The playtime’s the thing

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/19/letters-playtimes-the-thing

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Alex Clark concludes her paean to playtime by calling on “teacher” to “leave those kids alone” (“I learned in class, but playtime taught me a lot more”, Comment). She ascribes far too much power to the profession.

Social change – women going to work and fewer children going home for lunch – must have led to the reduction of what had been a 90-minute lunch break in the 60s. But, yes, teachers were indirect contributors to playtime’s protracted demise. They “withdrew goodwill” in the 1980s during their dispute with the Thatcher government. Supervising at break or lunchtime was not a contractual duty and enough teachers followed their unions’ advice to abstain from this extra work for it to become necessary to employ ancillary staff instead, an arrangement that became permanent once the dispute was over.

Supervision is low-status work – however important – and its cost is temptingly easy to reduce. One merely cuts “play” and lunchtime.

Government edicts, longstanding culture wars and the salami-slicing of public services have prevented play. Play, its concomitant sociability and imagination, as well as its academic theorisation, was pushed from the classroom. Lack of money has been driving it from the playground.Elspeth KnightsSt Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex

Thank you, Alex Clark, for your piece on the importance of play. As a former playworker and manager of play settings, I agree wholeheartedly. In free and undirected play, children take what they’ve been taught in classrooms and learn to implement it in the real world. It’s in this way that knowledge is fully assimilated. Pete StockwellLondon W1

Sacked for ‘uncivil’ tweeting

I share Kenan Malik’s squeamishness over employers policing employees’ speech as private citizens (“We thrive on provocation. But are we too quick to punish those who stray?”, Comment). However, he misrepresents the case of Steven Salaita. The US academic was not accused of antisemitism – he was sacked after posting “uncivil” tweets about Israel’s 2014 Gaza blitz, in which more than 2,100 Palestinian civilians were killed.

In fact, Salaita secured a settlement against the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, while the chancellor resigned over her shoddy handling of the affair. Nonetheless, Salaita was hounded out of academia. He now drives a school bus, yet continues to write with acuity, insight and wit.Juliana FarhaLondon N7

Golden oldies?

Careful now before rushing to record the memories of elderly relatives (“Families turn to oral historians to record a lifetime of memories”, News). Before she died aged 96, my mother often entertained us with her memories of events that she was convinced were true, and wouldn’t be gainsaid by anyone. Two of our favourites were that she had worked down the pit as a child working the ventilation “traps”; she also claimed to have taken the press photo of her parents on their golden wedding anniversary when in fact the family photos she took were all of people with their heads cut off, a consequence, I think, of her being quite small and a rubbish photographer. But as they say, why spoil a good story?Margaret EasonDarlington, County Durham

I reject this xenophobia

Your leader says that “the proportion of the public whose hostility to immigration is driven by opposition to ethnicities and religions other than their own has fallen dramatically” (“Farage’s deceit must be called out by the main parties”).

Even if this is the case, it appears that the general level of outright xenophobia has risen sharply in recent months. On Saturday, I attended a regional meeting of a UK professional body with a speaker of Spanish nationality, resident here for about 10 years. She mentioned that she had experienced for the first time colleagues questioning the validity of her professional judgment, even suggesting that her intellectual capacities were limited, on account of the fact she was not British. Polish and Russian colleagues around the table confirmed that this was also their experience and had recently become a normal part of life for a non-UK national.

As a British born-and-bred citizen of some 67 years, I feel something unpleasant is going on that I utterly reject.Dr John R WhittakerKeyingham, Hull

Young and old are not at war

Phillip Inman’s analysis of life for Britain’s pensioners drew heavily on the phoney assumption that there is a conflict between the generations (“We have favoured the old over the young for too long”, Economics). He omitted to mention that half of all older people don’t have enough money to pay income tax, that pensioner poverty is rising and that the UK state pension remains bottom of the OECD league table.

But probably more interesting is that a growing body of evidence shows that inequality inside generations is wider than that between generations. Furthermore, despite the claims that we are at war, families continue to help each other out both financially and practically, such as when grandparents provide unpaid childcare.

What Inman suggests is really a rolling back of the welfare state, supposedly to punish today’s “rich” pensioners, but in effect removing support for millions of both today’s and tomorrow’s poor pensioners in the process.Jan Shortt, general secretaryNational Pensioners ConventionLondon WC1

Phillip Inman castigates pensioners for taking delight in “Osborne’s pledge to raise the inheritance tax threshold for couples to £1m”. Does he believe that these obviously irredeemably selfish people plan to leave their money to themselves when they die?Professor Trevor Curnow Lancaster

Forever blowing bubbles

David Mitchell misses the joy he had with plastic straws now they are taboo (“Am I clutching at straws for wanting to have fun?” New Review). Fear not, David, far more fun was had with paper straws. We could blow bubbles in bottles of drink, use them as pea shooters (with bits of chewed-up straw), trim the ends to make duck whistles, fold them to make to make little springs and combine them into wonderful constructions, and of course use them to drink our free milk.Martin Cooper (68½)Bromley, Kent

High price of football

Of course the all-English football finals should be held in England (“As English fans get set to cross Europe, anger rises at football’s carbon bootprint”, News). More generally, organisers need to think about the environment. Sports events such as marathons should prioritise local applicants for places. The European parliament should stop moving between Brussels and Strasbourg. And none of us should drag our friends abroad for weddings and hen and stag nights.Richard Mountford Tonbridge, Kent

Call that a cryptic clue?

Let me get this straight: a brilliant young woman is an edgy, new-wave, crossword-setting phenomenon in the New Yorker on the basis of clues such as “Its percentage is listed on a bar of chocolate” (“Anna Shechtman, the new queen of crosswords”, Magazine)? Have we all gone (rhymes with “ducking dad”, 7,3)?Brian SmithBerlin