nd-3. 0
? ? sion set or at a home computer than in the streets or the playgrounds. But
they are also more directly exploitable by the marketplace, which has steadily
developed them as a consumer resource over the past two decades. Much
of the disquiet of modern parents has to do with this increasing and direct
availability of their children to the marketplace through television. Three
hundred years of the bourgeoisie's sloughing off the parochial folk controls
over children through the culture of traditional neighborhood games has been
called into question by this sudden susceptibility of modern children to com-
mercial infringement.
But children's sharing of this vicarious media world with their par-
ents doesn't mean that they are no longer children. Most parents deny that
they simply bow to what television suggests for their children (Sutton-Smith
1986), and those other special arrangements for children's domestication
(schools, books, toys, and recreation programs) continue apace. Whatever
may be happening to their parents in the occupational world, it is still the
fate of children to be put in their own separate zoos run by adult educators
and other supervisors of children. This fundamental segregation is not al-
tered because there is this new development of shared symbolic television
space. Nor is there much indication of any modification on the American
scene of the desire by most educated parents to shelter real children from
real violence, grossness, vulgarity, or sex, no matter what may be happen-
ing on the television screen or in dysfunctional families. In short, childhood
continues but we often have so little adequate descriptive research about it
that we cannot tell how it is different or how it is the same as in times past.
THE DISJUNCTION OF CHILD AND ADULT
The basic underlying condition of modern childhood seems to be its disjunc-
tion from adulthood. Modern enculturation is founded on this discontinu-
ity. In folklore terms this means that as long as the two groups, adult and
child, differ in power and life space, then the interaction between them will
lead to the kinds of tensions from which the lore of each group about the
other will usually arise. The more unique their separate needs and their op-
position, the greater the folklore and the development of group lore calcu-
lated to respond to them. On the one hand, there are the parents, the teach-
ers, and the psychological experts banding together for the preservation of
their own values about childhood; on the other, there are dyads, cliques, and
gangs of children developing their own business of life and often using tra-
ditional materials to do so.
Mechling asks whether there can be a theory that makes all the ma-
terial of this work hang together, that unites the irrational with the ratio-
297
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:03 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/usu. 39060010034923 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#cc-by-nc-nd-3. 0
? ? nal, the spirit of childlore with the socialization of adults. Perhaps to expect
the two to be brought together is a "rational" kind of view, "an enlighten-
ment view" that is simply not what children's folklore is about and presum-
ably not what folklore scholars should be about (Spariosu 1989). The very
danger of this sourcebook is that it provides more means for some adults
to supervise children more carefully in order to get rid of their folklore. What
Tatar aptly writes about adult revisions of fairytales for children stands for
their approach to children's play in general: There is "the idea that a litera-
ture targeted for them must stand in the service of pragmatic instrumental-
ity rather than foster an unproductive form of playful pleasure" (1992, xxv).
Bauman, the erstwhile director of the largest funded project on children's
folklore and education, expresses concern that researchers themselves con-
tinue to place too much emphasis on the didactic uses of children's folklore
and neglect in consequence the study of "the aggressive, obscene, scatologi-
cal, antiauthoritarian, and inversive elements. . , that any student of childen's
folklore knows well to be a central part of the expressive culture of child-
hood" (1982, 173). Here Bauman is referring to children's folklore that very
few folklorists have cared to publish, such as the article "High Kybo Floater:
Food and Feces in the Speech Play at a Boy Scout Camp" (Mechling 1984b).
Perhaps some of the adults reading this book will acknowledge the memo-
ries of childhood being evoked here that they have hitherto refused to ac-
knowledge; in consequence, they may make more provision for this rueful
joyfulness to take place in childhood. After all, a conclusion about play, by
all those who work in play therapy at least, is that a major meaning of play
in childhood is that it is a pretense of society and self of a vigorous and life-
restoring kind (Erikson 1950). Play's promise may lie in human optimism
and commitment to life, rather than those other incidental correlates of prob-
lem solving, creativity, and imagination that have taken on a vogue in re-
cent psychology and education.
THEORY FOR CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
Perhaps there is something we can do for Mechling's theoretical call with-
out falling into the usual rationalistic traps. If we begin by not accepting the
usual romantic disjunction of childhood and adulthood but instead apply
to children the same kind of theories we apply to adults in distinctive cul-
tural groups, we might make some progress. It is, for example, the promise
of children's folklore that it can bring a sense of the same cultural relativity
to our view of childhood that we generally apply to other groups. Thus, al-
though the "savages" and the "women" may have escaped from the unilinear
theory of cultural evolution (of which Zumwalt speaks), the children are still
298 CONCLUSION: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:03 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/usu. 39060010034923 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#cc-by-nc-nd-3. 0
? ? not free. By and large in official academic and educational quarters their life
is thought of as a series of steps and stages to higher forms of adult matu-
rity. Whereas just as cultural relativity implies that each human group fash-
ions its own forms of human adaptation and expression and that each has
its wonder and beauty (as well as disasters), so with childhood there is an
aesthetic for each age, which may be celebrated (or cursed) by adults, rather
than simply glossed as an inevitably inferior step on the way to the "won-
ders" of adults' civilization, reason, and morality.
Importantly, because children are members of the most politically
powerless group, their folklore is usually favored for purposes that are not
especially those of the children. It is seldom possible to be rationally in fa-
vor of children without interfering with much that they do that is not very
rational. For this reason, we see the study of children's folklore as a very
special territory in which groundbreaking research can still be accomplished,
that is, if we pay it the tribute of considering it in terms of various contem-
porary cultural theories that are taken very seriously on the adult level but
seldom applied to children. Thus we may argue that the whole field of
children's folklore can take new directions by incorporating the recent cul-
tural ideas about power as expressed among heteronomous groups of schol-
ars like James C. Scott, Roger M. Keesing, Joan N. Radner, and Susan S.
Lanser. Our first step is to recognize that their theories allow us to look be-
neath the superficially placid surface of children's play to understand how
important are the power-related aspects of children's folklore and its forma-
tion. It would not be false to argue that although there are multiple inter-
pretations of children's folklore in the foregoing pages, the dominant theme
throughout is that of the power the children exercise over each other, and
the power they seek in their relationship to adults, mythical or real. There
is also throughout these chapters a diffuse and seldom fully explicated rheto-
rics of progress at work.