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A great deal of attention has recently been devoted to the concept of “Play,” namely, that children need free-form environments in which to experiment and build their knowledge organically. While many people would quickly agree that the most important lessons in their lives were learned outside the classroom, the idea of “Play” conjures a whole host of images that are somewhat misleading: children frolicking across sun-kissed playgrounds, a toddler slowly working out the rules of physics by playing with toys, or (for most of us) figuring out how to watch Power Rangers by playing with the remote.
These images are misleading because, unfortunately, the world is a scary, nasty place filled with people who will lie, cheat, steal and murder to get what they want–and a lot of our early childhood education is more from the school of Brutality than Whimsically Catching Butterflies.
Brutal Lesson 1: People Will Deceive You to Get What They Want
As much as it’s sometimes cast as a distasteful social aberration, lying is as old as life itself, and stubbornly persists in scientists’ models of social interaction. In a child’s education, one of the earliest lessons is that even your closest friends will try to trick and misdirect you to get what they want, and oftentimes, children are the worst perpetrators of elaborate lies–mostly because not everyone in their social circle has figured out how to reliably tell truth from fabrication.
But you’d be surprised just how early in our lives we are taught this brutal lesson. Try to think back to a time in your life where none of your peers lied to you, and you yourself didn’t try to lie to anyone. If you’re finding this particularly hard, it’s because experts believe that we learn to lie as early as six months old. This means you were probably lying before you learned to speak or walk. This indicates that, for some reason, evolution has ensured that our collective early childhood educations teach us to lie before we are able to handle most solid foods or in any way defend ourselves from danger. Though it’s also probable that one too many deceptive games of peek-a-boo have conditioned us all to be lying bastards from an early age.
Skills Learned: How to lie, how to tell if others are lying, an awareness that deception is commonplace, understanding that your parents do not disappear when not making eye contact and that your goldfish never “took a vacation.”
Brutal Lesson 2: Senseless Cruelty
Studies have shown that at an exceedingly young age, humans understand that there is a basic logic and order to the world. For example, infants shown videos of normal events and improbable events (such as objects passing through solid walls) will spend significantly more time puzzling over the implausible videos. We all have an inborn sense of how things should work, and are confused and distressed when they don’t. This is reinforced through our social interactions growing up, good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people, and nothing happens without a reason.
But then, of course, everyone has that story from their childhood where, whether they understood it or not, they learned that the world can be arbitrary and cruel. Usually this involved some innocent animal dying for no reason that is justifiable to our young, innocent, and well-ordered minds. Though to be fair, some people never really learn the heart of this lesson, and live their lives pretending it’s not true. But also, some people don’t really learn to lie effectively, and some people don’t seem to learn that everyone else can tell they’re full of shit.
Skills Learned: You should expect the expected, but realize there’s nothing stopping the tragically unexpected.
Brutal Lesson 3: You Are a Fragile, Mortal Being, Alive for Only A Short Period
For most adults, consciousness of our own mortality is an existential trauma that is fraught with “oh my god I only have a few short decades before I die alone unloved and unmourned, all evidence of my existence vanishing a brief span thereafter.” For children, being alive is simply a backdrop to catching disgusting reptiles and throwing them at girls. From an evolutionary standpoint this makes sense. Your genes only really need you to be afraid of mortal danger, if anything sitting around contemplating the feeble meaninglessness of your existence is counterproductive to having lots and lots of sex (or productive, depending upon your coping mechanism of choice).
Since we live in a developed nation, most of our parents won’t die until we’re well into our 30s or 40s. In fact, most of our grandparents won’t die until we’re in our 20s (if you’re lucky, you might even collect your first social security check before both your parents die). So unsurprisingly, this little bit of early childhood education is usually learned through our first pet dying. In a crushing realization that pretty much every single human being remembers, not just our world, but the entire framework through which we view it comes crashing down. Needless to say, they don’t delve into this much in kindergarten, and often parents will try to defer this brutal lesson by saying that Scruffles “Went to doggie heaven.”
Skills Learned: Your entire existence up to this point has consisted mostly of screwing around because you didn’t understand that you were working with a limited time frame. This will change.
Brutal Lesson 4: Most of the Things You Trusted, Lied to You
As a child, you’re necessarily forced to vest your trust in some authority figure, be it parental, religious, or educational or all of the above. After all, you’re helpless, hungry, and really need someone to buy a TV so you can watch cartoons. But at a certain point, you realize that these people and institutions that structured your outlook, morality, habits and basically everything about you, are made up of lying, fallible humans.
Unlike Brutal Lesson 1, usually this realization doesn’t come from someone explicitly lying to you. After all, our teachers tell us all sorts of historical fabrications and half truths, yet many of us still have a lot of respect and affection for our Kindergarten teacher (you were the best, Mrs. Roach). This is more often the result of someone in a position of respected authority doing something hypocritical, which leads to the shocking, but not altogether surprising, realization that adults are stupid and fallible just like you and everyone you know.
Skills Learned: Only trusting people that have earned your respect personally, or the respect of your peers. Also, perversely, that a position of power can insulate you from all sorts of bad behavior.
