Volume 15, Number 2 · July 23, 1970
Street Actions
By V.S. Pritchett
Children's Games in Street and Playground
by Iona Opie, by Peter Opie
Oxford, 400 pp., $9.50
About children's games—'those games children find out for themselves when they meet' as Plato called them—the Opies know everything. Their learned books are to be read not only for curiosity and delight; they have a particular urgency for educationalists and for people who are trying to manage children in the city and suburb of today. The child's natural playground has been the street for centuries, but street life is visibly vanishing in our cities; and where it survives, especially in slummy neighborhoods, reformers are dedicated to clearing it away and turning it into the asphalt playground. The Opies give us warning that the blame for vandalism, rioting, and pilfering rests with the reformers who forget, as older children themselves quickly do, what the young child is like and what he needs and why he needs it:
Review, 1974 words
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