Freedom to Learn

The roles of play and curiosity as foundations for learning

by Peter Gray

Video Game Addiction: Does It Occur? If So, Why?

The concept of "video game addiction" has been rejected by the American Psychiatric Association, by many video game researchers, and by many psychotherapists who work with video gamers. I reject it too. Here's why; and here's how you might help someone you know who spends lots of time at video games and seems unhappy. Read More

The Many Benefits, for Kids, of Playing Video Games

Video games do not promote obesity, ill health, social isolation, or violence. They do promote friendships, cooperation, self-control, and brainpower. Read More

How Children Learn Bravery in an Age of Overprotection

I doubt if there has ever been any human culture, anywhere, at any time, that underestimates children’s abilities more than we North Americans do today. Our underestimation becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, because . . . Read More

Why Children Protest Going to School: More Evolutionary Mismatch

A Darwinian, evolutionary perspective helps us understand why children do not readily submit to schooling. Every bone in their body, every neuron, every muscle, resists coercion. Our hunter-gatherer past endowed children with educative drives that are rooted in freedom. Read More

Why Young Children Protest Bedtime: A Story of Evolutionary Mismatch

A Darwinian, evolutionary perspective helps us understand why young children put up such a fuss about bedtime. Every parent should realize that their child is not just testing their will. The child, for good reasons, is experiencing fear, maybe even terror. Read More

What Is Unschooling? Invitation to a Survey

A large and growing number of parents are taking their children out of school, not to school them at home but to allow them to learn in their own natural ways at home and in the larger community. What are they thinking? Read More

Is Real Educational Reform Possible? If So, How?

Our present compulsory school system is like the hulking dinosaurs of the late Mesozoic. Those people and groups who have walked away from the school system—the homeschoolers, unschoolers, Sudbury schoolers, and so on—are like the Mesozoic’s little mouse-like mammals. . . . My money is on the mice. Read More

What Einstein, Twain, and Forty Eight Other Creative People Had to Say About Schooling

• "It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry." - Einstein • "How I hated schools, and what a life of anxiety I lived there." -Churchill. • "The vanity of teaching doth oft tempt a man to forget that he is a blockhead." -Saville Read More

How Does School Wound? Kirsten Olson Has Counted Some Ways

In her book "Wounded by School," Kirsten Olson identifies seven ways by which school can produce lifelong wounds. What lasting emotional effects--positive or negative--has school had on you? How is school currently affecting your children or others whom you love? Read More

The Human Nature of Teaching III: When Is Teaching an Act of Aggression?

I've known kids who would rather get a beating than a B. The methods of coercion we use in schools today are at least as hurtful as the "barbaric" methods of the past. I argue here that any coercive teaching is an act of aggression--from the viewpoint of the teacher as well as the student. Read More

How Hunter-Gatherers Maintained Their Egalitarian Ways: Three Complementary Theories

If we truly believe in the values of equality and peace and want them to reign once again as the norm for human beings, then we need to (a) find ways to deflate the egos, rather than support the egos, of the despots, bullies, and braggarts among us; (b) make our ways of life more playful; and (c) raise our children in kindly, trusting ways. Read More

The Human Nature of Teaching II: What Can We Learn from Hunter-Gatherers?

Hunter-gatherers did not teach by coercion and generally did not attempt to direct their children's learning. Yet they did teach, in ways that preserved children's feelings of security, trust, trustworthiness, and personal autonomy. Here is how they did it. Read More

The Human Nature of Teaching I: Ways of Teaching That We Share With Other Animals

Teaching is natural in at least some other animals as well as in humans. Almost all such cases of teaching involve relatively simple ways by which the teacher helps the learner practice some skill or acquire some information that the learner is highly motivated to practice or acquire. Teaching, then, is altruistic; it serves the learner at some cost to the teacher.. Read More

What Do Chinese Americans Think of Amy Chua’s “Tiger Mother” Book? An Analysis of Amazon Reviews

In reviews of Amy Chua’s “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” on Amazon.com, Chinese Americans express much more dislike for the book than do other reviewers. They are more likely than are other reviewers to see Chua’s parenting methods as cruel, to see her values as misdirected, and to believe that she unfairly stereotypes Chinese mothers. Read More

Amy Chua Is a Circus Trainer, Not a Tiger Mother

Amy Chua may not have written her "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" as satire, but in fact it is satire. It shows the absurdity of our current, mainstream approach to education if we take it to its logical conclusion. Read More

How to Advise and Help Your Kids Without Driving Them (or Yourself) Crazy

We love our kids. We want the best for them. And so, we offer them advice and help that they didn't ask for and don't want, and they reject it or ignore it. In some instances our impulse to help leads us to become downright pests to our children. ... Here are seven suggestions for really helping kids, in ways that respect their individuality and need for autonomy. Read More

Unsolicited Advice: I Hate It, You Hate It, and so Do Your Kids

"Have a nice day," said the mom to her teenage daughter; to which the daughter replied, "Motherrrr, will you pulleeeeze stop telling me what to do!" I empathize with both parties in this old joke. . ... Why do we dislike unsolicited advice, especially when it comes from those we love? Read More

Fight Bullying with Babies

Here are four stories about the power of babies and young children to reduce the aggressiveness and increase the kindness of older children and adults. Read More

Cheating in Science, Part II: School is a Breeding Ground for Cheaters

One of the tragedies of our system of schooling is that it deflects students from discovering what they truly love and find worth doing for its own sake. Instead, it teaches them that life is a series of hoops that one must get through, by one means or another, and that success lies in others' judgments rather than in real, self-satisfying accomplishments. Read More

Cheating in Science, Part I: The Tragic Story of a Young Man’s Suicide

I begin with a true and tragic story. Many years ago I was a graduate student conducting research in one of the top biopsychology laboratories in the country. The lab chief was one of a handful of the world’s most prominent research psychologists at that time, and many in the lab believed he was headed for a Nobel Prize. ... Read More

Experiences of ADHD-Labeled Kids Who Switch from Conventional Schooling to Homeschooling or Unschooling

In response to my call for stories about ADHD-diagnosed kids who have been educated in non-traditional settings, I received 28 stories. My analysis of these stories suggests that (1) most ADHD-diagnosed kids do fine without drugs if they are not in a conventional school; (2) the ADHD characteristics don't vanish just because they aren't in school, but the characteristics are no longer as big a problem as they were before; and (3) ADHD-diagnosed kids seem to do especially well when they are allowed to take charge of their own education.

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

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

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? 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

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

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

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

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. Read More

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

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

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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About Freedom to Learn

Children come into the world with instinctive drives to educate themselves. These include the drives to play and explore. This blog is primarily about these drives and ways by which we could create learning environments that optimize rather than repress them.