Plato

Richard Courtney says in Play, Drama, and Thought that "Plato considered that education must be based upon play and not compulsion..." Plato, he says, divided his educational system into two parts: 'musical' and 'gymnastic'.

Plato: "...the young of all creatures cannot be quiet in their bodies or in the voices, they are always wanting to move and cry out; some leaping and skipping, and overflowing with sportiveness and delight at something, others uttering all sorts of cries."(296)

Aristotle goes on: "Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns first by imitation." (14)

E.J.Burton and J.L. Moreno

E.J. Burton, in his Reality and 'Realization: An Approach to a Philosophy (Drama and Educational Fellowship, 1966) says: ...Drama is greater than any studies based upon it; and life is greater than drama which depends on, lives within, and seeks to learn from it, as an active and ever developing process.

(Drama) is..."the universal method of 'trying out' and planning the future enterprises, from the dance to be attended, the interview to be suffered, the lesson to be planned -- even though in the more sophisticated adult the 'trying out' is merely 'visualized' as a series of actions.

J.L. Moreno, in Psychodrama, I says: "The training of language through spontaneity techniques requires that phrases to be learned enter the mind of the pupil when he is in the process of acting, that is, in a spontaneous state. In consequence, when the pupil at a later time is again in a process of acting, for instance, in social situations, these phrases will recur simultaneously. Since the use of them began in the course of a spontaneous activity, he is able to use them again in the manner of spontaneous expression.

In The Theory of Play (Barnes, N.Y. ; revised edition, Ronald Press, N.Y., 1948) ElmerMitchel and Bernard Mason state: "...play is explained by the fact that the individual seeks self-expression...all that is necessary to explain play is the fact that (man) seeks to live, to use his abilities, to express his personality. The chief need of man is life, self-expression.

Theory

Starting with Augusto Boal's, Theatre of the Oppressed

Gary Carkin, Ph.D.