The Power of Make-Believe: Shaping Childhood and Beyond
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For a four-year-old,real is usually contrasted, not with what’s derivative, or with illusion, or non-existence, but withpretend ormake-believe. It’s a distinction that seems too obvious to be worth noticing for an adult – of course, a bed isn’t a boat, no matter how many pieces of string or scarves you drape around it. As Plato saw, though, it’s urgent for us to see how the distinction behaves in the presence of children. After all, children learn a lot by pretending, and they use make-believe to get a grip on what they experience. In turn, this sort of play is closely connected to the whole realm of stories we hear and watch, as opposed to the ones we act out ourselves. The philosopher Kendall Walton has even argued that we should understand our adult relationship to narrative artworks, such as novels and films, as a sophisticated version of childhood games of make-believe, so that the characters in the stories function as ‘props’.
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A huge amount of what children come to experience or notice in their first few years are things we introduce to them through pictures and stories – from objects and animals to things such as work, conflict, daydreaming, fear, safety and more. We use images and stories to prepare them for reality, and that preparation influences how they confront it. At least, so we imagine, so we hope, and so we worry. Plato is worried (and hopeful) too. Perhaps surprisingly, he groups stories with music and the other arts for the purposes of education, and thinks that we need to be very careful which ones we tell the future rulers of his ideal city in theRepublic:
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Don’t you understand that we first tell stories to children? These are false, on the whole, though they have some truth in them … You know, don’t you, that the beginning of any process is most important, especially for anything young and tender? It’s at that time that it is most malleable and takes on any pattern one wishes to impress on it. Plato thinks that the malleability in this case has a distinct source: the young can’t distinguish the allegorical or non-literal meaning of a story from its surface meaning. His solution – censorship – is notorious, and can sound radical, but in some degree or other almost everyone accepts his statement of the problem, and some version of his solution.
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Unless he’s prepared in the right way, a child won’t even recognise why something is good. But it’s important to see why Plato thinks we need these early stories that are ‘false on the whole, but contain some truth’. The general goal of all this early exposure to the right kind of stories, music and art isn’t any literal transmission of information, but rather that ‘something of those fine works will strike their eyes and ears like a breeze that brings health from a good place, leading them unwittingly, from childhood on, to resemblance, friendship, and harmony with the beauty of reason’. That is how anyone who has been properly educated in music and poetry will sense it acutely when something has been omitted from a thing and when it hasn’t been finely crafted.
