Freedom to Learn

The roles of play and curiosity as foundations for learning

Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology at Boston College, is a specialist in developmental and evolutionary psychology and author of an introductory textbook, Psychology. See full bio

Freedom to Learn

January 26, 2010

The Dramatic Rise of Anxiety and Depression in Children and Adolescents: Is It Connected to the Decline in Play and Rise in Schooling?

Rates of depression and anxiety among American children and adolescents have been increasing steadily for the past fifty to seventy years. Today five to eight times as many young people meet the criteria for diagnosis of major depression and/or an anxiety disorder as was true half a century ago or more. This holds even when the diagnostic criteria are constant. Some attribute this rise in psychopathology to the culture's increased materialism and orientation toward extrinsic goals. To that idea I add a further hypothesis. Read More

January 6, 2010

I Want Your Stories of Self-Directed Learning

As you know if you have been following it for awhile, this blog is primarily about self-education, especially in children but also in adults. It's about learning that occurs through play, self-directed exploration, and self-initiated focused effort. The comments and emails I have received over the past few months suggest that many of you have stories to tell that are quite relevant to these themes. I would love to hear and perhaps share your stories, which can be about your children, others you know, or you. Your stories may be a great source of inspiration for other readers. Read More

December 16, 2009

The Morally Questionable Lessons of Formal Sports II: Moral Disengagement in the Drive to Win

You are a big-league baseball pitcher. The opposing pitcher has been throwing hard inside fastballs and has hit one of the batters on your team--maybe deliberately, maybe not. Should you retaliate by hitting their best batter with a high inside fastball? To do so is to deliberately risk injuring a fellow human being. Read More

December 9, 2009

The Morally Questionable Lessons of Formal Sports I: A New Look at the Classic Robbers Cave Experiment

In his famous Robbers Cave experiment, Muzafer Sherif invited two groups of boys at a summer camp to engage in a sports tournament for valued prizes. As he predicted, the tournament led to serious animosity between the two groups and ultimately to a condition resembling inter-tribal warfare. How did this happen? How can games, which should be fun, set the conditons for hostility? Read More

November 11, 2009

Some Lessons Taught by Informal Sports, Not Taught by Formal Sports

Imagine an old-fashioned sandlot game of baseball. A bunch of kids of various ages show up at the vacant lot. They've come on foot or by bicycle. Someone brought a bat and ball (which may or may not be an actual baseball), and several came with fielders' gloves. They decide to play a game. ... The lessons intrinsic to this kind of game are the lessons intrinsic to real life: (1) There is no real difference between your team and the other team. (2) To keep the game going, you have to keep everyone happy, including those on the other team. (3) You and the other players have to make the rules yourselves, and you have to change them as conditions change. (4) Conflicts are settled by argument, negotiation and compromise, not by appeal to a higher authority. (5) Playing well and having fun really ARE more important than winning. Read More

November 4, 2009

The Biological Distinction Between Play and Contest, and Their Merging in Modern Games

In nonhuman animals, play and contests are sharply distinguished. Play is cooperative and egalitarian, and contestests are antagonisitic and aimed at establishing dominance. Hunter-gatherer humans accentuated play and avoided contests in order to maintain the high degree of cooperation and sharing that was essential to their way of life. In our society, with our competitive games, we often confound play and contest. What might be the consequeces of this for children's development? Read More

October 27, 2009

Pushing Competition and Damaging Health: Making Play Offensive

If American football were a food additive or a drug, it would be banned by the FDA. Or, if financial interests prevented its banning, its package would at least carry a surgeon general's warning: Football causes brain damage. The evidence that football causes brain damage is now indisputable. But the deleterious effects of our strong focus on winning go beyond football and brain damage. The compulsioin to win, in general, may be bad for our health. Read More

October 7, 2009

Empowering Neighborhoods and Restoring Play: A Modest Proposal

Because neighbors don't know one another as they once did, parents' fears of "strangers" in the neighborhood has helped to cause a sharp decline in children's free outdoor neighborhood play. Here is a proposal for bringing neighbors together and creating safe, neighborhood play-and-learning centers that everyone can enjoy. We may actually do this, as a pilot project, in a neighborhood already selected. Please read on, and supply your ideas for improving the project. Read More

September 30, 2009

How Developmental Psychology’s Marriage to the School System Distorts Our Understanding of Children

Have you ever seen the Handbook of Child Psychology? If not, I urge you to look at it the next time you're near a university library. Handbook is a misnomer for this work; you'd need both arms to carry it all, and if you have a weak back you might want to lift it only a part at a time. The rest of its title--of Child Psychology--is also, in my opinion, a misnomer. Amazingly, this 5000 page work, billed as the authoritative summary of all of child psychology, has almost nothing to say about children's playfulness and curiosity. How can that be? Here's my theory. . . . It's a theory not just about the Handbook, but about the constraints that researchers into child development have placed upon themselves. Read More

September 16, 2009

Our Social Obligation Toward Children’s Education: Opportunities, Not Coercion

Children educate themselves. Children are biologically built for self-education. Their instincts to explore; to observe; to eavesdrop on the conversations of their elders; to ask countless questions; and to play with the artifacts, ideas, and skills of the culture all serve the purpose of education. In this post I suggest a route through which we, as a society, could enable all people to educate themselves freely and well, as they wish, without coercion. Read More

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Even those of us not in explicitly creative fields must come up with new ideas and insights in order to move ahead. How can we shake up our thinking patterns?

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