Freedom to Learn

The roles of play and curiosity as foundations for learning

by Peter Gray

August 19, 2010

The "ADHD Personality": Its Cognitive, Biological, and Evolutionary Foundations

The brains of people diagnosed with ADHD are no doubt different from those of other people, but that doesn't make ADHD a "disorder." ADHD (except in extreme cases) is only a disorder to the degree that we, as a society, fail to tolerate impulsiveness and fail to provide environmental conditions in which people with widely differing personality characteristics can make best use of their strengths and learn how to compensate for their weaknesses. Read More

July 20, 2010

I Want Your Stories of ADHD in Homeschoolers, Unschoolers, and Free Schoolers

Most ADHD diagnoses in children are initiated because of inattention or disruptive behavior in school. To date there has been no research at all on ADHD in children who do not attend a conventional school. If you have (or are) an ADHD-diagnosed school-aged child doing homeschooling, unschooling, free schooling, or some other form of unconventional schooling, I invite you to post or send me that story. I will analyze the stories qualitatively and quantitatively and present the results soon on this blog. Read More

July 7, 2010

ADHD and School: The Problem of Assessing Normalcy in an Abnormal Environment

One out of every eight school-aged boys in the United States has a diagnosis of ADHD. If just teachers' ratings were used for the diagnoses, that proportion would be one out of every four! How can that be? How can it be that an eighth (or a quarter) of all boys have this mental abnormality--an abnormality deemed so serious that it is treated with powerful drugs whose long-term effects on the human brain are not known? The answer to that question is not unlike the answer to this question: Why do so many monkeys in cages look so abnormal? Read More

June 8, 2010

Freedom from Bullying: How a School Can Be a Moral Community

Many years ago, as part of my early studies of the Sudbury Valley School, I sat in on a school meeting. The main agenda item had to do with a complaint made about a new student who had been coming to school wearing a leather jacket with a swastika painted on it. At most schools this kind of offence would be quickly and efficiently handled by the principal, who would call the student into his or her office and order the student to remove the jacket and never bring it back to school. But that's not how Sudbury Valley handles things. Sudbury Valley has no principal. It is run--entirely run--in democratic fashion by the School Meeting, which includes all students (age 4 on through high-school age) and staff members together. The debate I heard that day was one befitting the Supreme Court of the United States. Read More

May 12, 2010

School Bullying: A Tragic Cost of Forced Schooling and Autocratic School Governance

Let's say you are 15 years old, or 13, or 11, and for some reason--over which you have no control--you have been singled out by your schoolmates as an object for scorn and humiliation. Every day at school, for you, is another day in hell. No matter how you feel about school and how terribly you are treated there, the law requires you to be there. You see no escape. What do you do? What can we do, as a society, to prevent this from happening to you or your children? The only real solution I know involves a radical restructuring of the way schools operate. Read More

April 15, 2010

Kids Learn Math Easily When They Control Their Own Learning

Math. As a society we worship it, hate it, and fear it. In our schools we force kids to study it (or pretend to study it) for thousands of hours and then we wail about how little they learn. Here, now, are reports from "unschoolers" that tell a different story. Math is fun; math is easily and naturally learned as a tool when needed; and kids who want to go to a competitive college can learn SAT (or ACT) math in 30 hours or less, even if they have never previously done any formal math study. Read More

March 18, 2010

When Less is More: The Case for Teaching Less Math in Schools

Early in the twentieth century, L. P. Benezet, superintendent of schools in Manchester, New Hampshire, performed an outrageous experiment. He prohibited the teaching of arithmetic in the first five grades (grades 1-5) in some of the elementary schools in Manchester's poorest neighborhoods. Then, when they were in 6th grade, he compared the arithmetic performance of those children with that of children in the wealthier neighborhoods, who had been taught arithmetic all along. The results surprised everyone except Benezet. Read More

February 24, 2010

Children Teach Themselves to Read

The general assumption in our culture is that children must be taught to read, but the experiences of "unschooling" families and of people involved in the Sudbury school movement prove otherwise. Here, based on stories submitted by parents, are seven principles relevant to the question of how children teach themselves to read without formal instruction. Read More

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

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.

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