In an advanced country like Japan (the third best country in the world) where technology is embraced at an early age as infants grasp their mother tongue, children are permitted to play in the sand. I soliloquized on that thought…
I assumed (I may be wrong) “nkorobɔ”, (as we refer to playing with sand in the sand in the Ghanaian Akan language) was only an identity for poor, low-income parent’s offsprings. I still could be wrong though, but the “nkorobɔ” time had a special “uniform” which was typically dark, dirty and often shabby. Usually, that “uniform” was worn by dark unkept children (such as was me in those years) whose parents were out either hawking, fetching firewood on the farm or doing some menial jobs elsewhere. So when I saw, well dressed, fair “abrɔfo” children accompanied by their parents playing in the sand, my imaginative self exclaimed, “what a beautiful fairy tale!”
The life of the modern educated parent (bourgeoisie) is different from the old illiterate parent (proletariat). While the latter’s kids played with sand, the former bought for her children electronic devices and plastic toys. While the parent in the village still allowed sometime for “pilolo…pampana” etc, the parent in the city ‘understood civilization too well’ and so shielded his children from getting into the clay or mud and get dirty.
May I say that I also believed in that new theory of ‘civilization’ and also protected my children from falling back into the era of primitive sand play, only that by default ‘I was born into the sands’. Thus, my children naturally fall off the expected ‘civilised’ path of playing with artificial crafts and learning from the computer (to dream of becoming future Bill Gates) to jumping into the sands and getting dirty.
Nonetheless, on coming to Japan, a land of the educated, a land where poverty is not tasted, felt, seen or inhaled involuntarily, I noticed otherwise.
In a society where every surface of the earth is coated because the state can afford, yet special “sand ponds” are left for children to play with. Schools have fields of sand where, as part of the curriculum, pupils are given time to be creative using the sand. Students thereby practice construction by building from sand castles to every other thing that can be put together using the sand.
I reminisced my childhood days when I used to mould cooking utensils using red clay, and how I will jealously guard them as I display them in the sun to harden, lest someone tramples on them to destroy my moulded pots.
Yet in this age, modernisation has given those sand activities a different tag. Well, I’m not very sure if it was indeed modernisation that changed those. However, if that was truly the case, I wish to ask this, that, if modernisation should change a people, should it not first change the best-developed countries in the world? Of which Japan fell third this year after they were the second-best country after Switzerland in 2019?
In a country where modernisation is expected to be at its peak and “eradicate such primitive” activities as sand games, they are ironically upheld. I got too concerned and I began researching on why sand play is still the central theme in teaching in Japan other than cleaving to computer games as the bourgeoisies do in Africa.
The reasons I discovered from teachers and students was an eye-opener.
1. Sand play promotes physical development. Large muscle skills develop as children dig, pour, sift, scoop and clean up spills. Eye-hand coordination and small muscle control improve as children learn to manipulate sand accessories.
2. Sand play enhances social skills as children using sand can cook, construct roadways, dig tunnels, etc. They also learn important social skills like empathy and perspective-taking.
3. Mathematical concepts are developed using the sand play as children are provided with measuring spoons, cups and containers of various sizes and shapes.
Terms like more or less, few or many, full or empty are explained using the sand.
4. I listened on and observed how science topics as density and matter and objects as beaker, measuring jar, spatula, etc are explained using the “sand utensils”.
Through this explanation that seemed like a lecture, I remembered a conversation I had with one old man in Ghana who told me how children who grew up in typical villages knew everything, talked earlier (communicated wisdom) and were assertive with their opinions whereas those who grew up with TV and computer games in the cities, I was told were “oracles of cartoon language” and parrots of existent telenovelas.
As I always point out in my writings, I don’t assume to know anything more than anyone reading. So I will not say everything about the ‘primitive age plays’ was wholly good and should be dragooned on the current generation. Yet, if the few benefits we enjoyed from those sand plays and the emphasis of importance given above is true, yet all have been relegated in Ghana because of ‘modernisation and civilization’, then I may conclude that civilization indeed was a fabric with sleeves that was extended to Africans. Unfortunately, some wore it in its long-sleeved form without interrogation, but more developed countries as Japan ‘reasoned’ through and wore it as short sleeves, so even in their developed state, their children still play in the sand and learn through that.
(I am the GHANAIAN villager that came to Japan officially known as Afiba Anyanzua Boavo Twum)
#Benefits of Sand play
#Modernisation does not mean relegate all the good of the past