Freedom to Learn with Peter Gray

Welcome to Raising Wildlings, a podcast about parenting, alternative education and stepping into the wilderness, however that looks, with your family.

So Peter was the first person we emailed and the first person to respond. So we think we should probably retire after this episode because we're not sure it's going to always be

But many, many years ago, actually, my son was rebelling in school, and his rebellion reached such a point that it was very clear that he was not going to be able to continue going to any kind of a traditional Thank you very much. Then the question became, well, what would we do? We weren't set up for homeschooling. Homeschooling was hardly a thing at that time anyway.

We looked at alternatives, and it turned out there was, about a couple miles from our home, a radically alternative school called the Sudbury Valley School, where children from age four on through 18 or 19, typical school age range, free to play and explore and follow their own interests and do whatever they wish as long as they don't violate the school rules, and the school rules are all made democratically.

And my son, who was nine years old at the time, thought, well, that is exactly what a school should be. And I was intrigued. I was certainly open to the idea, and his mother was too. But We had some questions about it, as most parents would. Clearly, he would be happier there than in the public school, but is this going to have a negative effect on his future?

For example, if he decided that he wanted to go into some kind of a career or some kind of a life that required going to college, would he be able to go to college after college? this kind of schooling where he's not taking any courses, he's not taking any tasks, he's not doing any of the things that we think of as school.

And then being a scientist, I wasn't satisfied just with a few select anecdotal stories, I thought, well, we need to have a systematic study of the graduates of this school. The school at that time was already old enough that it had close to 100 graduates, some of whom had done all of what would be K-12 schooling elsewhere there and never been to another school. And they were out there in the real world as young adults.

And so I thought, well, wouldn't it be great to have a study of these graduates? And I tried to interest, this was not my field. I tried to interest people in the Department of Education at Boston College where I was a professor and couldn't find anybody there. I tried, there was a whole group of people at Harvard who ostensibly were interested in democratic schools.

And I thought, wow, they should really be interested in this and doing such a study, but I couldn't interest them in doing the study. So I finally decided if If a study is going to be done, I guess I'm going to have to do it. And so with the help of a part-time staff member at the school, David Chanoff, I did this study of graduates, managed with his help to locate almost all of the graduates of the school and got almost all of them to respond. And what I found really turned my career around.

These graduates, so here are people who are doing, growing up, doing nothing that looks like school. It really doesn't look at all like school. You go into this place any time of day and you see almost nothing that looks like school. You will see people reading, but they're reading whatever they want to read. You will see people doing all kinds of interesting things indoors and outdoors. You see very lively people, but they're not doing what looks like school.

And we have this notion in our society that you just have to grow up doing school or somehow you're going to be lost in this world.

There were a disproportionate number, no surprise, a disproportionate number of musicians and artists of various types. I think that people, when they're really free to explore, a larger percentage gravitate to that than who are going to school. But nevertheless, there were people in every career.

There were scientists, there were social workers, there were people who had started businesses, there were people in human services, there were people in every... I could not find any realm of activity that we value as a society for which there were not at least some graduates of the school who were pursuing that realm. In my mind, this was a very interesting observation.

I couldn't understand why the whole world wasn't just fascinated by this question, but yet people would find every excuse to dismiss it. Like, oh, these are just special kids. There's something special about these kids. And so I tried to address that. Is there something special about these kids? Well, I suppose the one special thing is that they all in one way or another hated school. I

But then the siblings of the problem children who were not problem children also came to the school. And I couldn't find any particular, you know, it just seemed like no matter why people came to the school, they all seemed to do pretty well. This was the observation that turned my career around. And I continued to do the brain research for a while, but gradually faded that out in favor of doing more and more research on how children learn when they're in charge of their own education. So

So I define play as an activity that has these five characteristics, and I'll list the characteristics. The first characteristic is that it's freely chosen and self-directed. So right off you can see one of the great, or maybe more than one, of the reasons why play is so important for children's development. It's how children learn to choose what to do. It's how they learn to take initiative. Nobody's doing it for them. Nobody's setting it up for them.

Little league, adult directed sports is not play. We might call it play, but in my vocabulary, it's not play because it's not self-chosen and self-directed. Somebody else is setting it up for you.

You'd choose sides. You'd create the field. You'd have to create your own rules because you're not playing on a standard.

There's no such thing thing as a standard ball field you know you're playing on a vacant lot there's a busy street on one side of the lot there's windows over there you know you have to say anybody who bats it towards those windows automatic out and so on and so forth and you negotiate there's no umpire calling balls and strikes so you have to negotiate how you're going to manage that so what you are learning in that game is all kinds of skills that are way more important than baseball I mean,

you know, everybody is going to have to in life have to make use of the kinds of skills that you learn when you're creating your own baseball game, how to negotiate, how to compromise, how to create rules, how to solve your own problems. So that's the first characteristic of play. And I also want to note that because play is freely chosen, you're also free to quit. And it's the fact that children can quit that is also such a powerful learning experience. So think of that game of baseball.

For that game to go on, you've got to keep all the players who are at that field happy enough to stay at the game. Otherwise, they'll quit.

There's nobody cheering you on. There's none of that. Everybody's trying their hardest and everybody, you know, cheers wildly when their team makes us to score. But in the end, nobody really cares who won. Probably you've lost track of the track of the score. And even if you have kept track of the score by tomorrow, you don't remember of the score and it doesn't matter because tomorrow it's going to be a whole new teams, right? I mean, you know, it's a pseudo competitive.

That's the other thing that adults do. When adults get involved with children, they turn it into competition and competition becomes the motive more so than fun. So that's the first characteristic of play. The second characteristic of play is that it is intrinsically motivated. You're doing it just because you want to do it. not because you think you're getting something from it. You're not doing it for gold stars or praise from your parents or teachers. You're not doing it for grades.

You're not doing it to improve your resume. You're not doing it for any of these extrinsic motives. Now, there may be, and I argue there are positive consequences of it, but that's not consciously why the child is doing it. And so it's fascinating to me that natural selection created in children a drive to do something just for fun. And it turns out that engaging in that drive just for fun has all kinds of positive consequences, which I can summarize, including some that I've already described.

And I think that it's that aspect of it that makes adults often feel like play is a waste of time. Why would you be doing something for which there's no reward And we're so hooked on the idea that everything we do, we should be doing in order to get something, right? I mean, that's the way our economy works. We work for money and so on and so forth. That's the way our typical schools work in order to get grades and honors. We're doing everything for extrinsic rewards.

And so the idea that you're doing something just for fun, it almost sounds sinful, right?

I mean, you're not one of the things that I've found in my research, in my first study of the graduates of the Sudbury Valley School, the school my son went to, and subsequent studies of grown people who were self-directed in their education growing up, is that many of them, in fact, I've estimated based on the research that I've done, that about for half of such students, they are in careers that are direct extensions of things that they discovered in play, that they are found that they loved

to do when they were children playing. And they became, you could almost say, obsessed with these activities and engaged in lots and lots of play and became really good at them. And then as they began to get into their teenage years and began to think about how they wanted to make a living, they sort of said, well, how can I make a living doing what I really love to do?

And my research suggests that for about half of them, there's a very straight connection between what they discovered they love to do and, you just because they love to do it, not because as children, they were thinking, oh, how am I going to train for a career? But this was after the fact.

So there was one grown unschooler. So this is a kid, this is somebody who was homeschooled, but homeschooled by the method that's called unschooling, where there's no curriculum, no tests. It's like Sudbury Valley, but not at a school. And homeschooling is a little bit of a misnomer. It's not really just at home. You have this vision sometimes that... Homeschooling means that the children are cooped up at home and they're only learning from their parents.

But successful homeschooling, especially unschooling, where you're not giving a curriculum, really requires that the children be connected to the society in a variety of ways. And that means that they're growing up in families that are so connected. So here's just one example. Here's a kid who did nothing but YouTube stuff. I mean, this is what so many kids do, right? But he had lots of time to do YouTube stuff because he wasn't going to school. And he became really, really good at it.

So he was making these films. And at some point he learned, I think he was maybe 16 at the time, he learned that a major movie company was making a film in his city. And again, because he had free time, he wasn't going to school, he volunteered to help out. He said, I've had some experience and he volunteered to help out at the production end.

And producer found his help so valuable and found he knew so much and was so motivated and so loved the work that the producer invited him, and maybe this didn't occur until he was 18, invited him to go to Hollywood to work as an assistant. And he's on his way to his dream job of being a movie producer himself. I

So at the time I did the study of Grown Unschoolers, he was in his early 20s making a good living as an aerial nature photographer. So, you know, he combined and I looked at his website and just beautiful photographs. So he combined his interest in flying with his interest in nature with his interest in photography. So we live in a world where there are so So.

many different ways of making a living, that almost anything that you really love to do, if you're good enough at doing, and maybe it requires a little bit of luck also, you can find a way to make a living doing it.

So all play is structured and all play is structured by the players themselves. And so play is how children learn to structure their own activities. Play is how children learn learn to follow rules. Play is how children learn to inhibit their whims. So it seems contrary to the way most people think. Play is how children acquire self-discipline. And so if, think about it, so every instance of play that's really play, it's never random.

It's always, you're always doing something where you've got in mind what you're doing. And that means a structure. There's imagination within that structure, but the play is still bounded by rules. There are certain things you can't do. You would be out of bounds if you were to do that. The example I like to give to illustrate this is the kind of play that might, to many people, seem like the least structured play. And that would be, imagine a couple of boys play fighting.

They're swinging sticks at one another. They're chasing one another around. They're just acting wild, it looks like, absolutely wild. Sounds like my belief. Now, these rules don't generally have to be stated, but if either of the boys violates one of the rules, the other one will clearly state it. Hey, you know, that really hurt. And again, will invoke the freedom to quit. I'm out of here if you keep playing like that, right? So what looks like it's wild is actually an exercise in restraint.

So you're going, you're behaving, you're engaged in this extraordinarily vigorous, activity, but at the same time, you have to control yourself in ways that mean it's such that you're not actually hurting the other person. But I could go through any example, any kind of play and point out the structure that's involved.

The great developmental psychologist, the great Russian developmental psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, way back in the 1920s, his view was that the primary thing that children learn in play is how to control themselves, how to follow the rules. I

We want them to have these skills, but we don't actually want them to engage in the things that will allow them to develop

Adults can interfere with them, but adults can't teach them. We've got to get over the notion that all the important things that children learn are things that we adults can teach them. Nice. And we have to understand that the most important skills that children need to learn cannot be taught. They can only be learned by allowing children to engage as children naturally wish to do in free play and exploration.

In an imaginary world that is kind of a practice world for the real world. And because it's an imaginary world, you can set up whatever conditions you want. So you can set up conditions that that might exist in the real world at some point for you, but they don't exist in your real world right now.

So you can practice for those opportunities by imagining that you are a mommy, imagining that you're a firefighter, imagining that you are a superhero who's going out and rescuing people, and practicing what it would be like to be that kind of a person. And you are also engaging in what is really the highest order of human thinking, which is hypothetical thinking.

So even little children, when they're playing in their imaginative ways, are engaging in what philosophers call hypothetical deductive reasoning. As you may know, the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, who's so famous, used to argue that children are not capable of hypothetical deductive reasoning until they're about 11 or 12 over 13 years old and reached what he called the stage of formal operational reasoning. But he was wrong.

It's very clear that little children can engage in such reasoning when they're playing, and they do it all the time when they're playing. They don't do it in response to the kinds of questions that Piaget asked, which are kind of like the way a teacher would ask the questions to a student, but they do it in play. And in play, they're practicing the ability to use that that kind of reasoning. So imagine three, four and five-year-olds playing you know, an imaginary game.

So they're imagining that there's a troll under the bridge, right? They've made a bridge out of the chairs or the table is a bridge in the living room. And they're imagining that there's a troll under the bridge. And they say to it, oh, there's a troll under the bridge. And the other one says, well, I better not go under the bridge. Well, that's hypothetical deductive reasoning. A troll under the bridge, what's the logical conclusion from that? Better not go under the bridge.

So children are engaging in this highest order of thinking. This is uniquely human way of thinking. As far as we know, no other animal is capable of thinking about things that aren't actually present. Imagining that something is there and then imagining what the consequences of that would be. And again, I could go on. All forms of play involve, to some degree, imagination and all forms of play involve creativity. Every move is a creative move in any kind of play that you're playing.

Children are practicing the ability for a imagination and logical thinking that comes from imagination and they're also in all ways practicing being creative

A researcher named Teresa Amabala, who is famous for this research in the United States, and she would bring people into the study and you know, say, and ask them to do some creative thing. In some cases, they ask them to write a poem, in some cases to make a collage or to draw a picture. And then she would have these products evaluated for creativity by a panel of judges who would independently assess them for creativity.

Now, I'm not sure how, there are various ways of defining creativity, and it's sort of hard to define what makes something creative, but apparently people reliably recognize it because judges judging it independently are very consistent in their responses to what is creative. So this is how she assesses the creativity. And then in the experiments she does, she'll have various conditions.

So in one condition, the people doing this creative thing, the subjects in the experiment are just told, this is kind of a study of creativity. Don't attach your name to it. There are not going to be any consequences to this. Nobody's going to even know who produced what. is just going to go into a general pool. And so that's sort of what I might call the playful way of doing it. There's no chance of any reward from it. You're not getting any feedback. Nobody's judging you about it.

Nobody even knows you did it, right? So that's one condition. Another condition, other conditions go something like, so this is a contest, right? So here's your competitiveness. This is a contest. We're going to judge these and whoever produces the most creative poem or collage or whatever it is, wins the prize.

The end result is no matter what study she does, no matter whether it's with children or adults, the most creative products are done by those in the anonymous condition for which there's no competition going on. There's nothing encouraging them to try to do their best because it's going to be judged. It's the play condition. And to me, that's pretty obvious why that's true. It's because you're not stressed about it. And to be creative, you have to feel free to let your mind roam.

As soon as you begin to try to think about how it's being evaluated, that constricts your mind into a more narrow channel. And you're not able to think out of the box in really interesting ways. So that's the fourth characteristic. The fifth characteristic, just to be brief, is really kind of a consequence of the other characteristics. And it relates to something that I've just been describing.

And that is that the mental state of play is a state in which you are not highly stressed there may be a certain degree of stress because you're trying hard. You want to do your best. And then some kinds of play, you're deliberately stressing yourself to some degree. So risky play, a little girl climbing a tree as high as she can is deliberately putting herself into a little bit of a state of fear. But as soon as it becomes too much, she can come down.

The great thing about play is you're always free to quit. If you're playing, in some sense, what that little girl is doing is playing with her fear. How much How much fear can I tolerate? overly stressed. Your mind is very active. You can't be passive in play because, as I said, you have to be following the rules of play. You have to keep them in mind. You have to be paying attention to what you're doing in play. There's no such thing as being a passive player.

Your mind is always active in play. You're always creating something. You're always thinking in play. but you are not overly stressed. Now, it turns out that that state of mind that is highly active but not stressed is the state of mind that researchers have found is the ideal state for learning anything new and also for any kind of creative activity, as we've just been talking about. There's lots of research on that. Most of the research isn't talked about under the rubric of play.

It's talked about under, they use such terms as flow. So, for example, the state of is the mental state that I've just described where you're completely absorbed in something and you're not overly stressed about it. You're not thinking about yourself or how others will evaluate it. You're just thinking about the thing that you're doing.

And there's a lot of research showing that if you, like Teresa Amabile's research for creativity, but also research on learning new things, that that state of mind is the ideal state for learning new things.

And if you've got a child who, let's say, spends all day sleeping and all night playing video games, child is not being a member of the family. And, you know, I can understand that adults, the parents would be concerned about that. I think it's reasonable to set as a family, certain guidelines and parameters. Ideally, everybody's involved in that discussion. You come to some kind of an agreement and you say, okay, well, let's try this out.

I think the key is always to the degree possible, don't lay down the law, but rather have a discussion. If children are more reasonable than we think they are, and if there's a reason for what we think they should be doing, we should be able to explain that reason in a way that makes sense to them. And we should be able to present them with evidence and logic and not with just because I said so.

So because although different states within the United States have different rules about it, there's no state that in any real way regulates homeschooling. So that means that every family has the opportunity to register their child as homeschooled but then not give the child the curriculum. And then simply allow the child to follow their own interests.

As a result of the ready availability of homeschooling and the flexibility about it, there are a lot of homeschoolers in the United States, a growing number. There are something now like 4% of school-age children in the United States are being homeschooled. And a growing number of them are being homeschooled without a formal curriculum. That continues to grow.

And as the growth occurs, then people who are doing it, since there are many people, especially in city but even in small towns often, there are enough people doing it that they get to know one another and they form some kind of a learning center that could be like a Sudbury school. It doesn't have to be registered as a school if everybody's a homeschooler.

So there are more and more of these learning centers that are basically places where kids can get together and learn from one another and play and explore. And there can be adults. And if children want to learn something from adults, there are adults available. So that's Yeah. I think what people often don't realize is that real self-directed education requires that the children not be tested.

And the reason I say that is because as soon as you've got a test, and especially if that test is taken at all seriously, I mean, I suppose you could say if the children are tested, but nobody cares about the test results. If the child doesn't care, and the family doesn't care, and the state doesn't care, but you're just doing the tasks because you've got a rule that you have to do the tasks.

I suppose that it wouldn't be a problem, but even then it could be a problem because as soon as you have a task, then the family, the child themselves feel like, well, I've got to study for the test. And now since you're studying for the test, you're not really engaged in self-directed education anymore. You're engaged in trying to learn the stuff that the testers have decided you need to learn. If you're going to a regular school, you're supposed to be able to read by a certain age, right?

You're supposed to be able to read at age six or seven. But one of the things that we've discovered in self-directed education is many children learn to read by that age. Maybe the majority of children do, but because they're learning on their own and because the whole idea of self-directed education is if you learn something on your own, you will love it in a longer way. It'll be more meaningful to you. You're not likely to burn out about it.

Therefore, If you pressure the child to learn to read at age six so that they can pass the reading test for that age, you have really violated a basic assumption of self-directed education. What we find, just to take reading as an example, is that some children don't learn to read until they're eight, nine, 10, even 14. Now, some people might look at that as an aghast. I mean, if you were in regular school and couldn't read by age 14, you'd be in serious trouble.

But what we find with self-directed education is many children just don't see a need to read. They're learning all kinds of interesting things. And then at some point, you can't grow up in a literate society without recognizing at some point that reading is valuable to do what you want to do. And so for a few children, that becomes rather late. Very few is it as late as 14, but for some it is. It's not uncommon for to be as late as eight or nine.

So if you do a test of kids in self-directed education and you report the results, oh my goodness, the reading scores, the average reading score was so low. All that means is that in the people that you're testing, many of them haven't developed an interest in reading yet. So they haven't learned to read. I've done some somewhat informal research on reading. And what I've found from that research is that children can learn to read at any age.

There's no critical learning, Even adults can learn to read at any age who've never learned to read. There's no critical age for learning it. There's no evidence that you can learn it better or faster when you're young than when you're older. If anything, you can probably learn it faster when you're older than when you're younger.

Many families who engage in self-directed education report that they had one child who learned to read really early, maybe at age three or four or five, and another who who didn't learn to read until 10. And now they're both teenagers, and you wouldn't know which one was the early reader. They're both into reading. I've also observed is that most people in self-directed education, as they become older, do a lot of reading. They love to read. They read a lot. This is part of how they self-direct.

This is how they learn. And because they've never been forced to read, reading is not a negative thing to them. It's a completely positive thing to them. They don't have negative connotations about reading. And the same is true for other realms. Because they've never been forced to do mathematics that they didn't want to do, they're not afraid of mathematics. Because whatever math they learn, they learn because it's useful to them or because it's fun to them.

They have very positive feelings about mathematics. Whereas the great majority of school people in our society, there's actually evidence on this, are math There's the primary thing that people learn in math classes is I hate math. So that's partly because of the way it's taught, but partly because the math that's being taught is irrelevant to life. It's being taught in a way that's irrelevant to life. And because it's being taught to people who aren't eager to learn it.

The kind of math that self-directed learners learn is math that's very related to their activities.

And I was really reminded at how insightful Holt was and how Holt was somebody who didn't have his own children. And maybe because he didn't have his own children, he took a lot of interest in other people's children and children in the classes he taught, but also children of relatives of his. And he was very respectful to children. And because he was respectful to children, he could engage in conversations with them and learn a lot about their ways of thinking and how they learned.

And that really led to insights that go way beyond the insights that I think you can find from people who are more systematic researchers. I mean, this was kind of observational research. In terms of fiction, I have to say... Again, in terms of understanding children, nobody beats Mark Twain. So I would put Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn as the best book about children ever. So again, because he respected children and because Huck Finn is such a self-directed person.

So let me leave it at that as my answer

Your job is just to try to understand this person. Welcome this person into your home. Try to understand who this person is. in whatever ways you can, help the person be who they want to be. Help the person be who they are. Help the person find who they are. I think that's, no matter how much parents believe that they're responsible for who their child becomes, they have very, very little control over that.

The best thing you can do is to be a model of a good adult so your child has an example of a moral person. You know, I think that's If somebody had said, work on shaping yourself into the best person you can be, rather than trying to shape your child into the best person your child can be. You have a lot more control over yourself than over your child.

All of these things are, a lot of these things that I do are kind of repetitive and conducive to meditation while at the same time good exercise and I find that they free my mind from whatever my mind has been concerned about, and that also oftentimes, because my mind is free, whatever was the problem that was bothering me, first of all, seems less important, but secondly, oftentimes the solution is Mm-hmm. Yeah. You know, some people do this with yoga or with meditation or so on.

For me, I do it with rhythmic, physical, outdoor activity that is mind-free. Well, I think that