What is work--work not as mere external performance, but as
attitude of mind? It signifies that the person is not content
longer to accept and to act upon the meanings that things
suggest, but demands congruity of meaning with the things
themselves. In the natural course of growth, children come to
find irresponsible make-believe plays inadequate. A fiction
is too easy a way out to afford content. There is not enough
stimulus to call forth satisfactory mental response. When
this point is reached, the ideas that things suggest must be
applied to the things with some regard to fitness. A small cart,
resembling a “real” cart, with “real” wheels, tongue and body,
meets the mental demand better than merely making believe that
anything which comes to hand is a cart. Occasionally to take
part in setting a “real” table with “real” dishes brings more
reward than forever to make believe a flat stone is a table and
that leaves are dishes. The interest may still center in the
meanings, the things may be of importance only as amplifying a
certain meaning. So far the attitude is one of play. But the
meaning is now of such a character that it must find appropriate
embodiment in actual things.
The dictionary does not permit us to call such activities work.
Nevertheless, they represent a genuine passage of play into
work. For work (as a mental attitude, not as mere external
performance) means interest in the adequate embodiment of a
meaning (a suggestion, purpose, aim) in objective form through
the use of appropriate materials and appliances. Such an
attitude takes advantage of the meanings aroused and built up
in free play, but controls their development by seeing to it
that they are applied to things in ways consistent with the
observable structure of the things themselves.
The point of this distinction between play and work may be
cleared up by comparing it with a more usual way of stating the
difference. In play activity, it is said, the interest is in
the activity for its own sake; in work, it is in the product
or result in which the activity terminates. Hence the former
is purely free, while the latter is tied down by the end to be
achieved.--JOHN DEWEY, “How We Think.”
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