THE STORY OF MONOPOLY, SlLLY PUTTY, BINGO, TWISTER, FRISSBEE, SCRABBLE, ETCETERA (15 page)

A more legitimate use of the educational tag occurs in the Sears Wonder of Growing series, which is graduated from crib plaques for newborns up to walk-in play centers for children three years old and more.

Individual descriptive booklets come with each Sears package, while a 127-page, hard-cover text guides the parent through the programed series. The guidebook begins by explaining the baby’s brain as a mass of cells that, with growth and learning, become linked into a complex network. “Scientists,” the booklet states, “believe that these connections develop best when the child is exposed to interesting experiences” -and such experiences, according to Sears, can best be stimulated by enjoyable toys such as the program offers.

A typical product in the Wonder of Growing plan is “series six,” a plastic activity set in the shape of a dog. Aimed for children between fifteen and eighteen months, the toy is called Superhound and comes with a small storybook outlining the adventures of one day in the life of the canine. The toy itself includes a squeezable squeaker nose, a tapered tail with four large rings that can only be set in place in sequence, and a lidded back where plastic triangles, cylinders, and rectangular prisms may be passed through the appropriate holes. In addition, Superhound is on wheels so he can be pressed into service as a pull toy.

Superhound is educational toymaking at its best. Colorful, durable, with the look of fun built into the design, it employs color and shape to attract the eye of the youngster. The educational value is considerable—shape and color recognition, hand and finger exercise—but it is properly sugar-coated.

Professional endorsements are of utmost importance to makers of educational toys, and the Sears package is no exception. The entire line was conceived and directed by a Tufts University professor of child study, Dr. Esther Edwards, who also wrote the book which accompanies the series.

Kenner Products also received professional aid for its excellent Playtentials series of “progressive toys.” This line is the result of extensive tests conducted by Dr. Burton L.

White, director of Harvard’s preschool project. “Playten-tials,” said White, “are designed specifically to give a baby a head start in fun and learning from about three weeks to eight months. The idea of the series of toys is to help the new infant develop the habit of being alert, confident, and inquisitive.”

Though the line includes playthings for slightly older children, the strength of the Playtentials series lies in a series of crib toys which extends the old Indian concept of the cradle gym to new levels of sophistication.

The series grew out of Dr. White’s dissatisfaction with traditional crib mobiles. He saw that they usually amused only grown-ups because, initially, the infant cannot perceive objects farther than six to eight inches away. Furthermore, many babies keep their heads in a side position, making it unlikely that they will see the mobiles.

“The classic rattle, too,” said Dr. White, “tends to be a traumatic, rather than pleasurable, experience. I could see in my studies that the infant does not know how to let go. Or, after the child does discover how to loosen his hold, the rattle drops and he has the frustrating experience of being unable to find it.”

White began to develop a crib toy series of mobiles and graspables to be positioned within the baby’s limited field of vision and reach. Because the child’s abilities change as he grows older and bigger, White also worked out a scheme to make the toys adjustable and interchangeable.

The resulting Playtentials line includes an adjustable stand with a graduated series of faces and forms, mirrors, balls, elephants, and chimes to attract the infant. As the child grows, other attachments are added: a colorful windmill which the baby pulls while on his back in the crib; a bouncy rabbit which he can kick with his feet; and a trapezelike teether and pull exerciser.

“When Playtentials are used as directed,” said White, “most infants respond with increased tactile and visual exploration. Although no long-term predictions can be made from present data, our current testing program and related research indicate that significant growth landmarks such as visual discovery of hands and mastery of their use are achieved sooner.”

These are the kinds of results that ought to come from any “educational” toy worth the title. Yet
any
good toy must and, in fact, does provide some sort of dividend which should be characterized as educational.

Can the goals of the education-minded consumer be met within the toy industry without necessarily enlisting experts or propagandizing on the didactic theme? Assuredly yes-provided the resultant product is truly enjoyable.

One such toy is Kenner’s Spirograph, a British import that has been honored as England’s “most educational toy of the year.” Spirograph is a drawing toy consisting of a device with a series of holes of various sizes. The child places a ballpoint pen into any hole and then moves the rack containing the holes and a plastic gear wheel around a fixed ring. The precise meshing of gear teeth produces intricate circular designs.

Spirograph was introduced into the United States in 1967 and has by now racked up several million dollars’ worth of sales. It was invented by a British electronics engineer, Denys Fisher, who got the inspiration for the toy while doing research on a new design for bomb detonators for NATO. The design involved epicyclic curves—circles which roll around the interior or exterior of other circles. One day, while listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Fisher suddenly thought of a way to use the epicyclic curve principle to create a toy which would enable anyone to become “an extraordinary creative artist.” It depended on a system of precisely meshed gears, and Fisher invested six thousand dollars in experiments to perfect the idea.

He put the refined toy into production two years later, and although he knew nothing of the toy business, contacted a few stores directly and sold them on his idea. It took very little time for the new product to catch on. Today, Kenner produces a variety of related products, including a magnetic model which enables the artist to use more than one pen at a time.

A less cordial initial reception was accorded another important educational toy: Renwal’s Visible Man. A model figure which shows the anatomical interior of the human body, Visible Man was the first of a line which would eventually include the Visible Woman, Visible Horse, Visible Dog, even a Visible V-8 Engine, and several others.

“The Visible Man evolved from the great interest in the young for science once Sputnik went up,” explained Irving Lubow, vice president of Renwal. “We had a professional designer, Marcel Jovine, making models for us. About the time of Sputnik, he ran out of assignments, so I suggested he ought to spend some time in the library thinking up possible products we could develop on scientific themes. It didn’t matter what—astronomy, anatomy, they all had possibilities.”

Jovine took Renwal up on the suggestion and began mulling over possible educational toy ideas. One day he went into the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he saw a famous life-size figure of a woman which revealed all her internal musculature and nerves. Jovine got the notion that a small transparent plastic man on the lines of the statue might answer Renwal’s problem.

Renwal agreed, and thought that the idea of “showing the insides of things” could be the basis of an entire line of products. The Visible Man was developed on a one-to-six scale, and tooling was checked and rechecked by a team of consulting physicians. Once the item was completed, the consultants prepared an accompanying booklet about the human body. The product cost fifty thousand dollars before even a single Visible Man went on the market.

The toy was introduced in August 1959 with a full-page ad in the
New York Times.
It was an immediate success, and orders outstripped Renwal’s ability to produce—a familiar story in toy manufacturing. The supply lag lasted three years.

Despite the initial clamor for Visible Man, several major national retail accounts refused to carry the product on the grounds that it was “too gory.”

“The skin,” said Lubow, “showed the arteries and veins and the internal organs, and pointed up the blood flow. One prominent five-and-ten-cent-store buyer grimaced when we put it on his desk. ‘Take it away!’ he said. ‘I don’t even want to look at it!’ and he wouldn’t order it until it had become such a success that he just couldn’t ignore it any longer.”

Renwal’s first sequel was the Visible Woman, complete with a Miracle of Birth accessory that showed the woman’s body during the seventh month of pregnancy. The company naturally anticipated resistance to that feature, so it made a point of getting the tacit approval of the archdiocese of Long Island. Also, the Miracle of Birth parts were packaged in a separate box so parents could withhold them from the child if they wished.

In spite of the efforts of consumer lobbyists and certain toymakers to promulgate dreary educational toys, children will continue to give preference to those playthings that embody genuinely fascinating, challenging activity. If there is a clearly defined educational dimension engineered into a toy, so much the better. But the parent must learn to recognize which toys are genuinely creative both in play value and in child improvement. The parent must not be intimidated by the harangues of consumer leaders nor accept blindly the pontifications of the educational-toy manufacturer. Each parent must learn to judge for himself.

In judging toys, it is important not to neglect the imaginative aspect of play. Wallace Hildick warns against a similar tendency in purchasing children’s literature in his brilliant study,
Children and Fiction
(World Publishing, 1970). “One good story,” he writes, “is worth hundreds of nonfictional books, no matter how tastefully illustrated or attractively laid out, because for every Spanish galleon or Chippendale commode or meadowlark’s egg a child will be required to recognize in life, there will be hundreds of Steerforths or Uriah Heeps or Huck Finns he will need to understand.”

Bill Van Gorp, publisher of
Toys
magazine, says it succinctly: “Toys foster fantasy life, and this is an important activity in growing up, one which educational-toy advocates seem to neglect. But it is often difficult for the parent to remember the need for fantasy values and how certain toys will appeal to a child’s imagination.”

Perhaps it is the grim strain of Puritanism in our heritage that prompts some Americans to look askance at anything not instantly and perceptibly utilitarian. But it would be a great mistake to allow such psychological pundits to sacrifice the greatest single value of the toy on the altar of education-alism.

That value is
fun,
a quality that knows no master loftier than itself. Fun is like art, as defined by Oscar Wilde: it should be ultimately, unapologetically useless.

Gamesmanship is infiltrating every aspect of modern living, both individual and communal.

Educators, gurus, and city planners have all found ways of using game structure to explore and reshape both the personal and the group character. Games have invaded classrooms, acting workshops, encounter circles, management pools, and political caucuses. Even the most unscientific layman has learned to monitor his behavior for signs of “ego games” with family and colleagues.

In this environment, manufactured games have flourished. Not only have makers of “adult games” enjoyed thriving business in the past few years, but manufacturers who generally cater to the young have been hungrily contemplating the older portion of the market.

While it would be premature to say that adult games are outselling other kinds, many suppliers are convinced that there will be great expansion in adult game sales in the next half decade.

It is easy to be misled by the term “adult game.” It does not necessarily mean a game is more complex, sophisticated, or challenging than those designed for children. In fact, a Parker Brothers spokesman believes that there has never been a game on the market so difficult that it could not be played—and mastered—by a bright, determined nine-year-old.

Often, when we speak of “adult games,” what we really have in mind is sedate packaging and a game department or store far removed from the usual “kiddie” outlets. When an adult purchases a parlor pastime, he is likely to be more concerned with its appearance. Game boxes that emphasize the title and type in booklike packaging; word games that eschew cover graphics; improvisatory products that promise to make the consumer more “socially aware”—these and other games seem to promise a subdued and mature form of relaxation that won’t embarrass its owner when his guests see it on the coffee table.

Adult games of this sort tend to be bought in gift and stationery stores, rather than in toy outlets. Yet this combination of “mature” locale and sophisticated packaging forces some shoppers to become second-class consumers when buying adult games. For instance, a youngster may be able to buy a Stratego or a Risk (both original and challenging battle games) for a fraction of what his father will pay in a bookshop for an expensive but not necessarily more interesting product. Buying a game is a lot like buying a book; you don’t really know if you’ll like it until you’ve bought it and taken it home. In the book field, at least, newspaper and magazine reviews help guide the shopper, but there is little comparable information available to the game purchaser. An unsuspecting shopper can shell out as much as eight dollars for one sturdily boxed “brain game” which is nothing more than Guggenheim—a parlor amusement that requires no equipment but a pencil and paper!

Since it is a mistake to equate adult games with sedate packaging and sophisticated-looking stores, is it even possible to use the term meaningfully? Indeed it is, but the criteria must be content, not appearance. Though games primarily slanted to the juvenile can hold fascination for older players, there are also plenty of products whose emphasis on skill and mental stimulation entitle them to be considered genuinely adult.