I do now agree fully with this statement. If we were to provide absolutely no guidelines for the education of children, we would surely run into new difficulties concerning the final product that our children turn out to be. I do agree on the fact that most educational organizations have lost their direction, meaning they no longer manage education of children effectively. But I think that it has a lot to do with a massive demand for education that can no longer be supplied by society in a satisfactory manner. I do think it is time to re-think the way we educate children, but most of all, it is my oppinion that most societies should beging regulating birth rates to alleviate the demand for education, jobs, and all other resources that are necessary for a human being to pursue happiness in life.

The hardest part of being a parent for me comes in the form of other people's assessments. Let's begin with the assessment that I was a gifted student throughout junior high and high school with a decent I.Q., talents seemingly far surpassing my peers, and a precosity that engendered me to many of my teachers and others who knew me. I entered contests in art, music, drama, and literary works and excelled in all arens. However, I later went on to drop out of college, had two wonderful children, and went on to self-educate through continual information processing and life experiences in general. The second assessment appears to be summed up best by an older friend of my mother who called recently and mentioned to me, "I can't help but think all those brains...gone to waste." Let me just say that I feel more intrigued with learning as a working non-college student who, admittedly, feels a need to prove to the world that "all those brains" are NOT gone to waste. Fighting that stigma, actually I am more learned, better read, far more intellectual, and well-rounded than I was as a student coasting through the system.

The third assessment happens to be, what's next? I see that my two children have come under the same scrutiny that I underwent. People who knew me in my girl wonder years frequently ask if they're smart like I was, etc. Well, call it genes or the free environment I like to keep going around my three and four year old, but they both happen to be very smart, talented, and precocious--for different reasons than I ever was. One of the things I learned the hard way was that the established system is grossly inadequate for preparation of real world applications of the things we learn in "school." How I define the intellectual capacity of my children (and how I wish other people, including our school system would see it) is not by the fact that they only just turned three and four and can recite the entire alphabet, count to ten (count objects as well as recite the numbers), spell their names, pretty damn decent at writing their names too, and use vocabulary like "weird," "inappropriate," "ruined," and "humongous." Instead, the deciding factor for me has been in watching my four year old put together complex race track systems using just the picture on the box, listening to them pluck nonsensical tunes on their acoustic guitars, watching my daughter select her own very trendy outfits to wear, watching them play make believe Jedi Knights or fly kites or talk about Jimi Hendrix as if they knew him personally. Of course, I'm their mom and every little thing they do seems phenomenal to me. But, there's a great sense of wonder at the fact that these are faucets--real, interpersonal, and important faucets--of child development and important efficient learning of verbal, spacial, and mathematical skills that our current powers that be will miss out on if they expect my children to parrot out the "right" answer instead of exploring all the information the world sets before them.

I wonder whose failing when all our assessments are working out to be ineffective at finding the best and brightest and are only good at spitting out caricatures of "right-ness".

"Don't let school get in the way of your education," has been a sadly truth-filled motto throughout my formative years. Not only do children, as stated by Dr. Grey, not need formal education, but can we even imagine how much damage has been done or potential lost because of our glorified day-care system? I know it hurt me, personally when I wanted to study ahead and my teachers scolded me.

Thank you again, Peter Grey, for being the voice of reason in this arena. However, this being reality, it would seem prudent for parents to admit that school IS day care and that the children would not have anywhere safe to go (esp for less well off families) otherwise.

All that said, at least we need to stop the day care from getting in the way, let alone actually facilitate the education of our future generations.

It also needs to be added that modern "education" is less for the purpose of enlightened education, but more to condition young children to tolerate their future adult life of routine office cycles. Think of the pioneering spirit and energetic spunk of our young; then try to imagine that fitting into the office politics of the adult world...

So maybe we should change the world. It's already starting to happen if we look at the latest article on this subject from PT. Talks about how emotions are permeating our formerly sterile work environments. Maybe what our economy really needs is a shot full of free thinkers instead of yes men and sheep.

But if schools are most functional as daycares, lets not be so hasty as to call them learning centers. While a strict routine of staying with the flock might be easy, it's certainly not the panaramic view of life outside of the office--in the real world where there isn't a end of workday shut off time. Sure, they learn a few subpar social cues like bullying and self-denigration, and some great social cues like how to be a team player and listening to authority figures. But what more could they learn if we take off our own blinders so we can let them see?

E. Muirragui's post does hint at a factor that is probably quite relevant to the kind of free learning that occurs in all three of the situations Peter Gray mentions. That factor is the size of the learning community.

The pre-schooler, the child in a hunter-gatherer community, and the child attending a sudbury-type school "learn" and "practice life" in smaller groups and "learning communities" with higher adult to student ratios relative to what is typically the case in the public school system.

Much of the focus on structure and control found in public schools serves to help a relatively small number of adults with limited resources accept an unreasonable level of responsibility for what is learned and then objectively measured on tests taken by a relatively large number of youth.

Of course, the mere availability of smaller learning communities ( or as Muirragui suggests, a smaller population of people competing for educational resources) would be sufficient to cause a major shift in how children are educated. There are plenty of small private schools that do not allow students to choose the how, what, when, where or why to learn.

However, I am concerned that without a move towards smaller and more independent learning communities, the public school system will remain more worried about and committed to crowd control, conformity, and compliance, than to providing safe, stimulating and nurturing environments in which students can go about the playful business of learning how to live life and contribute meaningfully to society.

The 3rd line in the 4th paragraph of my post should have read:

would NOT be sufficient to cause a major shift -

My apologies.- C

(I tried to post this as a reply to Scott, but couldn't for some reason...I am trying again here...)

Scott might have read my last post without the correction, or perhaps read more into my comments on size than I intended. I want to emphasize that I do NOT think that smaller learning communities is the whole answer to education reform, nor would they be sufficient for increasing freedom or responsibility in learning. However, I think that it might be very difficult to give up the crowd control mentality and implement a Sudbury-like educational environment in a school with thousands of students.

My own daughter attends the Circle School, a Sudbury model school in Harrisburg, PA. There are between 70 and 80 students at the school, and it works well. The school is well established (nearly 25 years); the learning community began very small, and grew larger and worked out many kinks over the years. I believe it will be able to continue to grow and expand much as the Sudbury Valley School has grown. But does anyone really know how big such a school can get before it would need to split into some sort of subunits, “districts” or some other organization of smaller units in order for it to function at peak effectiveness? It is one thing to grow to a couple of hundred students as a program becomes increasingly well established, and another to take school with 200 to 1000 or more students and to implement the concepts of Freedom and Responsibility from scratch.

I would like to believe that if the public education system could incorporate the principles of Sudbury style education, that it could do so within the current physical structures associated with the system, but I would need a lot of additional convincing. I think it would be very difficult to reorganize the public education system to reflect such a drastically different model, without also rethinking the kinds and size of physical structures that would be used. Personally, I would like to see youth attend multi-age neighborhood schools they can walk to and from. Maybe there could also be some additional structures that students from multiple schools could access for sports, larger musical and theatrical activities, and so on. However, in large inner city environments, it is likely this would be a real challenge, and I can imagine all kinds of resistance to such a shift in how we bring youth together to learn and play. I am interested in hearing more about how Scott and others imagine large scale implementation of the principles discussed in this Blog, because I wholeheartedly agree that children will thrive if given the opportunity.

I agree with you that kids learn a great deal and even a majority of their adult skills outside of school, and can become successful adults without ever setting foot in the classroom.

But I think your example of hunter/gatherer cultures not needing school is not a fair contrast. A HG culture is not specialized like the high-technology culture that we live in, so in an HG culture, a parent or almost any adult can serve as an appropriate mentor for a youth learning skills of adulthood. In our HT culture youth need to identify aptitude for a variety of specialized skills and then find a way to match match up with the appropriate knowledge, skills and mentors.

I don't think we can be effective in arguing for alternative learning paths by making an argument that schools are totally superfluous. It pits us against the overwhelming majority of the adults in the world who believe that schooling is critical to a good education. I think we can be more effective making the case, as you do, that so much of every youth's learning happens outside of a classroom. The most effective point, I believe, is that a significant number of our youth do not need to be and don't belong in a conventional instructional school. Their presence in a learning situation that is not appropriate for them "poisons" the classroom climate for the other youth who enjoy and are motivated by the traditional instructional environment.