Free to Learn, by Peter Gray
Have you read this book? I’m only halfway through, but it’s really gotten to me. Maybe it is because my children are just now entering official school, but I have become quite preoccupied with the institutionalization of education. This book, by developmental psychologist Peter Gray, uncovers the complex problems of “imprisonment schooling,” where we expect children to forgo play in exchange for indoctrination. He takes the standpoint that children are naturally curious, playful, and social, and that they come into the world “burning to learn,” with energy and passion for mastering skills they will need as adults.
I know this sounds extreme, and it is. But our schools are failing all over the country, and instead of taking a close look at the entire institution and the way it is set up, we are going in the wrong direction: opting for more testing, longer school hours, longer school years, when in fact what our children may need more than anything is just time to be… children.
If you have 15 minutes and are interested, watch his TED talk below. It left me shouting “YES! YES! I agree! I see this!” and feeling an aching in my chest because, “yes, yes, I agree to this and it is so wrong that this is happening to our children…”
Let me know what you think. It’s common sense in so many ways, but where do we go from here? Such thought-provoking stuff.
I ADORE this video! Being a teacher and a parent, I am seeing how detrimental our education system is becoming! Not only are students burned out, but unmotivated and – surprise, surprise, just as the video said – DEPRESSED! I am depressed watching it all happen! I have changed my classroom in so many ways to combat what is going on (although high school is slightly different than elementary in terms of play needs). I don’t assign homework unless it is absolutely necessary and I try to include many class activities where students are working together to master a concept, rather than me doing all of the “teaching”. I really didn’t start to think about this change, other than the “when I was a kid” way of thinking, until I had my son. Not only did having a child change my perspective on teaching, but it also started a fire inside of me to try to make a change! My teachers union in NJ is now one of the leading schools to push the “REFUSE the TEST” and I do feel that we are making difference. Everything starts small and begins to grow and that is our hope for this movement! It is our right as parents to advocate for our child and that includes our child’s educational rights. Thank you so much Lauren, for posting this video and sharing your thoughts. I have included a few websites below for anyone who wants more info! The first is a close friend of mine and amazing writer who now blogs for NJEA (New Jersey Educators Association). I wish all parents luck in their journey in deciding what is right for you and your family!
https://teacherbiz.wordpress.com/
http://unitedoptout.com/
http://www.fairtest.org/get-involved/opting-out
Kathy, thank you! That is amazing and I had no idea you were involved in this! So inspiring.
On my way home from work about a year ago I started paying attention while I was passing the elementary school. Some children were being picked up from school as late as 6pm. Many parents don’t have the choice but to do it that way, however it is not what I want for my children even if that means I will cut my work hours and make less money. That is a commitment I am willing to make in order to give my child time to have unsupervised, unscheduled play. What I’m saying is we can start little, many families have no choice where they can send their kids to school but they can communicate with the school, get involved and demand changes. My son starts school next September and I will try my best to be a voice for him. I love how he says, better schools not longer school days or more school. Thank you for sharing and bringing up this extremely important subject.
I listened to the video over lunch, and I do agree with some of the things he said, but I was also interested in some of the things he didn’t say.
He talks a lot about the way kids used to play, or how schools used to be, but it seems to reference a very small slice of past America, specifically post-war suburbs.
Kids that grew up on large farms (like my father) in very rural areas did not have long hours of unstructured play with neighborhood friends. They usually worked before and after school, and their playmates were siblings or cousins (and families were often larger). This isn’t really a counter-argument, because there are probably similar benefits to children in either setup. Even my husband, born in the early 70’s, lived in a very rural Iowa town, and most of his play (structured and unstructured) revolved around the school yard. I know there are exceptions to this, but most school days still seem to be between 6-7 hours. If kids are in school for extra hours, it’s often in far less structured time, not unlike the speaker’s description of having a neighborhood park with a hired adult to minimally intervene in otherwise unstructured free play. I think the school yard can be the same thing, and I think I prefer that idea over the idea of children going home to empty houses in the afternoon.
Kids that live in urban neighborhoods continue to play outside and in neighborhood parks. But think how much our cities have changed over the past sixty years. When we moved into our city neighborhood almost fifteen years ago there were very few children there. People often blame schools for lots of things, including the flight of (some) families from city neighborhoods to suburban ones in search of better schools. But there are deeper issues at play here than just the condition of the schools, and I think a lot more of it has to do with how we’ve developed and sprawled across the land, creating a society really dependent upon the car or minivan, and our kids’ social interactions (even the unplanned ones) usually occur with others who are more or less exactly like us. When he describes the evening neighborhood play of children I can picture it – it looks like a tree lined neighborhood of modest houses and mostly white children. Exactly like the one I grew up in and rode my bike around freely in until the street lights came on as my signal to come home. I think our thoughts about children roaming neighborhoods in free play and social experimentation and risk taking change drastically when we picture a street more like the one I live on now, with our (non-white) neighbor boys playing outside with homemade sticks as swords in one hand and a basketball dribbling under the other one.
I cannot speak to the structural changes of the school day over the decades related to curriculum standards and testing as well as some can because we chose an independent elementary school that emphasized copious amounts of outdoor exploration and play, group learning, and did not issue grades or standardized tests. We’ve now entered into the world of public, magnet middle school, and it’s a different beast for sure regarding homework and testing, but there are still only six hours a day of instruction. I agree that we should always be advocates for the best quality with regards to our schools (and quality rarely equals more time or testing!), but that should also extend to out of school activities and minimally supervised downtime. It’s a very small percentage of the population that has the ability (or desire) to not work or work within the five or so hours left between transporting children to and fro and driving to work.
Sorry for rambling (I type and think quickly), but I wanted to thank you for your posts – I always enjoy reading them and thinking about them. Keep them up.
Wow, what a post. Thank you, Lauren, for the video and the thought-provoking stuff. The comments are amazing, and I loved reading them.
It is such a passionate subject, and so important. I feel this anxiety come on every time I wonder about the future of my son’s education. He is 27 months old, and it feels like kindergarten and elementary school are getting closer and closer. Kristin’s comment resonates all too loudly with me. We live in a large city, in a dense neighborhood. Actually, historically, the gay neighborhood – with few schools, few single-family homes and awesome night life. It’s also within a 15-min walk of my work downtown, and we love the energy, the art students, etc. I guess the point is that we are pretty far from “post-war suburbia”, and I think about unstructured play an awful lot.
We have lots of parks, and we are within a bike ride of more residential neighborhoods. But there, just as the video shows, i see the uniformed children play rule-filled “games” under careful tutelage of adults.
I love the idea of outdoor preschools and schools, but find them restrictive in their own unique ways: costs, hours, and demographics. I have friends who say things like “I’d rather foreclose on my house than take my kids out of the Waldorf school they are in”, and I see where they come from. I really want to see my kid run free in a forest as well. But even if I could swing having a kid (or two) in such school and still work expected postdoc hours, it makes me think about the modern means of socioeconomic segregation, where white (progressive?) parents are able to wring their hands about providing their spirited children with treed school grounds, and effectively shrink their circle of friends and exposure to anything only like themselves. Makes my head spin, you know?
Anyways, many thanks for the post. Love these.
Veronika, you have nailed a sentiment I’ve been chewing on. I spent 10 years teaching at a small, progressive school with a lovely wooded campus. I planned on sending our kids. I even earned full tuition remission for my years of service, but I am now taking a year off from my teaching post there and am beginning to really appreciate the connection with community that we’ll have if we send our kids to the (highly acclaimed) neighborhood school.
What gets my insides knotted up is that we’ll have to endure all the testing and test prep and loss of play time for test prep. The high praise that our little school district gets comes from the dramatic increase in test scores they’ve achieved through what has been coined their digital conversion (laptops for everyone in grades 3-12 and a cultural overhaul to go with them). What I really struggle with, too, is that while it is HUGE for the underserved in our community to have access to the hardware and skills of the laptop program, all kids take their MacBook Air home and that means less playing outside (I think, I have no data to back this up). The digital conversion has been incredibly important (and, you know, it’s kind of cool that Obama spoke at our middle school). But I think it will be as important to maintain intentional growth of parks and outside time because it is so hard to resist the pull of the Internet! (An interesting knock-on effect of the digital conversion is that we also have an incredible library with awesome librarians who work hard to keep up with the techies and keep reading a high priority!)
I do find that in our neighborhood which is old and trying to recover from being a one trick pony (cotton mill town) that there are more families moving back in and lots of them let their kids roam around and don’t worry so much about the college resume building. At the (wonderful, wooded) school where I spent so many years teaching, the college prep talk starts in the kindergarten Open Houses before families have even applied!
It’s hard to have your cake and eat it, too, is how I feel these days. I want my kids to grow their creativity and sensitivity and self control and independence; I want them to be of sound mind and body, but they also need to be a part of their community, which is not so like-minded as me. To go to an independent school is to be in a social bubble that starts nice and progressive but leads to a very competitive high school scene, but to burst from the bubble and experience the diversity and connection to our town means subjecting the kids to more homework and testing.
For many years I taught a book called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. It is very thought-provoking, touching on issues of sustainable resource use, but also on education and play and nature and mental health. The sequel, My Ishmael, is compelling, too. I recommend both! No concrete answers in them, but great call to action to save the world!
I am loving these comments! You are all so thoughtful and really have put into words part of the dilemma we faced last year when we had Milo enrolled in our neighborhood public school. There we experienced a lot of good — the diversity and community aspect of it; unfortunately, we experienced far more bad — physical violence, a lot of busywork and repeat worksheets coming home, very little outdoor time, frequent video-watching the school day (I have no idea why), and a lot of waiting around while disruptive behaviors were dealt with. The violence was too much for me, and I witnessed it on occasion, then started seeing our oldest test out those behaviors at home right after school. I hear that the particular class Milo was in was a fluke — that our neighborhood school is decent and we just had a bad experience, but it’s hard to go through that when it’s your kid and say “Yes! Let’s do that again!”
True we do miss out on diversity in private Montessori. There is some, but it is not necessarily representative of the population in St. Louis. We are still involved in our community and neighborhood, though. We take the boys to the playground directly after school so they can connect with a more diverse population in a positive way, but I know it is not enough. I’m not sure what the answer is.
I just found your blog through your post on The Washington Post and I am already loving what you have to say.
I just wanted to share that I took my two boys out of public school a year and a half ago to attend a new, small school run by a married couple. They have 23 students, and 20 of them are boys. I love it because they are VERY active, including lessons in jujitsu and a lot of time for recess. Of course they are also learning there but they are given time to play and be kids also, whereas SO much time was wasted at their previous school. Anyway, I just wanted to comment and say that I agree and that I feel blessed to have found a wonderful place for my children to learn AND play! 🙂
Glad to have found your blog!
Love this video and the discussion here, so much of what I have been thinking and feeling as we get closer to Kindergarten. I have a lot of conflicting thoughts, and most of them have been beautifully articulated here… wish I had a clearer feeling on the ‘right’ direction for us.