The People in the Playground
Iona and Peter Opie spent years recording what children actually say and do when adults are not organising them. This volume covers the school playground: the games, the rhymes, the codes, the truces and the insults, gathered from schools across Britain. Their argument was that children are not defective adults but people building a culture of their own, and often a richer one than adults imagine.
Recommended by 1 Person
Alison Gopnik
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.
Interview · August 2012
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