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Your Parenting Mojo – Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive
032: Free to learn
63 min •
2 april 2017
Professor Peter Gray was primarily interested in the motivations and emotions of animals before his son Scott started struggling in school, at which point Professor Gray’s interests shifted to developing our understanding of self-directed learning and how play helps us to learn. He has extensively studied the learning that occurs at the Sudbury Valley School in Sudbury Valley, MA – where children are free to associate with whomever they like, don’t have to take any classes at all, and yet go on college and to satisfying lives as adults. How can this possibly be? We’ll find out.
Reference
Gray, P (2013). Free to learn: Why unleashing the instinct to play will make our children happier, more self-reliant, and better students for life. New York, NY: Basic Books. (Affiliate link)
Also see Professor Gray’s extensive posts on learning and education on the Psychology Today blog.
Also see Professor Gray’s extensive posts on learning and education on the Psychology Today blog.
Read Full Transcript
Transcript Jen: [00:00:39] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Before we get going with our awesome guest Professor Peter Gray, who’s going to talk with us about self-directed learning, I wanted to let you know that if what Peter says resonates with you, then I’m on the verge of launching a course to help parents decide whether homeschooling might be right for their family. I first started to think about homeschooling after I realized that I’d been doing everything I could to help my job to pursue learning for its own sake and engage in self-directed learning. But the more I read about school, the more I realized that at schooled, there really is no such thing as self-directed learning. Children learn what they’re told to learn when they’re told to learn it because that’s just how schools work. I mentioned in the episode on Betsy DeVos that I actually wrote my master’s thesis on what motivates children to learn in the absence of being told to do it and I was shocked to find that the system used in schools is pretty much the opposite of one that would really nurture children’s own love of learning. Jen: [00:01:36] I did a lot of reading about learning and also about homeschooling and I developed the course because I realized that nobody had really collected all that information up in one place in a way that helps parents to understand the universe of information that needs to be considered to make this decision and also to support them through that process. Right now I’m recruiting people who’d be interested in helping me to pilot test the course. You get full access to all the research I’ve done on homeschooling based on over 50 books and 150 scientific research papers as well as interviews with more than 20 families who are already homeschooling and seven experts in the field. If you’d like to learn more, then please drop me an email at [email protected] And I’ll send you some information about it with no obligation to sign up. The cost to participate in the pilot will be $99, which will be half the cost of the course once it’s released to the general public and all I’d ask you to do in exchange is to share your honest thoughts of how the course worked for you, so please let me know if you’re interested. Again, that email address is [email protected]. Jen: [00:02:35] Now, let’s get going with our interview. Today we’re joined by Peter Gray, who is a research professor of psychology at Boston College. Professor Gray was primarily interested in the motivations and emotions of animals before his son Scott started struggling in school, at which point professor Gray interest shifted to developing and understanding of self directed and how play helps us to learn. Professor Gray is the author of a textbook on general psychology that’s now in its seventh edition, as well as the book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Better, Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Welcome Professor Gray. Dr. Gray: [00:03:17] I’m glad to be here. Jen: [00:03:19] Thank you. So let’s start with kind of a thorny question. Why, why do we have schools? I went to school and I think you went to school and in many ways it seems like it’s just something that is part of our lives. How did we get to this point? Dr. Gray: [00:03:34] Yeah, that’s exactly right. It is part of our lives. It’s been part of our parents’ lives most, most for most of us, our grandparents; some of us, our great grandparents all went to school. It’s really, you know, schools as we know them today first appeared really in the late 17th century during the Protestant reformation, the Protestant reformers believed that it was very important for children to learn how to read so they could read the Bible. They believed that it was important for every human being to read the Bible for themselves. And so teaching reading was part of it, and in fact, the Bible or some primer version of the Bible was sort of the text that children learn from, but beyond teaching reading, at least as important to these reformers was to teach obedience, and not just to teach to read the Bible, but to teach children to believe the Bible, indoctrination, biblical indoctrination. Dr. Gray: [00:04:52] So obedience training, indoctrination, reading: these were the primary purposes of, um, of the early schools. The leader in the formation of such schools was the German Republic of Prussia. And the person, if, if there’s a single father, if you will, of a modern day schooling, it would be August Hermann Francke, who was a pietist priest, a pietist or one of the, one of the, uh, the sect, of Protestantism, who was really in charge of starting schools in Prussia. So this was really the first, a widespread compulsory school system where children had to go to school. Uh, it wasn’t nearly as extensive as today. It wasn’t nearly as many days of the year or years of a child’s life, but for a certain number of years, children were expected to go school for a certain number of weeks. Dr. Gray: [00:05:59] Um, the goal, the stated goal by Francke of his schools was to suppress children’s will remember, remember that at that time, willfulness was regarded as sinfulness. Children, human beings are born in sin. And a primary goal of education is to sort of, if you will beat the sinfulness of children. And that was very clearly the goal of these schools and so today, of course we don’t, most of us don’t think of that as the purpose of schools. But the fact of the matter is those schools founded by, by Francke and by other Protestant leaders elsewhere, including in the United States, in the colonies, I should say. And again, in the 17th century, Massachusetts was the first colony to have a compulsory schooling for at least some of its children. And again, they were Protestant schools. The reader was called the Little Bible of New England. It was based on biblical stories and the whole purpose of the tax was to insert the fear of God into little children. Dr. Gray: [00:07:15] All kinds of ditties about how you will go to hell if you tell a lie and all sorts of things and the importance of obedience to your parents and to the school master and ultimately of course to God. So obedience was the big lesson and um, and that’s really where schools began and schools were well designed to teach obedience and to indoctrinate children in Biblical doctrine. They, the many number of children all in the same class, all doing the same thing at the same time. The primary job is to do exactly what you’re told to do. You don’t question the assignment, here are your job is to do the assignment, no questions asked. In fact, it’s quite impertinent to ask why you should be doing this. And that’s still true today. The mode of punishment has generally changed. Dr. Gray: [00:08:24] In the early days, the primary mode of punishment was to beat the child. If the child didn’t learn what he or she was supposed to do; today we’re more likely in one way or another to shame the child by comparison, comparing them with other children and giving them the oppression that they’re stupid compared to other children we grade them. And so on and so forth. Although physical beating still does really occur in some American schools, is not nearly as prevalent as it was at that time, but we’re stuck with this system that was designed to teach obedience and to indoctrinate children. When the schools were taken over by the states, is the power of religions declined and power states increased, the method of schooling remained the same and more or less the goals of schooling remained. The the same; it was still obedience training; the states wanted to be and subjects, if you will, uh, and um, and the doc in the doctrine nation was not a doctrine of the Bible, but the doctrine of the state. Dr. Gray: [00:09:33] So nationalism, belief in the, in the wonderful history of the culture that you are growing up and, and, uh, about how you’re surrounded by enemies became part of the doctrine, certainly in Germany and certainly in much of Europe and to a considerable degree in the United States as well. Over time the curriculum changed in various ways and we now look at schools for teaching all kinds of things. But the methods did not change. We still have the system of a bunch of kids, you know, somewhere between 20 and 40 kids in a classroom. They’re all sitting in rows looking at the teacher in front of them. And the job is to unquestioningly do what the teacher tells you to do. And in fact, it’s still the case today that really and truly the only way you can fail in school is by not doing what you’re told to do. Dr. Gray: [00:10:32] A nd so obedience is absolutely still the primary lesson of school. It may not be consciously what teachers think is the primary lessons, but it clearly is. You cannot pass in school if you don’t do what you’re told to do, nor can you fail if you do what you’re told to do. The lessons are never very difficult, but they are tedious and it requires a lot of willingness to go through them and do what you’re told to do. And so still obedience is the primary skill that’s being taught in school. So here we are, interestingly, we’re in a world in which many people at least believe that the characteristics that are important for children to develop are things like creativity, critical thinking, curiosity, lifelong interest in learning and so on, but we have schools that were the not developed for those purposes. Dr. Gray: [00:11:31] In fact, they were developed quite explicitly to suppress those characteristics and promote obedience and the memorization and feedback of doctrine. So that’s where we are. It’s a historical…there’s no good scientific reason for why we have such schools, given most people’s beliefs about what education should be about today, but it’s a historical reason. We human beings are creatures of social norms so we tend to do what was done to us and over, um, over historical time, schools have increased in their influence, in the sense that they take more and more of children’s lives. They take more and more of their day, more and more of, of their year, more and more years are spent and compulsory schooling. Um, but the basic system has not changed. Jen: [00:12:30] It’s almost mind boggling to me that we didn’t choose this system; those of us who are today or the last generation or even the generation before that; that it came from something so long ago that had such a different purpose. And I’m reminded of the William Faulkner quote: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Dr. Gray: [00:12:53] Exactly. Jen: [00:12:53] It’s almost like we don’t really fully understand why we got here and while we’re in it, until we’re out of it and can kind of look back on it. So you raised a number of points in and your kind of introductory remarks and I went to get into a couple of them a little bit. I had always thought/assumed. I guess that the purpose of schools was to help young people develop to their full potential, um, I guess intellectually/academically and socially as well to some extent, and to help even out the discrepancies in opportunities that children have when they come from different backgrounds. But it seems as though that was not the purpose of schools. And so I guess maybe we shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t do that very well, right? Dr. Gray: [00:13:39] Yeah, I think that’s right. That was certainly was not the original purpose of schools. I think for some time what you just described is the stated purpose of schools and, and certainly I don’t want to be too harsh on people who go into teaching or become educators. My mother was a school teacher, really have a sister who was a school teacher. Jen: [00:13:59] My father was a school teacher… Dr. Gray: [00:14:00] And so on. These are wonderful people. These are people who, you know, who went into this because they really want to help children and so on. But as I say, they’re stuck with this system. I do think that, for decades really, even for certainly more than probably since the, since the beginning of the 20th century, most people talking about schools in the United States talk about them as sort of the great equalizer. Dr. Gray: [00:14:35] I mean, ideally the great equalizer, you know, whether you’re rich or poor, you have a public school to go to. And the ideal at least is that the public schools should provide the same education to everybody, whether you’re rich or poor. It shouldn’t be the great equalizer. I think also many people, um, you know, today, this doesn’t ring so ideal as it did sometime ago, but the idea of schools as, as homogenizers, you know, we are a country of immigrants. People come from different, came from different parts of the world with different sets of beliefs, different languages and so on. And part of the belief supporting schools was that we want to make everybody into an American. You know, there’s, there’s both the good and the bad side of that depending on how you look at it. But the idea that we, we have a common language, everybody’s going to speak English if they go through the public school, everybody’s going to have sort of the same concepts of history, everybody’s going to learn a little bit about the principles of American democracy. Everybody’s going to read some of the same literature and so on, and we will have a common culture as a result of that. I know people even today who strongly defend the public school system on grounds like that, and I can relate to that. I can understand why people would feel that the problem is that it, um, whether or not it ever worked very well for those purposes, it clearly isn’t working very well for those purposes today. And I don’t think it ever worked very well for those purposes. It does in some sense of homogenize, but I think that the acquisition of American culture is going to require going to come for people who live in America anyway. Dr. Gray: [00:16:26] And the idea that, um, that it’s the great equalizer has certainly not panned out very well. It’s very clear that… Everybody, everybody in education is, and for long time has been concerned about the so called education gap. Kids from poor families do not do as well in school, do not succeed as well in school. The school system in some sense fails them compared to kids from Richard families. There is always exceptions. There’s always that rare kid you know, who grew up in the ghetto, if I may use that...
Transcript Jen: [00:00:39] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Before we get going with our awesome guest Professor Peter Gray, who’s going to talk with us about self-directed learning, I wanted to let you know that if what Peter says resonates with you, then I’m on the verge of launching a course to help parents decide whether homeschooling might be right for their family. I first started to think about homeschooling after I realized that I’d been doing everything I could to help my job to pursue learning for its own sake and engage in self-directed learning. But the more I read about school, the more I realized that at schooled, there really is no such thing as self-directed learning. Children learn what they’re told to learn when they’re told to learn it because that’s just how schools work. I mentioned in the episode on Betsy DeVos that I actually wrote my master’s thesis on what motivates children to learn in the absence of being told to do it and I was shocked to find that the system used in schools is pretty much the opposite of one that would really nurture children’s own love of learning. Jen: [00:01:36] I did a lot of reading about learning and also about homeschooling and I developed the course because I realized that nobody had really collected all that information up in one place in a way that helps parents to understand the universe of information that needs to be considered to make this decision and also to support them through that process. Right now I’m recruiting people who’d be interested in helping me to pilot test the course. You get full access to all the research I’ve done on homeschooling based on over 50 books and 150 scientific research papers as well as interviews with more than 20 families who are already homeschooling and seven experts in the field. If you’d like to learn more, then please drop me an email at [email protected] And I’ll send you some information about it with no obligation to sign up. The cost to participate in the pilot will be $99, which will be half the cost of the course once it’s released to the general public and all I’d ask you to do in exchange is to share your honest thoughts of how the course worked for you, so please let me know if you’re interested. Again, that email address is [email protected]. Jen: [00:02:35] Now, let’s get going with our interview. Today we’re joined by Peter Gray, who is a research professor of psychology at Boston College. Professor Gray was primarily interested in the motivations and emotions of animals before his son Scott started struggling in school, at which point professor Gray interest shifted to developing and understanding of self directed and how play helps us to learn. Professor Gray is the author of a textbook on general psychology that’s now in its seventh edition, as well as the book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Better, Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Welcome Professor Gray. Dr. Gray: [00:03:17] I’m glad to be here. Jen: [00:03:19] Thank you. So let’s start with kind of a thorny question. Why, why do we have schools? I went to school and I think you went to school and in many ways it seems like it’s just something that is part of our lives. How did we get to this point? Dr. Gray: [00:03:34] Yeah, that’s exactly right. It is part of our lives. It’s been part of our parents’ lives most, most for most of us, our grandparents; some of us, our great grandparents all went to school. It’s really, you know, schools as we know them today first appeared really in the late 17th century during the Protestant reformation, the Protestant reformers believed that it was very important for children to learn how to read so they could read the Bible. They believed that it was important for every human being to read the Bible for themselves. And so teaching reading was part of it, and in fact, the Bible or some primer version of the Bible was sort of the text that children learn from, but beyond teaching reading, at least as important to these reformers was to teach obedience, and not just to teach to read the Bible, but to teach children to believe the Bible, indoctrination, biblical indoctrination. Dr. Gray: [00:04:52] So obedience training, indoctrination, reading: these were the primary purposes of, um, of the early schools. The leader in the formation of such schools was the German Republic of Prussia. And the person, if, if there’s a single father, if you will, of a modern day schooling, it would be August Hermann Francke, who was a pietist priest, a pietist or one of the, one of the, uh, the sect, of Protestantism, who was really in charge of starting schools in Prussia. So this was really the first, a widespread compulsory school system where children had to go to school. Uh, it wasn’t nearly as extensive as today. It wasn’t nearly as many days of the year or years of a child’s life, but for a certain number of years, children were expected to go school for a certain number of weeks. Dr. Gray: [00:05:59] Um, the goal, the stated goal by Francke of his schools was to suppress children’s will remember, remember that at that time, willfulness was regarded as sinfulness. Children, human beings are born in sin. And a primary goal of education is to sort of, if you will beat the sinfulness of children. And that was very clearly the goal of these schools and so today, of course we don’t, most of us don’t think of that as the purpose of schools. But the fact of the matter is those schools founded by, by Francke and by other Protestant leaders elsewhere, including in the United States, in the colonies, I should say. And again, in the 17th century, Massachusetts was the first colony to have a compulsory schooling for at least some of its children. And again, they were Protestant schools. The reader was called the Little Bible of New England. It was based on biblical stories and the whole purpose of the tax was to insert the fear of God into little children. Dr. Gray: [00:07:15] All kinds of ditties about how you will go to hell if you tell a lie and all sorts of things and the importance of obedience to your parents and to the school master and ultimately of course to God. So obedience was the big lesson and um, and that’s really where schools began and schools were well designed to teach obedience and to indoctrinate children in Biblical doctrine. They, the many number of children all in the same class, all doing the same thing at the same time. The primary job is to do exactly what you’re told to do. You don’t question the assignment, here are your job is to do the assignment, no questions asked. In fact, it’s quite impertinent to ask why you should be doing this. And that’s still true today. The mode of punishment has generally changed. Dr. Gray: [00:08:24] In the early days, the primary mode of punishment was to beat the child. If the child didn’t learn what he or she was supposed to do; today we’re more likely in one way or another to shame the child by comparison, comparing them with other children and giving them the oppression that they’re stupid compared to other children we grade them. And so on and so forth. Although physical beating still does really occur in some American schools, is not nearly as prevalent as it was at that time, but we’re stuck with this system that was designed to teach obedience and to indoctrinate children. When the schools were taken over by the states, is the power of religions declined and power states increased, the method of schooling remained the same and more or less the goals of schooling remained. The the same; it was still obedience training; the states wanted to be and subjects, if you will, uh, and um, and the doc in the doctrine nation was not a doctrine of the Bible, but the doctrine of the state. Dr. Gray: [00:09:33] So nationalism, belief in the, in the wonderful history of the culture that you are growing up and, and, uh, about how you’re surrounded by enemies became part of the doctrine, certainly in Germany and certainly in much of Europe and to a considerable degree in the United States as well. Over time the curriculum changed in various ways and we now look at schools for teaching all kinds of things. But the methods did not change. We still have the system of a bunch of kids, you know, somewhere between 20 and 40 kids in a classroom. They’re all sitting in rows looking at the teacher in front of them. And the job is to unquestioningly do what the teacher tells you to do. And in fact, it’s still the case today that really and truly the only way you can fail in school is by not doing what you’re told to do. Dr. Gray: [00:10:32] A nd so obedience is absolutely still the primary lesson of school. It may not be consciously what teachers think is the primary lessons, but it clearly is. You cannot pass in school if you don’t do what you’re told to do, nor can you fail if you do what you’re told to do. The lessons are never very difficult, but they are tedious and it requires a lot of willingness to go through them and do what you’re told to do. And so still obedience is the primary skill that’s being taught in school. So here we are, interestingly, we’re in a world in which many people at least believe that the characteristics that are important for children to develop are things like creativity, critical thinking, curiosity, lifelong interest in learning and so on, but we have schools that were the not developed for those purposes. Dr. Gray: [00:11:31] In fact, they were developed quite explicitly to suppress those characteristics and promote obedience and the memorization and feedback of doctrine. So that’s where we are. It’s a historical…there’s no good scientific reason for why we have such schools, given most people’s beliefs about what education should be about today, but it’s a historical reason. We human beings are creatures of social norms so we tend to do what was done to us and over, um, over historical time, schools have increased in their influence, in the sense that they take more and more of children’s lives. They take more and more of their day, more and more of, of their year, more and more years are spent and compulsory schooling. Um, but the basic system has not changed. Jen: [00:12:30] It’s almost mind boggling to me that we didn’t choose this system; those of us who are today or the last generation or even the generation before that; that it came from something so long ago that had such a different purpose. And I’m reminded of the William Faulkner quote: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Dr. Gray: [00:12:53] Exactly. Jen: [00:12:53] It’s almost like we don’t really fully understand why we got here and while we’re in it, until we’re out of it and can kind of look back on it. So you raised a number of points in and your kind of introductory remarks and I went to get into a couple of them a little bit. I had always thought/assumed. I guess that the purpose of schools was to help young people develop to their full potential, um, I guess intellectually/academically and socially as well to some extent, and to help even out the discrepancies in opportunities that children have when they come from different backgrounds. But it seems as though that was not the purpose of schools. And so I guess maybe we shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t do that very well, right? Dr. Gray: [00:13:39] Yeah, I think that’s right. That was certainly was not the original purpose of schools. I think for some time what you just described is the stated purpose of schools and, and certainly I don’t want to be too harsh on people who go into teaching or become educators. My mother was a school teacher, really have a sister who was a school teacher. Jen: [00:13:59] My father was a school teacher… Dr. Gray: [00:14:00] And so on. These are wonderful people. These are people who, you know, who went into this because they really want to help children and so on. But as I say, they’re stuck with this system. I do think that, for decades really, even for certainly more than probably since the, since the beginning of the 20th century, most people talking about schools in the United States talk about them as sort of the great equalizer. Dr. Gray: [00:14:35] I mean, ideally the great equalizer, you know, whether you’re rich or poor, you have a public school to go to. And the ideal at least is that the public schools should provide the same education to everybody, whether you’re rich or poor. It shouldn’t be the great equalizer. I think also many people, um, you know, today, this doesn’t ring so ideal as it did sometime ago, but the idea of schools as, as homogenizers, you know, we are a country of immigrants. People come from different, came from different parts of the world with different sets of beliefs, different languages and so on. And part of the belief supporting schools was that we want to make everybody into an American. You know, there’s, there’s both the good and the bad side of that depending on how you look at it. But the idea that we, we have a common language, everybody’s going to speak English if they go through the public school, everybody’s going to have sort of the same concepts of history, everybody’s going to learn a little bit about the principles of American democracy. Everybody’s going to read some of the same literature and so on, and we will have a common culture as a result of that. I know people even today who strongly defend the public school system on grounds like that, and I can relate to that. I can understand why people would feel that the problem is that it, um, whether or not it ever worked very well for those purposes, it clearly isn’t working very well for those purposes today. And I don’t think it ever worked very well for those purposes. It does in some sense of homogenize, but I think that the acquisition of American culture is going to require going to come for people who live in America anyway. Dr. Gray: [00:16:26] And the idea that, um, that it’s the great equalizer has certainly not panned out very well. It’s very clear that… Everybody, everybody in education is, and for long time has been concerned about the so called education gap. Kids from poor families do not do as well in school, do not succeed as well in school. The school system in some sense fails them compared to kids from Richard families. There is always exceptions. There’s always that rare kid you know, who grew up in the ghetto, if I may use that...
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