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Peter Gray on Unschooling and Teaching Children without Hierarchies
May 21, 2022
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This is somewhat of a bonus episode only being released on the Drakhma Institute on December 1st, 2020. It's with Peter Gray, an evolutionary psychologist, and we talk about the concept of unschooling when it comes to child rearing slash education.
I'm joined by my colleague Peter Glinos, and there may be sound effects at different points because, as mentioned, this was released in 2020 when the Drakma Institute was experimenting with podcasts. No sponsors for this episode, just leave a written review on whichever platform you're listening to this on as it greatly aids distribution. Thank you and enjoy.
On that note, we will begin. So Peter, our first question for you is, the Christian anarchist, Ivan Illich, believed that schools were ultimately lacking. In his book, Deschooling Society, he proposed the creation of broad-based learning webs in their place. Do you feel that schools can ultimately
Or is there another solution, such as de-schooling, which is the answer? Good question. I don't think schools as we have them today can be reformed. Not in the way that I would look for. Certainly not in the way that Illich would have wanted either. They can't be reformed for a number of reasons. One is that there's just way too much vested interest in how they are operating.
And the other is that reform can't occur gradually. The kind of reform I'm looking for can't occur gradually. It has to be a shift. It has to be a turning upside down of what we've got. You can't just change one little bit of it and expect it to work. There is a long history. As long as we've had state-sponsored compulsory schooling, there have always been reformers.
And some of the reformers want to liberalize the education. They want to make it a little bit more playful, a little bit more choice, and so on and so forth. Other reformers want to go the other direction. And there's a pendulum movement back and forth. The fundamental reason that you can't reform it is because our current educational system is simply not going to accept the idea
that education cannot be evaluated, that it can't be measured. As long as you measure education, then you're going to teach to the measure. Assessment is definitely a critical component of any teacher's pedagogy. Should we have assessments and measurements given your desired performance for education or your desired change for education? Would you consider yourself more of a radical in that way?
Measurement undermines education. It always undermines education because as soon as you've got measurement, then the goal, the purpose is to achieve whatever it is that you're measuring. Whether or not it's meaningful to the learner, whether or not the learner is at that time and place ready to learn that. So as soon as you have measurement, you've got forced education.
and it's forced education that I'm opposed to. It doesn't work well. Education works when it's self-directed, when it's initiated by the learner themselves, and all of us are different. There are certain things we're all going to learn. What my research shows is that everybody learns to read in self-directed education. Everybody learns to read, as long as they're in a literate environment. We have to make sure everybody has a literate environment.
Everybody learns numbers to the degree that you need them in real life. You just learn them in real life because they are valuable in real life. So there are certain things that everybody learns. Beyond that, there's a lot of differences. What is meaningful to you is different from what is meaningful to me. And so what conceivable sense does it say to measure? What this conceivable sense does it make to say that you and I are in competition for who is the best educated
Best educated means an entirely different thing for me than it does for you because I'm different. I have different goals in life. Right. So then if you pose a metric, then people will try to advance towards that metric. And you're saying, well, the metric is different for every person. So what is the overall metric? What's the point? So I think that there are two points. One is if you're looking at people as they're developing, as you're looking at children,
You know, so I've been, just to backtrack a little bit, I've been asked by the heads of schools, school departments in various countries that are thinking about the question of should they allow a Sudbury model school, which I'll talk about later as a public school in their country. And then they'll ask me, well, how do I measure it? And I say, you can't measure it. And then they'll say, well, isn't there any way we can measure it? And my response is there's two ways you can measure it actually.
One is, are the children happy? If the children are not happy, the school is a failure. Absolutely the school is a failure. Anything that makes children unhappy needs to be gotten rid of. The second question is, do the children grow up to live meaningful, satisfying, and moral lives? And if they don't, the educational system is a failure.
If you've got an educational system in which people are not growing up to live satisfying and meaningful and moral lives, then something is wrong. There's no way you can measure that in between.
We're going to touch, I think, a little bit more on that as we continue the interview, this idea of assessment in the school system, particularly now that it's being applied to play. You can look at sports and things like that, and they're very competitive, and there are trophies awarded. But before we get to that, one of the things that you touch on, too, is hierarchies. And so what we wanted to talk about was the relationship of hierarchies to creativity. What is the relationship?
between hierarchies and creativity, especially when it comes to hierarchies of assessment, right? Do you have a future deciding what is and isn't proper in the classroom in terms of the work that is produced? Does that have an effect on creativity?
That's a somewhat complicated question and kind of to get to the creativity question. Let's talk about hierarchy in education at all. Right. Okay. So, you know, I'm sure the question arises because we have a hierarchical school system. We have a system in which, you know, the rules of what it is you're supposed to learn are made at the top of this hierarchy by people who don't even know children. They're people who develop the tasks, who develop the, who
who provide funding to the schools on the grounds that the schools are going to teach this curriculum, that they're going to give these certain tests. So at the top of the hierarchy, we have people who don't see children on a day-to-day basis. They don't know much about child development, to tell you the truth. But they're big measurement people. They want to see tests, and they want to see increased test scores. They've conceived of even an international competition for test scores. They want people to do well.
And this funnels down the hierarchy to ultimately the superintendents of school, who give the orders to the principals, who give the orders to the teachers. And at the very bottom of this hierarchy are the students themselves, who are subject to all of this. Wow. Ask about creativity. The only people who are being the slightest bit creative are the people making the tests and thinking this thing up.
And they're being creative about something that is actually in the end going to be harmful to the people at the bottom of this hierarchy. Self-directed education turns the hierarchy upside down. Real learning requires that you be learning what you want to learn, what you're ready to learn, what you feel you need to learn. That means you have to make the decision about what to learn. That means you have to be at the top of the hierarchy.
you might rely on some other people who are willing to help you and you would go and ask them to help, but you would still be in charge of that. It would say, I want this kind of help. Maybe you would even say, I really want your help and I'm willing to take a course from you and follow whatever you tell me. But that's still you making that decision. The person who's helping is kind of being hired by you to help you out. It's like if I take music lessons,
I might hire somebody to teach me music, but I'm free to quit whenever I want. I don't think they're doing a good job. If I'm not learning the way I want to learn, I quit. I'm on top of that hierarchy. I'm not a prisoner to it. So where does creativity come in? Self-directed learning is always creative. Children create
Knowledge. Everybody, every developmental psychologist knows this. Piaget argued, children develop, children explore the world. They're creating models in their mind of the world around them. It's an entirely creative process based on their observations, their explorations, their thinking things through. Children learn, that's curiosity. Children learn by exploring. Children learn through play, and play is always creative.
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So Peter, you said that students can direct themselves, but what I'm thinking is that there's often difficulty in some tasks.
in the initial stages or in the medium in the middle stages that naturally proceed some reward and I can imagine when I was learning chess for example when I was a kid my dad told me well stick with it this is difficult right now but it'll become easier and if I didn't have him I would have just said well I quit if it was me directing so how do you overcome that how does a kid who's self-directed not just quit
when it's difficult, even though the rewards are greater in the long run, but they don't see that because they're kids. You know, kids do see it. Think of a child learning to walk. It is hard. The child falls, the child gets up, the child struggles, the child keeps at it, and yet the child learns to walk. Think, I have seen many children learn chess without any father forcing them to do it.
because they wanted to do it. They started off playing around in chess, then they got more serious about it, then they started studying books of it and so on and so forth. I've seen kids get interested in all kinds of things where they end up doing a lot of hard study related to what they are interested in. I've seen it over and over and over again. Generally speaking, if somebody is being forced to do an activity, it's because they don't really want to do that activity.
Occasionally, you'll hear a story. Maybe it's a great golf player or a great tennis player or a gymnast who was forced by their parents at an early age to do this or that and they became a star at it. In at least half the cases, they resent it at some point. In another half the cases, they're pleased about it.
But is this really a benefit to the world? Does the world really improve because a few people become superstars at some kind of thing because they were forced to do it at an early age? I've seen people become mathematicians. I've seen people go into all kinds of activities that we all consider hard through self-directed education. We would not have survived as a species were we not willing to undertake hard things.
in our self-development. Schools are brand new things, but we've been doing hard things as long as we have been human beings. It's simply false to believe that human beings can't and don't naturally on their own undertake difficult tasks. So is all that matters? You mentioned one of the metrics is happiness and well-being and meaning. Now those three are different metrics.
Does meaning matter more? What's the difference just for the audience between happiness and life satisfaction or meaning? Yeah, I mean, again, the term metrics implies that we're going to measure these things. I would say a person's happy if they say they're happy. I'd say people are living a meaningful life if they say that it's a meaningful life. And you can see in a person's disposition, are they happy or are they living a meaningful life?
So I think that, you know, the reason I would add meaning to happiness, for many people, most of us, I think meaning is a component of happiness. We want our life to be meaningful. We're not very satisfied with our lives if it's not meaningful. But I add the word meaningful and I also add the word moral because I suppose if I just said happy, somebody could imagine somebody who's just strung out on drugs all the time, you know, and they're happy because they're on drugs, you know, but I don't think any of us would look at them and say, well, that's a meaningful life.
I'm just playing devil's advocate. Well, some people would say that capitalism has brought more people out of poverty than virtually any other system, and those people who are brought out of poverty have gone from unmeaningful and not happy, to say the least, lives, to slightly meaningful and slightly happy. But this capitalistic system is predicated on people being taught
I think one could conceivably have made that argument logically
some decades ago. During the time when a lot of people worked in factories, during the time when we have a lot of clerical jobs that were just very routine kinds of jobs, during the time when there was just a lot of really boring work to be done. We don't live in that world anymore.
This is one of the reasons why self-directed education is becoming more and more understandable and acceptable to people today than it was some time ago. You know, robots have replaced all that kind of labor. Computers have replaced the need to sit and crunch numbers over and over and over again. You know, the kinds of skills that are taught in our schools, which is to memorize a lot of
information and be able to spin it back. You know, that's taken over by Google. We don't have to hold that stuff in our heads. We don't have to know it. We don't, you know, you two seconds, you can find it. You know, with the idea that we have to be able to do long division and all that was to memorize some procedure which school kids never understood and most adults never understood why, for example, the
the algorithm for line division works. Everybody just memorize that, right? You don't have to memorize it anymore. You just pull out your little pocket computer and there you got the answer. More important that you have some notion of what division is or multiplication is, and that comes from real life. There's actually a lot of data showing that. You don't learn that in school. It's not taught in school. Nobody understands it if they're just learning it in school.
So the things that people need to do, and we're, we live in an age where increasingly everybody's got to be an entrepreneur. Basically that means everybody has to be able to learn on the job. Everybody has to be able to take risks. Everybody has to be in some sense, creative and adventurous. These are the skills that are fostered by self-directed education. And these are the skills that are wiped out, that are inhibited, interfered with.
I couldn't agree more about the history of education and that factory model of education. As an educator, it's sort of horrifying to realize that the school bells were modeled off of factory bells, the objective being to train good workers. And so we created a school system that would do that. We're sort of in the ruins of that school system.
But doesn't the alternative have a cost? There's a sense that self-directed learning is pragmatic. It follows a sort of evolutionary algorithm in the sense that you have a classroom of students, tell them to learn what they wish to learn.
They go off in all sorts of different directions, so much so that you can't even assess them. They are just creative outside the box. But evolution is costly, right? Most of the strategies that we have seen on Earth have failed. We are the survivors. And so when we look at life, there's a certain survivorship bias we have, because most of the life forms that have made it are not of the majority, but of a
of a select few that made it. There's a great loss that happened along the way. Is there a sense that students going in all these different directions, will most of them fail or will a great portion of them fail and the few that make it redeem the others if you would in their innovations, in their happiness, in their
I could talk all day on that question, but let me start by, since you referred to evolution, referred to our human history,
One of the ways that I've looked at self-directed education is to interview and survey anthropologists who have lived in and studied hunter-gatherer cultures throughout the world in various different, even different continents, different settings. And, you know, there's really essentially no pristine hunter-gatherer cultures today, but as recently as the mid to late 20th century there were.
And anthropologists and cultural psychologists went out, trekked out, located these people. And you know what they found is as long as they're sufficiently isolated from Western culture, they're doing pretty well. They were doing well. They don't work that hard. They are subject to disease, and especially if there's been contact with Western culture.
They're subject to some degree of famine when that happens and to some degree of drought. But by and large, they live, according to all the anthropologists, happy, satisfying and moral lives. They don't die. They don't die in fierce competition. They don't die because they're competing with one another. In fact, they're egalitarian.
They deliberately don't compete. In fact, these are the only cultures that have ever been found by anthropologists that don't have competitive games. They help one another. They support one another. It's part of human nature to support one another. Competition is kind of culturally imposed. My studies of children indicate that children don't naturally compete. They want to help one another. When they play together, they don't play competitively. We adults force competition onto them.
and then at some point they become competitive. But hunter-gatherers, there's nobody forcing competition and they're cooperative, they're helping one another. Everybody wants to succeed in life and in self-directed learning you have the opportunity to learn what you need to do to succeed in life and that occurs throughout your life. There's no end to self-directed learning. We're all, you're learning from day to day to do the things that you want to do the next day.
And I'm learning from day to day to do what I want to learn, do the next day. We're just constantly learning. And just think of it this way. So we live in a world, in our world today, which is different from a hunter-gatherer world, in which there's many ways of making a living. In which there's so much knowledge, so many different kinds of skills,
that none of us have any chance of learning more than a tiny sliver of that. Now, are we better off in a world where everybody's learning the same sliver, which is imposed upon them by this hierarchical school system and everybody's going out with the same sliver as knowledge of everybody else?
Are we better off today, given the diversity of our ways of making a living, given the complexity of our culture, given everything that we know, in a world where each of us has the opportunity to focus on what we want to do, how we blossom, how we succeed? One of my observations, I've done studies of people who've grown up with self-directed education outside of the coercive school system.
One of my observations, one of my findings is they're well employed. They're not necessarily interested in making a lot of money, but they want to make a lot of money so they can support themselves and their family if they've got kids. But the most important thing to them is that they're doing meaningful work that they enjoy doing and that they feel is meaningful because it's contributing to the society. And what I have found is, in about half the cases that I've studied,
they are in adulthood pursuing careers that are direct extensions of passions that they developed in childhood play. You know, how wonderful, how many, how many kids growing up in our typical school system can you say that's true? I know it's a relatively small percentage because back when I was teaching and I was, and I was talking to my advisees, I would ask them questions about
So what do you think you want to go into when you graduate? What kind of job do you want? And they would tell me something. Maybe they'd want to be a doctor or the lawyer, something usually with some prestige ring to it, right? And I would ask them, so why do you want to do that? And they didn't have a good answer. They would say, because that would be doing all I could do. That would be showing my potential. It's like even at that age, they're still trying to get the A.
They're trying to do the thing that will bring them the most recognition from society without regard to what would I do well and what would I be happy at and how could I contribute to this world? When I talk to people in self-directed education, that's not the way they respond. They say, you know, I want to be a forest ranger because I love the forest.
Or I want to be a mathematician because I've been playing with mathematical puzzles my entire life and I love mathematics. Or I want to be a musician because I've been fiddling around with this and I've gotten pretty good at it and wow, what a career that would be. I could go on and on and I could list dozens and dozens of jobs and you would see that all those jobs are very valuable jobs in our society that people from self-directed education have gone on to.
Within the binding walls of curriculum, there's certainly restraint, but there's also a certain safety. When we venture beyond those walls, I'm not doubting the idea of better lands, if you were, better opportunities of knowledge, undiscovered country, if you would, on the front of knowledge and careers.
I'm curious what the cost is for the explorers who don't find the Northwest Passage, for the explorers who don't find that delightful countryside of new knowledge, of living their dreams. And there's a certain sense that maybe that doesn't matter. And maybe the act of exploration in itself is meaningful and worth it. But I'm just curious what you think of that cost. If it is a
The Northwest Passage is a very poor analogy. There's only one Northwest Passage, and not everybody's going to find it. But the path to happiness in your career, there's a million different paths. And the best way to find it is to start on what you're happy at right now and continue on that. You know, again, your mind is so focused, because our school system is so focused on this idea of competition, that there are winners and there are losers.
And some people are going to get through there and some are not going to get through there. You know, that doesn't happen in self-directed education. Now it's true, it's true that we live in a world in which some people are suffering severely from poverty. We've got to solve that problem. People growing up in poverty don't have the same opportunities for lots of reasons as people not growing up in poverty. And that is, from my observations, even more true if you're going to the standard school system because in that
in that competition, you fall behind and you fail, you get labeled stupid, you become a dropout. When people are allowed to be, when basically what you've set up instead of a school is something that is a rich environment for self-directed education, which is cheaper to set up than a school, then you make things more equal for people.
For the people watching, just in full disclosure, Peter, great. I've watched many of your TED Talks and I'm very much inclined to agree and I even showed it to my wife. We're thinking, putting considerable effort into thinking about raising our kid. We don't have a kid, but when we do have a kid or kids,
raising them in an unschooling manner. So when I'm asking you these questions, please know I'm just playing devil's advocate. There are some questions that are lingering in my head. You mentioned that there are hunter-gatherer societies, and you're using an evolutionary model, and then you can think of the hunter-gatherer societies as acting more in accordance with what evolution would want. But then another side of me says, well, evolution also says that what's successful is what's more populous.
and less famine and less disease and so on. But these hunter-gatherer societies, although they may be happier, they are more prone to famine and disease, particularly when they come in contact with the West. But then that would, to me, indicate that, well, evolution doesn't care about happiness. It cares about other strategies. And so this pursuit of meaning, which I agree, I totally agree with you on, but this pursuit of meaning can be seen as an evolutionary dead end or relative dead end.
And I'm curious, how do you make congruent both an evolutionary model of what is supposed to be successful, agree with the data that the West or other societies are far greater in their success evolutionarily without this approach to unschooling? You're saying that other societies are
more successful evolutionarily than hunter-gatherers, because we've killed off the hunter-gatherers. And we'll continue, if we continue that way, we'll continue killing off one another. Or outgrowing. So that's cultural evolution. And so the question is to me, there's so many ways to look at what you've just
at the question that you've just raised. And my answer to this is, I guess, is so we have one educational system, this top-down forced educational system, in which everybody has to learn the same things and the use of reward and punishment as the means of making you learn it, in which basically children become subservient. Children are taught that you don't know anything,
you have to do what you're told to do in order to develop wealth. That's one system. The other system says, wow, look at this little baby. He's already exploring the world. He's learned language without anybody teaching him. He's learned to talk. He's learned an enormous amount about the physical world by exploring. Wow, what would happen if we just let that continue to happen and we
supported it by providing the conditions so that this child can grow in this kind of way. And, and we provide the conditions. So, and it's easier to provide these conditions now because we've got the internet, we've got everybody has access to the whole world's knowledge. Let's let them explore that way. And also let's do it in this non-competitive way instead of growing up feeling like this is
Like, we're living in a dog-eat-dog world. Let's grow up the way that's more natural to people, the way hunter-gatherer people grew up, the way kids naturally want to be. It's cooperative. We're helping one another. You know, which is a better scenario for the future of the world? To me, it's pretty much a no-brainer.
There's a certain sense in evolution too of the Red Queen effect, where you have species competing with one another, so they sort of get into a quagmire of competition, each one being unable to ward off external forces. It comes from Alice in Wonderland, where the Red Queen grabs Alice and says, come on, let's go.
Okay. And they start walking, but they're not going anywhere. And so the Red Queen says faster and start running, not going anywhere. And then next thing you know, Alice is getting dragged behind the Red Queen and they're still not going anywhere. They're staying in the same spot. And Alice points that out. The Red Queen says, in my kingdom, you must run to stay where you are. Right. There's a quagmire of competition in that way between species.
You know, let me talk about running to stay where you are for a minute because some of my research has shown and it's not really so much my original research as my bringing together other research. Over the last actually six or seven decades, this hasn't happened all at once.
Our school system has become more and more weighty to children. We've increased the amount of time they spend in school. We've taken away recess. We've increased the amount of homework after school. We've increased the number of school like activities outside of school. So just instead of just going out and playing, you're being put in adult directed sports or other kinds of things, which are school like where you still are not free to do what you want to do. You're still doing what you're told to do.
In all of these activities, they're all kind of competitive, if not fully competitive, where you're kind of being judged and evaluated. Over this same period of time that this trend has occurred, and this is a period of my lifetime. So school, when I was a kid, school was nothing as nowhere near as stressful that it is today, nowhere near as time consuming as today.
Kids in the 1950s, when I was a kid, spent more time outdoors playing with other kids, like hunter-gatherers do, than they spent in school. No longer true. No longer true. So over this time that we've seen this change, there have been huge, well-documented increases in all kinds of psychopathology among school-aged children and young adults. Huge increases in depression and anxiety,
suicides among school-age children, which, of course, is the tip of the iceberg. And this is not that we're diagnosing things differently. My data are based on standardized questionnaires that have been given in unchanged form over the years, such as Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory Scale for Depression. By that scale, the rate of depression among school-age children is now about 10 times what it was in the 1950s.
Similarly, there are scales for anxiety, indicating that rates of anxiety are something like 10 times what they were in the 1950s. I've asked anthropologists, does anxiety and depression even exist in children in hunter-gatherer cultures? No. They don't see it. They never see it. We are hurting children. By some data, 30% of American school children have suffered from anxiety at clinically significant levels
There was a study done by the American Psychological Association a few years ago in which they assessed, called Stress in America, in which they polled Americans about the degree of stress they're experiencing in the past week. And the most stressed out people in America are teenagers in high school. The most stressed out. And 83% of them attribute their stress to school.
This is what we are doing to our young people because of our inane belief that the goal is to increase their test scores. And that happiness gets second shovel. How do skills deal with this? Not by decreasing all the drill, not by increasing recess, not by decreasing the hours so the kids can spend time playing,
but by adding more and more therapists. For sure, there's a sense that these are sort of bandages to an otherwise deeper wound. This expansion of competition above sort of the organic play that we would otherwise see, I'd imagine, in these other societies is, if you were colonizing more than just recess, but also sports, games,
mental institutions of play, such as chess competitions, things of that nature. What effect does this assessment of games, this competitive assessment of these sort of structured play games have on students? Does this fit what you were saying about education becoming more institutionalized, play becoming more institutionalized? Absolutely. So let me give you an example.
When I was a kid, I played a lot of baseball. So here's how I played baseball, just like all the other kids in the towns that I lived in. You'd go out to the vacant lot. There'd be a bunch of other kids there. There's no manicured field. There's no adults in sight. You go to the vacant lot. Somebody's got a bat. Somebody's got a ball. It might or might not be a real baseball. Some people have gloves.
Some of them are big kids who are good baseball players. Some are little kids. There's a few girls who throw like girls back in the 1950s. Most girls threw like girls, right? And so you got to make a team out of this. You got to choose upsides, right? So you choose upsides. You create the ground rules. You know there's a busy street over there. Anybody who hits it into the street, automatic out.
Windows in the house over there anybody who bats it towards those windows automatic out there's big Billy who can clobber the ball. He's got a bat left handed with a broomstick There's little Timmy, you know
Anybody who pitches hard to little Timmy is going to get teased mercilessly. What are you doing to this little kid? You know, pitch softly to him. So think of the lessons that are being learned in that, that are so much more important than baseball itself. You're learning how to create an activity. You're learning how to create rules. You're learning how to negotiate differences.
you are learning how to cooperate because if you don't cooperate you're learning how to keep your playmates happy because if you don't keep them happy they're going to go home and the game is over right and you got to keep the kids on the other team happy just as much as you have to keep the kids on your team happy if it's a lopsided score the only thing you know is well you didn't choose up teams right let's put big billy over in the other team now right so
Nobody cares who wins or loses. Everybody cheers wildly when their team makes a point because that's the goal of the thing is to make scores. But in the end, nobody cares. There's no trophy on the line. There's no parents there watching you. Thank God. So that's the way we played baseball. And there's a lot of lessons. That's the way kids have played, whether it's baseball or anything else throughout human history.
And that's how kids have learned to cooperate, it's how they've learned to pay attention to whether they're playmates or enemies, it's how they've learned to negotiate, it's how they've learned to take initiative. So how do you play baseball today? Even little kids, even toddlers I've seen in their uniforms, ridiculous, right? I mean, what sense does that make? Kids are going out and playing baseball as if they're
as if they're major leaguers. They're in uniforms, they're at this manicured field, the coach is telling them what to do, they're not making up what to do, most of them are sitting on the bench most of the time instead of running around as kids should be doing. None of what you learned in the pickup game as baseball is being learned. It's not a bad place to learn baseball if your coach is good, but how many of them are going to go on and need baseball scores to live a happy and meaningful life as opposed to how many are going to
When it comes to this age-mixed play,
Let's say that someone listening has a kid or a couple kids and they are convinced and they're like, I want Peter Gray's model of unschooling. I'm going to do that or at least homeschooling. But they, they don't know how to encourage play with people who aren't just within the family because as soon as you allow your kid to go outside, there's a lack of other kids.
Right. How do we solve this in absence of a large scale policy change? How do individuals solve that? Do they join a Facebook group for unschooling? That's a very serious problem in our society today. And I hear from many, many parents, I want my kid to go outside. I'll send him outside. And there's two problems with it. One is the one you've just described. So my kid goes outside and there's nobody to play with. You know, the truth of the matter is some people think kids love the great outdoors. They don't particularly love the great outdoors.
what they love is other kids to play with. And if there's nobody else to play with out there, who can blame them? They'll get on their iPhone or smartphone and communicate with their friends in the only way they can, or they'll go back in and beg to come back in. So that's one problem. And the other problem, at least in the United States, is there's a decent chance that if your kid is outdoors and you're not there watching your kid,
Somebody's going to call the police. There's a positive feedback loop of unsafetiness, because the less kids there are, the less safe they are, and then that increases the chance that... That's true, but you get called even when there are kids. So there are cases of siblings playing together who have been called upon. And when I was a kid, you could play outdoors without other people, and it was less safe then than it is now. There is less crime now in America than there is now of all kinds.
So we have greatly exaggerated the dangers out there. The thing that most parents are afraid of, that somebody's going to come along and molest their child, or kidnap their child, or even murder their child, these crimes almost never happen. They happen, but they don't happen outdoors. They're not strangers on the street. When those things occur, it's relatives, or priests, or teachers, or
Very, very rare. Somebody calculated that you would have to leave your child on the worst corner, supposedly worst corner in New York City for something like 500,000 or 50,000 years. I don't remember the exact number, but a huge number. Before on a statistical basis, somebody would take it, come and snatch your kid away. It's rarer than being hit by lightning. So we have greatly exaggerated that danger.
And so what has happened is because of public service policies that were designed to protect children that really came into effect in the 1980s and 90s in the United States at least now have become standard policies and they have and you are labeled as a negligent parent if you if you give your child the same freedom that basically all families gave to their children when I was a kid and even when my son was a kid, which was
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a non-profit organization. Lenore Skanezy, who's the president of that, wrote the book Free Range Kids, is the primary person in this organization. But we're working with whole communities to try to change policy. We're working with schools, standard schools, to bring age-mixed play into school. So there are schools that now have an hour, they call it play club, an hour of free play in which
It's age mix, all classes. This is elementary school, so it's kindergarten through fifth grade. They're playing together for a full hour and using, in some cases, the whole school, most of the school as their playground, the outdoor playground, the gymnasium, the art room, the hallways. I visited one of these schools and there are kids running around in the hallway and nobody's stopping them. There are kids engaged in a little rough and tumble play, nobody's stopping them.
These are, we have in some sense taught the teachers who have to monitor that they are not teachers while this is occurring. They are like lifeguards on the beach. If somebody's going to kill somebody else, intervene. But otherwise, let them be. And what they're finding is that it's working out wonderfully. I was a little concerned at the beginning. I thought kids not growing up playing, they might not know how to do it. But I think the fact that there are little kids there who haven't forgotten how to play,
helps the older kids know how to play. Bullying doesn't occur because older kids are protective of the younger kids, and older kids are nicer to one another when there are younger kids around. This is something I've talked about prior to ever doing this, and there's other research besides my own demonstrating this. So there are things that we can do, but we really have to work more at doing. There are also things that any given neighborhood could do, but it takes somebody with initiative to do it.
So just to give you one example, some years ago, I don't know if it's still going on or not, but in the Bronx and New York, the people living in public housing development, so they're living in poverty and it is a dangerous neighborhood. There are guns, there are drug pushers, and there's a lot of traffic on the street and so on.
But some of the parents got together and they said, our children need to get out and play. It's dangerous for them to get out and play. In this case, they were right. It is dangerous for them to get out and play. So what are we going to do about it? So they got the city to close off the streets during certain hours after school, and they got a group of grandmothers to sit out and drive the drug pushers away. This is Marshawn, Beast Mode Lynch. Prize pick is making sports season even more fun. On prize picks, whether
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If they can do it, any neighborhood can do it, if you take the initiative to do it. But somebody's got to care enough about it to take the initiative to get together with other neighborhoods. You know, you live in a suburban neighborhood, maybe, and nobody's outdoors, so you get to know the other parents. You find at least some other parents who say, yeah, I remember, or maybe it's the grandparents who remember, yeah, we used to play outdoors. What a great experience that was. Too bad our kids can't do it. And then you say, well, maybe
Maybe our kids can do it and maybe we can work out a system and if we're afraid that something terrible has happened, maybe we can work out a system where we take turns kind of keeping an eye out and we say they have to stay in the neighborhood but they can play freely but there'll be somebody there keeping an eye out to make sure that it's safe enough and then maybe they'll do it and then maybe over time they'll gain confidence that actually it is safe enough, they don't have to keep an eye out. There are people in suburban neighborhoods who have done that kind of thing. So it can be done. What I'm saying though,
is it doesn't happen naturally the way it would in a hunter-gatherer culture, and it doesn't happen naturally the way it did in 1950s America when I grew up. It takes somebody with initiative to create the opportunities for it to happen. You know, it also sounds like we as adults now, let's say 25 year olds and above, are much more socially awkward and socially distanced, especially now, social distancing.
So it's in essence up to us to create a community. I don't, we don't knock on our neighbor's door to ask for milk anymore. We don't, we barely know our neighbors. So before we were saying, well, how do we fix it for our kids? Maybe we fix it for ourselves so that we get to know the neighbors and then tell them about these new parenting ideas and say, do you want your kid to be involved in something like this too? Because I would love to let my kid out. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. It's, uh,
It's the adults' responsibility. The kids can't necessarily do it. I mean, I could do it when I was a kid. I remember when we moved into a new neighborhood, I was... I talk about this in my book, Free to Learn. I was five years old and I said, we moved to a new neighborhood. I was missing my friends and my mom said, why don't you just go knock on the doors and see if there's anybody your age living there? So I did that all by myself. I knocked on doors.
And I found right across the street this little girl, Ruby Lu, we became best friends and I tell this story about that in my book. Kids can't probably do that now, but at 25 you ought to be able to do it. One of the questions we have for you is about David Sloan Wilson's book, This View of Life.
He advocated for age-mixed play as well. When you look at the Sudbury Valley School and you see this age-mixed play, would you say this is more akin to hunter-gatherer societies? Did they have rites of passages that were, if you would, harsh breaks and segmented, that segmented their population in terms of who got to play with who, or is it just something more collective in that?
Yeah, well, so in hunter-gatherer cultures, all the play was age-mixed. I mean, because first of all, the bands are small enough that even if you wanted to segregate by age, there wouldn't be enough of a group to play with. It was a similar thing in neighborhood play when I was a kid. You know, you played the neighborhood, you know, to get that baseball going, you had to play with kids of all ages. There weren't 18 people who were within a year or two of your age. So even if you wanted to self-segregate that way, you couldn't do it, right?
So age-mixed play was the norm throughout human development. Play evolved in a context, the whole drive to play evolved in a context in which social play was always age-mixed. It was basically never age-segregated. Age segregation came about with the shift from small schools to large schools and then this, as you described it later on, the factory model, the idea that education is like an assembly line. You move the kids from
step one to step two to step three and then you age you know in step one you add a certain component of knowledge you move them on to grade two add another component of knowledge and so on and so forth and then over time because of the school model we've gotten used to that we've got we've developed the absurd idea that children only the children's peers are those kids who are the same age that that's who they who their natural playmates are the same age so we invite only same-aged kids to the birthday parties those are the kids they know
Little League sports, adult-directed sports are age-graded and age-segregated and so on and so forth. Even developmental psychologists have done almost, aside from my work, have done almost no study of age-mixed interactions among kids because it's as if we live in a world, and to some degree we do, where there are sort of two groups that kids interact with, those who are the same age and those who are adults.
So, but this is an artifact of modern times. This was never true historically. When it comes to certain skills like, let's say, the throwing of an arrow or certain physical skills, I can imagine that a kid would learn naturally an aged mixed play, and they would say, okay, I have a proclivity for this. Let me investigate and learn further about how to hunt, for example, or gather.
For abstract skills like mathematics, you mentioned mathematics or computer science. I'm not talking about just playing with your iPad. I'm talking about coding or programming. How is a kid supposed to play and, and learn that? Now I studied some, some math, but it's not like when I was a kid, if I was around other kids, I would notice, Oh, that person is studying math. Maybe I should study math. It wasn't like that. We'd play tag.
Yeah, of course you're not going to be attracted to somebody studying math. That's the most boring thing in the world. But suppose you are attracted to somebody who's playing mathematical puzzles. Suppose you see some kids who are just enjoying playing with mathematical puzzles, or they're playing these games that involve mathematics. So you might get attracted to that. I know quite a few kids.
Or suppose you're playing computer games. These days, most kids are playing computer games. And a lot of those computer games involve math. I heard from a mom. So I did this little study, informal study. It's not something I could publish because it was sort of a self-selected group in which on my Psychology Today blog post, I put out a request to parents who have kids who are either being unschooled or going to a school like Sudbury Valley where math is not being taught.
who've never been taught math. And I asked, so how have your kids developed the basic math skills? How have they learned adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, you know, that kind of stuff. And it turns out, and in fact, this is also my observation, everybody learns those skills because they're part of everyday life. If you're engaged in activities,
So we talk about the survival math that you need in order in your daily life. You learn it because it's part of your daily life. You don't need to be taught in school separately. So what about kids who go beyond that? First of all, why would everybody need to go beyond it? There's no need to go beyond it unless you've perceived a need. And if you perceive a need, there's so many ways to learn it. And some kids are perceiving a need because they're playing computer games for which there's a need. So one of the moms said, so my
My child, I think she said he was 10 years old, is playing this computer game that involves several different currencies and he has to be able to translate from one currency to another. It involves earning compound interests for certain investments. He has to calculate compound interests and he's doing all of this. You know, what fourth grader, this is what he would be in if he was in school, would be doing that stuff and understands it.
But he's learning it in this computer game. Of course, people think computer games are next to the devil, but the fact of the matter is that kids are learning amazing stuff in these games. It's also the case that kids are playing all kinds of games in our culture for better or worse, and whether you're really playing them hard-nosed competitively or not involves keeping some kind of score.
So even in Candyland, you're counting things off, or you're calculating totals if you're playing a card game, or if you're playing baseball and you're interested in your batting average, you're calculating a batting average, or even if you're following baseball, you're trying to understand the batting average of the players and so on and so forth. If you're cooking, you need to cut a recipe in half. So in all of these activities, you're learning that math. Now suppose you need
Suppose you need higher math. Suppose you need... So we operate on the assumption, which is a stupid assumption, that everybody has to learn algebra, trigonometry, maybe calculus, because someday maybe they'll need it, right? We all learned... I mean, I imagine that you studied quadratic equations as I did at some point in high school.
You know, I've done these things as have other people. I'll ask a whole audience of adults. So do you remember quadratic equations? Everybody raises, yeah, I remember quadratic equations. Does anybody know what a quadratic equation is? Have you ever used one in your life? Nobody. Maybe there'll be one person out of a hundred who'll raise their hand.
You know, and first of all, nobody even understood the quadratic equations when they were being taught and it was just a formality that we put people through because we think it's good for them to torture them in this way.
So we do all this and it's useless. Listen Jerry, I don't want to overstep my bounds or anything. It's your house. It's your world. You're a real Julius Caesar. But I'll tell you how I feel about school, Jerry. It's a waste of time. A bunch of people running around bumping into each other. Guy up front says two plus two. People in the back say four. Then the bell rings. They give you a carton of milk and a piece of paper that says you can go take a dump or something. It's not a place for smart people, Jerry.
Now, I've even asked scientists. So I've asked scientists who use math. So did the math you learned in school help you become a good scientist? Pretty much they all say no. The math I use is the math I've had to learn in relationship to the problems I work on here. It's not quadratic equations. It's not what I learned in high school. It's the math that I need to know now. There's two times to learn anything.
One is when you are so curious about it that you can't stop yourself from learning it. Nobody can stop you. And the other is when you need to know it. And today, fortunately, we're in a world where almost no matter what you need to know, you can learn it so much more efficiently than you ever could in the past. You can find YouTubes on it. You can find a lecture by the world's expert on it.
You don't have to go to college. You don't have to spend all that money. You don't have to go to school for this and be drilled in all kinds of stuff that's irrelevant to you. Whatever you need to know, you can just hone in and learn it. The philosopher of education, Rudolf Steiner, created a school, a Waldorf tobacco factory building.
It was the birthplace of Waldorf schools, schools that followed his philosophy. And Waldorf teachers for early childhood education, I'm not going to say they don't do much, but they have a very laissez-faire hands-off policy towards the children. The children interact in unstructured play. There's a sense that it isn't about instruction, but rather you unleash human potential and that students will figure out themselves
morality in this way you know through the negotiations of play they will figure out how to interact with their peers of their age groups younger or older and also their their teachers and the teacher models instead that's the form of instruction instead of you sit everyone in rows and we teach them
If the teacher wants the students to play with blocks, the teacher will go amongst, like an anthropologist, amongst these young students and then just start playing with the blocks. And lo and behold, the other students will look at this teacher, understand what they're doing, and then seek to imitate or to model. Is there a sense that getting students to go to something like a co-op or a
you know, sending them to a place where they can learn directly under facilitators or instructors who are in the field that they want to go to. Is that better than maybe sitting in a classroom? Yeah, so you know the the schools that I study that have looked at such as the Sudbury Valley School go much farther than Waldorf schools or Montessori schools and that
Because in Waldorf and Montessori schools you still have the sense, there's still the understanding that teachers ultimately are responsible for children's learning and that children are supposed to be learning certain things and so you set up, you know, like they have certain kinds of materials there because those materials are supposed to be materials for learning certain kinds of lessons and the teachers tend to try to draw the students interest towards
The things that the school has decided are important things for the children to learn at that stage. Plus, you've got all these children, pretty much, although there's more age mixing, especially in a Montessori school than there is in a regular school, you've still got a lot of age segregation. You don't have teenagers and little kids all interacting together. So the schools that I'm most interested in, that I've studied, are schools where you've got kids aged four on through teenage years,
just as you do in hunter-gatherer culture, you've got kids of all those ages interacting with one another, learning from one another. And then you don't need that much adult involvement because the kids are, you know, like you walk into a Sudbury Valley school and the teenagers will be reading to little kids, not because they're trying to teach the little kids reading, but just because teenagers love to read to little kids. You know, and you'll find kids playing games with one another where one of them knows how to read and the other doesn't. And as part of the
Just to make the game go on, the one who knows how to read is kind of pointing out how to read to the one who doesn't. So this kind of teaching occurs very naturally when kids are playing and exploring together in an age mix situation. So the Montessori classroom or the Waldorf classroom is much more artificial and that's because it derives from the standard classroom. It's a modification from
And it's probably no surprise that most people in our culture think it's okay to send your kid to such a school when the kid is very young, but you don't see them going on through high school age, or if they do, they change very much. The Montessori high schools, I'm aware of, are not that much different from regular high schools. So that's the difference that I'm interested in, that I would point out, between truly schools for self-directed education, where
where children, also children not confined to a space the way they are, you know, Sudbury Valley, you can go anywhere in the building, you can go outdoors, you can play in the barn, you can walk in the adjacent woods and so on and so forth, without anybody, without adults watching you. Even four-year-olds are trusted, just as four-year-olds in the hunter-gatherer culture are.
So that's the, and yeah, I think that's the kind of environment that's designed for self-directed. There's all kinds of opportunity for learning. The most important opportunity for learning is other kids of varying ages. Those are the group, those are the people that children naturally learn from. Most hunter-gatherer kids are not learning how to hunt and gather from adults. They're learning how to hunt and gather from older kids.
and ultimately some of the older kids are going out with the adults. So the adults become kind of the models for the teenagers and their learning, but then the teenagers are models for the 12 to 10 year olds and the 10 year olds are models for the six year olds and so on. And that's pretty much the way it occurs at Sudbury Valley. You don't, one of the things, the schools you've described, the Waldorf schools and Montessori schools, one reason that we don't see many of in the public school system is they're very expensive. You need a lot of teachers per student to do that.
Sudbury Valley, you don't. You need fewer teachers, fewer adults per student than public schools do because most of the learning doesn't involve adults. Most of the learning involves kids interacting with other kids or kids exploring things in their own ways. Let me give you an example. One of the graduates of Sudbury Valley who became a mathematician, ultimately a mathematician, I asked
The founder of the school, Sudbury Valley, Daniel Greenberg, was an expert in mathematics. He was actually a physics professor at Columbia University before he founded the school. He left academia very young and went off and founded Sudbury Valley way back in 1968. And so I asked this, at that time he was a young man, he's now a middle-aged man.
about his study of mathematics when he was at the school. I said, so I bet Danny Greenberg was a great resource. And he said, well, I may have talked to him once or twice about math. It was pretty much all on my own. And I didn't really need to go to him. I asked Danny Greenberg the same thing. And he said, I seem to remember one time he came to me with something that he had solved and he was interested in sharing it with me. So you don't need, you know, we
The problem is, educational theories are made by adults, and so we think it's all about adults, what adults do to kids. And that's the wrong way to think about education. Education is what kids do for themselves, and sometimes they make use of adults, more often not. One of the most brilliant mathematicians alive, his name is Terry Tao, if you look up his biography,
He wasn't taught by his parents mathematics, nor was he taught how to read. He taught himself, and his parents just encouraged him because they saw he had a pension for it. What I'm thinking is, well, you mentioned that some of these people who have self-directed play, children, they go on to have similar metrics of success, even though you have issues with the word metric. And I was wondering what those those measures were. You said life satisfaction and job acquisition.
Although I'm curious, what else is it? Is it life expectancy? Is it similar rates of cardiac arrest? I remember when I did my first study of the graduates of Sudbury Valley School many years ago, and I have to admit this was not a disinterested study. I was concerned about the results because my son had recently started as a student at the school.
And so I wanted to make sure that he wasn't cutting his options short if he were to stay at that school through what would be his high school years. So I did a study of the school, and what did I have in mind? I wanted to make sure that there weren't a lot of the, if a significant portion of the graduates were in prison, or they were in mental hospitals, or they were homeless,
or they were living in their parents' basement, which wouldn't be a disaster, but I didn't want that. Then I would have tried to do whatever I could to get my kid to go to a more regular school, but I did not find that. I found that they're employed, they're earning their own incomes. At the same rates as people.
At the same rates, at the same levels as people who weren't, who weren't directed in their education? I didn't do that kind of comparison. And also, to be honest, it would be impossible. You can't do a really scientific study here. Let's admit that. To do a scientific study, you'd have to randomly assign a group of people, some of them to Sudbury Valley, some of them to a regular school, and follow them up. You just can't do that with human beings.
So it was enough to me to show they're doing okay. What I can say is I believe they're doing better. I can't prove that to you statistically. I can't prove that to you statistically. And I can also say they're doing okay regardless of the reason they came there. Some of them came because they were failing in public school. Some of them had learning disorders. Everybody gets diagnosed with some kind of a learning disorder these days. Some of them had learning disorders, dyslexia.
And they came to the school and learned to read, you know, because there was no longer the pressure on them. They were learning to read because now they wanted to learn to read and they were free to learn in their own ways. These observations were absolutely eye-opening to me. I can't prove it statistically because what you can always say
So even though it's a fairly economically diverse group, not a particularly racially diverse group at this school because it's kind of in a suburb that there isn't a lot of racial diversity. And also because at least at that time in the study, most people who were not sort of the typical whites of that neighborhood were not interested in being different in yet some other way by sending their kid to such an unusual school. That's changing, by the way. There are more and more in the United States, more and more people of color
choosing self-directed education precisely because they see it as a movement towards liberation. That's a little bit of a digression. But the point is, people who were doing badly in public school, people who were doing well in public school, I couldn't see a difference between how they were doing. Those who wanted to go on to college, imagine this. I thought at least there would be some handicap in going on to college.
You've never taken a course, let alone the courses that the colleges claim are required for you to get there. You don't have any record of grades. You've never taken a test unless you took what in the eastern part of the United States would be the SAT test if you're going on to an elite college that requires that.
and yet they're getting in, including in some cases to elite colleges, without ever having done any of what people think you have to do to go on to college. And they're not only getting in, but they're succeeding in college. This was very eye-opening. So what should be, you know, where should the burden of proof be? Should the burden of proof be that, hey, freedom, should the burden of proof be on the method of freedom?
You have to prove that freedom is better than enslavement before we choose freedom over enslavement. You have to prove that, or should the burden of proof be the other way? You have to prove that the standard system of forced education, where children have no choice but to go to school, where they have almost no freedom within the walls of school, where all their basic human rights are being violated in school every day,
My view is that's the system that should have to prove itself before we put people into it. The system that says, let kids be and let's support their being. Let's provide them with what they need to learn. Let's not force them to learn to read. Any view of democracy says,
You institutionalize people only if you can prove that they need institutionalization. Nobody has ever proved that kids need to be in school to succeed. You know, I can see the approach working for kids who want to grow up or kids who do grow up to be entrepreneurs or some job where they have an internal locus of control being important or vital to it. Though I'm wondering,
for a kid who's never felt much discipline or structure from an external source, how is it that they can go on? How do they, you say that they fare similarly when it comes to a job, when it comes to a job acquisition, but, but I'm wondering how, how the heck, how does, how does that happen if they. Okay. So let's step back to your idea of growing up with no discipline or structure. It's impossible to grow up without discipline and structure.
Play is one of the things when I talk about play is it's always structured. There's no such thing as unstructured play. All play involves rules. All play involves you've got something in mind you're doing and there's a set of rules implicit or explicit for achieving what it is you're doing. You're building a sandcastle. You're not randomly piling up sand. You're creating something structured. You've got a structured activity in your mind.
You're doing it with other kids. You're talking about it. You're making sure that you're both in agreement about what this sandcastle is about. So it's not Lord of the Flies. You're playing, you know, Lord of the Flies, I've got to remind people, was fiction. There's a great new book out. I'm not thinking of his name, a Danish author. The English translation just came out, and he describes
the real story of Lord of the Flies. There was a real case of teenagers being left on an island. They cooperated. They helped one another. They saved themselves by doing so. Everybody thinks Lord of the Flies tells something about human nature. Maybe it tells about the nature of British prep school kids.
at that time who've learned to be bullies. And that's who it was, you know, British boarding school kids. Maybe it would be true for them. I don't know. I don't think it would even be true for them. But we have this thing. Almost the sophisticated thing is to believe that human beings are naturally competitive and fierce and dog-eat-dog and
And therefore, if you don't impose rules upon them, everything's going to fall apart. The truth of the matter is, or look at the lost boys of Sudan who saved themselves. By cooperating, helping one another, and so on and so forth, the stories are endless of how children without adults help one another instead of defeat one another.
And yet we use Lord of the Flies. In the end of the novel, the soldier who finds lost boys on the island is meant to sort of reflect, at least in Golding's conception, human nature. It's interesting here how you're saying that kids, in essence killing each other on the island, represents the tyranny instilled by society's nature as opposed to the reverse. You know, schools have been used in a way to instill all sorts of ideological, let's say,
world views from higher authorities, whether it be corporate world views in the initial creation of public education, or Napoleon's license, Napoleon's high schools, so that students would be trained as enlightened French citizens. Could this type of, let's call it, not necessarily programming, but directed instruction be
possible in the schools that you are proposing in Sudbury Valley for example or is Sudbury Valley immune from this kind of encroachment? Well I wouldn't say that directed instruction can certainly occur at a Sudbury school but it only occurs if you want it and it only lasts as long as you want it. So I'll give you an example that at Sudbury Valley there are oftentimes
At some point in the year, there's a group of kids who say that they're planning to leave the school and go on to college, and they recognize that they need to take the SAT test. And for the verbal part of the SAT test, there's no problem, but some of them are concerned about the math portion. And what's not surprising is that they will ask for a little course in math.
And I've talked to the person who they most often ask. And so he organizes this little course in math for people who want to take it. This is direct instruction, no messing around. He just gives them assignments. He tells them what to do and so on and so forth. But they do it and they learn it very quickly. He says that the typical way it works is that it typically takes him six total class hours. He meets with them one hour a week for six weeks.
He gives them an assignment between time, which he thinks takes a couple of hours for them to do. So this is what, a total of six times three hours, 18 hours they're spending on this, as opposed to think of all the hours that kids are typically spending from kindergarten on through high school on arithmetic and math. And by doing that, he says over and over, he's found that the kids learn enough math
that they can now study the SAT prep book themselves, which everybody studies whether they're going to regular school or not. So that's an example of very directed instruction. You know, there are kids who have been messing around with the guitar and now they want to learn it in a more formal way. They'll take a lesson from a music teacher. So there's a place for direct instruction. Direct instruction is oftentimes the best way to learn something if you want to learn it, but if it fits
I'm curious my last question. I'm curious if there's a way to apply unschooling your method
your methodology to us as adults. Yeah. You know, before I answer that, there's one part of your question, your previous question that I failed to answer. And that is that at Sudbury Valley School and other schools like it, there are rules. It's not like there, it's not like this is an anarchy. There are rules. In fact, there's a lot of rules and the rule, but the rules are all made democratically by vote of the school meeting.
So there are rules against littering. There are rules that if you take toys out, you have to put them away even if you're four years old, you're expected to put your toys away when you're done with them. And the rules are created democratically and they're forced democratically. So there's a lot of experience living by rules. And in fact, the rules are taken more seriously at Sudbury Valley than they are in a typical school, but they're democratically created, which makes all the difference. If you had a vote in creating a rule,
you're more likely to respect that rule. And if you violated a rule and you're tried by a jury of your peers, other kids, you know, this is the way it works at the school, you're less likely to be resentful that some higher authority figure has arbitrarily singled you out for punishment. These are your friends who are telling you, hey, you know, we're tired of you leaving your toys out.
You have to stay out of the playroom for the next two days. That's your punishment. That's the typical kind of sentence that might be given. So don't get the impression that this is chaotic and, you know, the school is very well organized and it's organized because there are a lot of rules. So I'm sorry, I wanted to be sure and answer that previous question. So now tell me the next question again because I forgot. Yeah, yeah, no problem.
I'm wondering if there's a way to apply unschooling to ourselves as adults. Now, there's a book by Cal Newport about the perils of following your passion, which runs contrary to most spiritual and new age advice, which just follow what you're interested in. He says, well, that's true. But also keep in mind that you get most interested in a subject of the cusp of the knowledge, which requires you to spend much of your time reading what is somewhat boring to you. And then you get to innovate at the edges.
So don't follow your passion because if you do, you'll be torn asunder in many ways. So the way that I think about applying unschooling to us as adults would be follow our passion, but that doesn't seem like that's efficacious and I'm curious what you think. I think we apply unschooling every moment to our adult lives.
You know, all of our learning, once you're out of school, is self-directed education. You know, you're constantly learning. You've got some new tasks that you have to do, whether it's at work or at home. You know, some of my faucet leaks. Do I go and take a course on how to fix a faucet? No. Even if I took a course on it, it'd be self-directed. I chose to take the course. But no, I look up, I find a YouTube.
exactly my kind of faucet. I watch it and they show me how to fix it. Let me tell you another very quick story. I happen to know a biologist who's, you would know his name actually, he's a pretty famous biologist, who is known as an evolutionary theorist and he told me, confided to me that he went into biology
because it doesn't involve mathematics. He loved science but hated mathematics and he said he was always terrible with mathematics. And then at some point he developed an evolutionary theory of something that somebody disproved by a mathematical model. And so he said, oh damn, I can't understand what this person's writing. I guess I'm going to have to learn mathematics. So he set about, you know, learning the math,
And he told me, you know, once I got into it, hey, you know, I could, I could learn it. I could understand it. And he developed a math, I don't know whose model was right, but he developed a mathematical model that proved that the other person's model was wrong and his was right. Well, I tell this story because it's such a perfect example of self-directed education in adulthood. And it's such a perfect example of how the time to learn something is when you need to know it.
He didn't need to know any mathematics until somebody challenged his model mathematically. Then he needed to learn it. And then even though he had believed he just didn't have a mind for mathematics, now that he needed to know it, lo and behold, you could learn it. Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on Peacock. I'm going to need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us.
So this was all planned? What did you get it to? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All Her Fault, a new series streaming now only on Peacock.
On that subject of human beings in adulthood also, you know, getting direct and following direct instruction willingly without coercement and this still fitting the model of unschooling in a way, right? Because it's not coerced, it's willing. You know, there's a certain sense that the rules are something that we do want in a way, right? You were mentioning the rules at Sudbury Valley School as not lawless.
There's a line in William Golding's book, Word of the Flies, where the two civilized child, quote unquote, and the uncivilized child, quote unquote, are talking to each other. And, you know, the uncivilized child says bollocks to the rules. Why do we need the rules? And the civilized child says, because the rules are the only thing we've got. It seems that what you're telling me is, well, even in a tribal society, someone would be saying, yeah, we need rules. They're not totally lawless, not totally anarchistic.
But with these rules, wouldn't centralization, with these courses that are sort of emergent in these decentralized schools, would centralization sort of come back? Is it sort of inevitable that, you know, eventually, imagine a bunch of Sudbury Valley schools, Okshuit the Nation, and students are interested in having more directed courses, would we see an emergence of
Instructional Hierarchical School Systems. In a democratic school, would it evolve into a... I'm sorry. In a democratic school, to clarify the question, in the democratic school, would centralized school structures emerge? Is there a tendency to centralization from decentralization? I think that there can be, if you don't take safeguards against it.
So the Sudbury schools take safeguards against it. It's built into their constitution. And the democratic procedure is a basic part of it. One thing is they eliminate parents from the decision-making process. Parents are not allowed in the school.
except when they're just bringing their kids out. They're not supposed to be there. Parents are not part of the school environment day to day, and they don't have any say in how they run the school. In schools that I've observed, which are parent co-ops, there's so much pressure from parents to do certain things and have certain rules, like let's not allow people on computers so much. And so pretty soon you get imposed things
And then the school people, the staff members think, well, the parents are going to take their kids out if they don't do this. And pretty soon the democracy is subverted. I've also seen, and there's going to be people who'll disagree with me on this. And these are some of my best friends who will disagree with me on this. I've seen schools that say, we're not a democratic school. We don't make decisions democratically.
our decisions by consensus. We make our decisions by long discussion. I think that evolves into the adults dominating and the adults making the decision. I visited one such school. It actually was in Europe. I was touring some schools and so this was a school very proud of using what they call sociocracy. I think they call it. There's a lot of schools that use this and that means that
So they believe that voting on something is wrong because there's always somebody who loses the vote, right? And they don't want anybody to lose the vote. I will take issue with that. So they want to make decisions where everybody's talked through, everybody's completely satisfied. Who's the they in this? And so this is a... Where is this? Where is this vote? Schools that use this. I'm not going to name the school.
but this is a school in Europe, one of several schools I visited that is modeled in many ways after Sudbury Valley, but they don't vote on issues. They use sociocracy. They discuss it out until everybody agrees. I see. So I'm sitting there with one of the staff members who's telling me about all of this and how wonderfully it works.
And I'm noticing a couple of the teenagers off to the side and their eyes are rolling. And so I asked the staff member, so can you give me an example of a decision that was made? And she gave the example. So we made unanimously a rule that nobody can use screens except on Friday afternoon. My eyes were raised. I've never seen a school
that purports to be a school where children can choose their own things, where they're not allowed to use screens except for half a day a week, right? And so I looked over at those kids whose eyes were rolling and I said, so this is a rule that you agreed to? And they said, that's not the way we remember it. And suddenly I felt like I was initiating a little revolution right there.
So I think that there can be the pretense. So when you're in a situation where you kind of feel like you're just holding everybody back unless you agree, you're a bad person if you don't agree, right? So all the way to the weighty people, including your own parents who might be there. It's a worse kind of tyranny. And you become, you're just holding up the meeting if you don't agree.
I think very often what happens is a false consensus. So I think it's much better to vote. So if you have a rule like this, it would be outvoted totally in any school that I know of if it's an honest vote and parents aren't allowed to vote, if it's just the people who are there every day, the staff and the students, and the students always greatly outnumber the staff. No group of students today in their right mind would vote against using screens.
It's the primary vehicle for learning today. It's like cutting your head off. But because adults have such a prejudice about it, their weight overflows. So yes, but I think as long as you are clear about it, that this is a democratically operated school and it's in the Constitution and we can't override that.
or the school becomes something entirely different from what it was before. It's interesting to me that Sudbury Valley School was founded in 1968, so it's 52 years old. It's still going strong. In that same year, many so-called free schools were founded. All of them went under, and they all went under for a variety of reasons, but one of the reasons is they didn't have clear-cut procedures for making decisions.
And the result was that there were endless arguments, there were parents who took over, and the whole concept of it's really the children who are running their lives got lost. So either the original staff members resigned and the school was folded, or the school evolved over time to be really kind of a progressive version of a hierarchical, more traditional school.
Thank you, Peter. Peter Gray, appreciate it. Why don't you tell the audience what you're working on next and where they can find out more about you? I'm working on a lot of things at once, but one of the things I'm just getting started on is a new book. The book that I've had out for a number of years is called Free to Learn. And the next book that I'm planning to write, just getting started at is, it will probably be called The Obsolescence of Schooling.
So you've got some idea what I'll be talking about in that from what I've talked about here. I'll lay out, among other things, my vision for an educational plan of the future. So that's one thing I'm doing. We need more traditional schools. Yeah, of course. We need that hierarchical model.
We need to bring back corporal punishment, actually. I read Lord of the Flies, I didn't realize it was an instruction. And I'm also working on a number of research projects that have to do. One of the projects I think people will be interested in is the idea of libraries becoming the replacement for schools. So libraries are already publicly supported centers for self-directed education.
Many libraries are already moving in the direction of more general learning opportunities in the library. And of course, this is all free for everybody. It's publicly supported. So many libraries have maker spaces in them. Many libraries welcome teenagers just hang around and play. And so I've done a study of what libraries are already doing. And the next step is to try to get funding
It's a wonderful project.
We look forward to reading your book when it comes out and we wish you the best at, you know, challenging the established understanding of how we should treat our children and innovate. And we want to thank you for the conversation. And thank you for having me on and thank you for asking me the hard questions.
The podcast is now finished. If you'd like to support conversations like this, then do consider going to patreon.com slash C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L. That is Kurt Jaimungal. It's support from the patrons and from the sponsors that allow me to do this full time. Every dollar helps tremendously. Thank you.
▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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"text": " This is somewhat of a bonus episode only being released on the Drakhma Institute on December 1st, 2020. It's with Peter Gray, an evolutionary psychologist, and we talk about the concept of unschooling when it comes to child rearing slash education."
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"text": " On that note, we will begin. So Peter, our first question for you is, the Christian anarchist, Ivan Illich, believed that schools were ultimately lacking. In his book, Deschooling Society, he proposed the creation of broad-based learning webs in their place. Do you feel that schools can ultimately"
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"text": " Or is there another solution, such as de-schooling, which is the answer? Good question. I don't think schools as we have them today can be reformed. Not in the way that I would look for. Certainly not in the way that Illich would have wanted either. They can't be reformed for a number of reasons. One is that there's just way too much vested interest in how they are operating."
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"text": " And the other is that reform can't occur gradually. The kind of reform I'm looking for can't occur gradually. It has to be a shift. It has to be a turning upside down of what we've got. You can't just change one little bit of it and expect it to work. There is a long history. As long as we've had state-sponsored compulsory schooling, there have always been reformers."
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"text": " And some of the reformers want to liberalize the education. They want to make it a little bit more playful, a little bit more choice, and so on and so forth. Other reformers want to go the other direction. And there's a pendulum movement back and forth. The fundamental reason that you can't reform it is because our current educational system is simply not going to accept the idea"
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"text": " that education cannot be evaluated, that it can't be measured. As long as you measure education, then you're going to teach to the measure. Assessment is definitely a critical component of any teacher's pedagogy. Should we have assessments and measurements given your desired performance for education or your desired change for education? Would you consider yourself more of a radical in that way?"
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"text": " Measurement undermines education. It always undermines education because as soon as you've got measurement, then the goal, the purpose is to achieve whatever it is that you're measuring. Whether or not it's meaningful to the learner, whether or not the learner is at that time and place ready to learn that. So as soon as you have measurement, you've got forced education."
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"text": " and it's forced education that I'm opposed to. It doesn't work well. Education works when it's self-directed, when it's initiated by the learner themselves, and all of us are different. There are certain things we're all going to learn. What my research shows is that everybody learns to read in self-directed education. Everybody learns to read, as long as they're in a literate environment. We have to make sure everybody has a literate environment."
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"text": " Everybody learns numbers to the degree that you need them in real life. You just learn them in real life because they are valuable in real life. So there are certain things that everybody learns. Beyond that, there's a lot of differences. What is meaningful to you is different from what is meaningful to me. And so what conceivable sense does it say to measure? What this conceivable sense does it make to say that you and I are in competition for who is the best educated"
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"text": " Best educated means an entirely different thing for me than it does for you because I'm different. I have different goals in life. Right. So then if you pose a metric, then people will try to advance towards that metric. And you're saying, well, the metric is different for every person. So what is the overall metric? What's the point? So I think that there are two points. One is if you're looking at people as they're developing, as you're looking at children,"
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"text": " You know, so I've been, just to backtrack a little bit, I've been asked by the heads of schools, school departments in various countries that are thinking about the question of should they allow a Sudbury model school, which I'll talk about later as a public school in their country. And then they'll ask me, well, how do I measure it? And I say, you can't measure it. And then they'll say, well, isn't there any way we can measure it? And my response is there's two ways you can measure it actually."
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"text": " One is, are the children happy? If the children are not happy, the school is a failure. Absolutely the school is a failure. Anything that makes children unhappy needs to be gotten rid of. The second question is, do the children grow up to live meaningful, satisfying, and moral lives? And if they don't, the educational system is a failure."
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"text": " If you've got an educational system in which people are not growing up to live satisfying and meaningful and moral lives, then something is wrong. There's no way you can measure that in between."
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"text": " We're going to touch, I think, a little bit more on that as we continue the interview, this idea of assessment in the school system, particularly now that it's being applied to play. You can look at sports and things like that, and they're very competitive, and there are trophies awarded. But before we get to that, one of the things that you touch on, too, is hierarchies. And so what we wanted to talk about was the relationship of hierarchies to creativity. What is the relationship?"
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"text": " between hierarchies and creativity, especially when it comes to hierarchies of assessment, right? Do you have a future deciding what is and isn't proper in the classroom in terms of the work that is produced? Does that have an effect on creativity?"
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"text": " That's a somewhat complicated question and kind of to get to the creativity question. Let's talk about hierarchy in education at all. Right. Okay. So, you know, I'm sure the question arises because we have a hierarchical school system. We have a system in which, you know, the rules of what it is you're supposed to learn are made at the top of this hierarchy by people who don't even know children. They're people who develop the tasks, who develop the, who"
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"text": " who provide funding to the schools on the grounds that the schools are going to teach this curriculum, that they're going to give these certain tests. So at the top of the hierarchy, we have people who don't see children on a day-to-day basis. They don't know much about child development, to tell you the truth. But they're big measurement people. They want to see tests, and they want to see increased test scores. They've conceived of even an international competition for test scores. They want people to do well."
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"text": " And this funnels down the hierarchy to ultimately the superintendents of school, who give the orders to the principals, who give the orders to the teachers. And at the very bottom of this hierarchy are the students themselves, who are subject to all of this. Wow. Ask about creativity. The only people who are being the slightest bit creative are the people making the tests and thinking this thing up."
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"text": " And they're being creative about something that is actually in the end going to be harmful to the people at the bottom of this hierarchy. Self-directed education turns the hierarchy upside down. Real learning requires that you be learning what you want to learn, what you're ready to learn, what you feel you need to learn. That means you have to make the decision about what to learn. That means you have to be at the top of the hierarchy."
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"text": " you might rely on some other people who are willing to help you and you would go and ask them to help, but you would still be in charge of that. It would say, I want this kind of help. Maybe you would even say, I really want your help and I'm willing to take a course from you and follow whatever you tell me. But that's still you making that decision. The person who's helping is kind of being hired by you to help you out. It's like if I take music lessons,"
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"text": " I might hire somebody to teach me music, but I'm free to quit whenever I want. I don't think they're doing a good job. If I'm not learning the way I want to learn, I quit. I'm on top of that hierarchy. I'm not a prisoner to it. So where does creativity come in? Self-directed learning is always creative. Children create"
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"text": " Knowledge. Everybody, every developmental psychologist knows this. Piaget argued, children develop, children explore the world. They're creating models in their mind of the world around them. It's an entirely creative process based on their observations, their explorations, their thinking things through. Children learn, that's curiosity. Children learn by exploring. Children learn through play, and play is always creative."
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"text": " So Peter, you said that students can direct themselves, but what I'm thinking is that there's often difficulty in some tasks."
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"text": " in the initial stages or in the medium in the middle stages that naturally proceed some reward and I can imagine when I was learning chess for example when I was a kid my dad told me well stick with it this is difficult right now but it'll become easier and if I didn't have him I would have just said well I quit if it was me directing so how do you overcome that how does a kid who's self-directed not just quit"
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"text": " when it's difficult, even though the rewards are greater in the long run, but they don't see that because they're kids. You know, kids do see it. Think of a child learning to walk. It is hard. The child falls, the child gets up, the child struggles, the child keeps at it, and yet the child learns to walk. Think, I have seen many children learn chess without any father forcing them to do it."
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"text": " because they wanted to do it. They started off playing around in chess, then they got more serious about it, then they started studying books of it and so on and so forth. I've seen kids get interested in all kinds of things where they end up doing a lot of hard study related to what they are interested in. I've seen it over and over and over again. Generally speaking, if somebody is being forced to do an activity, it's because they don't really want to do that activity."
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"text": " Occasionally, you'll hear a story. Maybe it's a great golf player or a great tennis player or a gymnast who was forced by their parents at an early age to do this or that and they became a star at it. In at least half the cases, they resent it at some point. In another half the cases, they're pleased about it."
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"text": " But is this really a benefit to the world? Does the world really improve because a few people become superstars at some kind of thing because they were forced to do it at an early age? I've seen people become mathematicians. I've seen people go into all kinds of activities that we all consider hard through self-directed education. We would not have survived as a species were we not willing to undertake hard things."
},
{
"end_time": 958.37,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 930.486,
"text": " in our self-development. Schools are brand new things, but we've been doing hard things as long as we have been human beings. It's simply false to believe that human beings can't and don't naturally on their own undertake difficult tasks. So is all that matters? You mentioned one of the metrics is happiness and well-being and meaning. Now those three are different metrics."
},
{
"end_time": 988.285,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 959.428,
"text": " Does meaning matter more? What's the difference just for the audience between happiness and life satisfaction or meaning? Yeah, I mean, again, the term metrics implies that we're going to measure these things. I would say a person's happy if they say they're happy. I'd say people are living a meaningful life if they say that it's a meaningful life. And you can see in a person's disposition, are they happy or are they living a meaningful life?"
},
{
"end_time": 1018.114,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 989.087,
"text": " So I think that, you know, the reason I would add meaning to happiness, for many people, most of us, I think meaning is a component of happiness. We want our life to be meaningful. We're not very satisfied with our lives if it's not meaningful. But I add the word meaningful and I also add the word moral because I suppose if I just said happy, somebody could imagine somebody who's just strung out on drugs all the time, you know, and they're happy because they're on drugs, you know, but I don't think any of us would look at them and say, well, that's a meaningful life."
},
{
"end_time": 1045.811,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 1019.138,
"text": " I'm just playing devil's advocate. Well, some people would say that capitalism has brought more people out of poverty than virtually any other system, and those people who are brought out of poverty have gone from unmeaningful and not happy, to say the least, lives, to slightly meaningful and slightly happy. But this capitalistic system is predicated on people being taught"
},
{
"end_time": 1075.435,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 1046.237,
"text": " I think one could conceivably have made that argument logically"
},
{
"end_time": 1098.763,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1075.998,
"text": " some decades ago. During the time when a lot of people worked in factories, during the time when we have a lot of clerical jobs that were just very routine kinds of jobs, during the time when there was just a lot of really boring work to be done. We don't live in that world anymore."
},
{
"end_time": 1128.541,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1099.616,
"text": " This is one of the reasons why self-directed education is becoming more and more understandable and acceptable to people today than it was some time ago. You know, robots have replaced all that kind of labor. Computers have replaced the need to sit and crunch numbers over and over and over again. You know, the kinds of skills that are taught in our schools, which is to memorize a lot of"
},
{
"end_time": 1152.773,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1128.677,
"text": " information and be able to spin it back. You know, that's taken over by Google. We don't have to hold that stuff in our heads. We don't have to know it. We don't, you know, you two seconds, you can find it. You know, with the idea that we have to be able to do long division and all that was to memorize some procedure which school kids never understood and most adults never understood why, for example, the"
},
{
"end_time": 1183.217,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1153.592,
"text": " the algorithm for line division works. Everybody just memorize that, right? You don't have to memorize it anymore. You just pull out your little pocket computer and there you got the answer. More important that you have some notion of what division is or multiplication is, and that comes from real life. There's actually a lot of data showing that. You don't learn that in school. It's not taught in school. Nobody understands it if they're just learning it in school."
},
{
"end_time": 1212.79,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1184.019,
"text": " So the things that people need to do, and we're, we live in an age where increasingly everybody's got to be an entrepreneur. Basically that means everybody has to be able to learn on the job. Everybody has to be able to take risks. Everybody has to be in some sense, creative and adventurous. These are the skills that are fostered by self-directed education. And these are the skills that are wiped out, that are inhibited, interfered with."
},
{
"end_time": 1240.623,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1213.473,
"text": " I couldn't agree more about the history of education and that factory model of education. As an educator, it's sort of horrifying to realize that the school bells were modeled off of factory bells, the objective being to train good workers. And so we created a school system that would do that. We're sort of in the ruins of that school system."
},
{
"end_time": 1259.394,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1241.22,
"text": " But doesn't the alternative have a cost? There's a sense that self-directed learning is pragmatic. It follows a sort of evolutionary algorithm in the sense that you have a classroom of students, tell them to learn what they wish to learn."
},
{
"end_time": 1287.108,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1259.701,
"text": " They go off in all sorts of different directions, so much so that you can't even assess them. They are just creative outside the box. But evolution is costly, right? Most of the strategies that we have seen on Earth have failed. We are the survivors. And so when we look at life, there's a certain survivorship bias we have, because most of the life forms that have made it are not of the majority, but of a"
},
{
"end_time": 1311.715,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1288.2,
"text": " of a select few that made it. There's a great loss that happened along the way. Is there a sense that students going in all these different directions, will most of them fail or will a great portion of them fail and the few that make it redeem the others if you would in their innovations, in their happiness, in their"
},
{
"end_time": 1334.241,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1312.159,
"text": " I could talk all day on that question, but let me start by, since you referred to evolution, referred to our human history,"
},
{
"end_time": 1362.637,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1335.23,
"text": " One of the ways that I've looked at self-directed education is to interview and survey anthropologists who have lived in and studied hunter-gatherer cultures throughout the world in various different, even different continents, different settings. And, you know, there's really essentially no pristine hunter-gatherer cultures today, but as recently as the mid to late 20th century there were."
},
{
"end_time": 1391.271,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1363.677,
"text": " And anthropologists and cultural psychologists went out, trekked out, located these people. And you know what they found is as long as they're sufficiently isolated from Western culture, they're doing pretty well. They were doing well. They don't work that hard. They are subject to disease, and especially if there's been contact with Western culture."
},
{
"end_time": 1416.561,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1392.039,
"text": " They're subject to some degree of famine when that happens and to some degree of drought. But by and large, they live, according to all the anthropologists, happy, satisfying and moral lives. They don't die. They don't die in fierce competition. They don't die because they're competing with one another. In fact, they're egalitarian."
},
{
"end_time": 1446.647,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1417.056,
"text": " They deliberately don't compete. In fact, these are the only cultures that have ever been found by anthropologists that don't have competitive games. They help one another. They support one another. It's part of human nature to support one another. Competition is kind of culturally imposed. My studies of children indicate that children don't naturally compete. They want to help one another. When they play together, they don't play competitively. We adults force competition onto them."
},
{
"end_time": 1472.79,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1447.329,
"text": " and then at some point they become competitive. But hunter-gatherers, there's nobody forcing competition and they're cooperative, they're helping one another. Everybody wants to succeed in life and in self-directed learning you have the opportunity to learn what you need to do to succeed in life and that occurs throughout your life. There's no end to self-directed learning. We're all, you're learning from day to day to do the things that you want to do the next day."
},
{
"end_time": 1502.466,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1473.302,
"text": " And I'm learning from day to day to do what I want to learn, do the next day. We're just constantly learning. And just think of it this way. So we live in a world, in our world today, which is different from a hunter-gatherer world, in which there's many ways of making a living. In which there's so much knowledge, so many different kinds of skills,"
},
{
"end_time": 1526.732,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1503.78,
"text": " that none of us have any chance of learning more than a tiny sliver of that. Now, are we better off in a world where everybody's learning the same sliver, which is imposed upon them by this hierarchical school system and everybody's going out with the same sliver as knowledge of everybody else?"
},
{
"end_time": 1555.589,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1527.602,
"text": " Are we better off today, given the diversity of our ways of making a living, given the complexity of our culture, given everything that we know, in a world where each of us has the opportunity to focus on what we want to do, how we blossom, how we succeed? One of my observations, I've done studies of people who've grown up with self-directed education outside of the coercive school system."
},
{
"end_time": 1585.691,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1556.596,
"text": " One of my observations, one of my findings is they're well employed. They're not necessarily interested in making a lot of money, but they want to make a lot of money so they can support themselves and their family if they've got kids. But the most important thing to them is that they're doing meaningful work that they enjoy doing and that they feel is meaningful because it's contributing to the society. And what I have found is, in about half the cases that I've studied,"
},
{
"end_time": 1613.541,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1586.357,
"text": " they are in adulthood pursuing careers that are direct extensions of passions that they developed in childhood play. You know, how wonderful, how many, how many kids growing up in our typical school system can you say that's true? I know it's a relatively small percentage because back when I was teaching and I was, and I was talking to my advisees, I would ask them questions about"
},
{
"end_time": 1643.148,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1614.172,
"text": " So what do you think you want to go into when you graduate? What kind of job do you want? And they would tell me something. Maybe they'd want to be a doctor or the lawyer, something usually with some prestige ring to it, right? And I would ask them, so why do you want to do that? And they didn't have a good answer. They would say, because that would be doing all I could do. That would be showing my potential. It's like even at that age, they're still trying to get the A."
},
{
"end_time": 1665.964,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1643.575,
"text": " They're trying to do the thing that will bring them the most recognition from society without regard to what would I do well and what would I be happy at and how could I contribute to this world? When I talk to people in self-directed education, that's not the way they respond. They say, you know, I want to be a forest ranger because I love the forest."
},
{
"end_time": 1693.012,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1666.749,
"text": " Or I want to be a mathematician because I've been playing with mathematical puzzles my entire life and I love mathematics. Or I want to be a musician because I've been fiddling around with this and I've gotten pretty good at it and wow, what a career that would be. I could go on and on and I could list dozens and dozens of jobs and you would see that all those jobs are very valuable jobs in our society that people from self-directed education have gone on to."
},
{
"end_time": 1717.91,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1694.138,
"text": " Within the binding walls of curriculum, there's certainly restraint, but there's also a certain safety. When we venture beyond those walls, I'm not doubting the idea of better lands, if you were, better opportunities of knowledge, undiscovered country, if you would, on the front of knowledge and careers."
},
{
"end_time": 1744.036,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1718.387,
"text": " I'm curious what the cost is for the explorers who don't find the Northwest Passage, for the explorers who don't find that delightful countryside of new knowledge, of living their dreams. And there's a certain sense that maybe that doesn't matter. And maybe the act of exploration in itself is meaningful and worth it. But I'm just curious what you think of that cost. If it is a"
},
{
"end_time": 1775.179,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1745.913,
"text": " The Northwest Passage is a very poor analogy. There's only one Northwest Passage, and not everybody's going to find it. But the path to happiness in your career, there's a million different paths. And the best way to find it is to start on what you're happy at right now and continue on that. You know, again, your mind is so focused, because our school system is so focused on this idea of competition, that there are winners and there are losers."
},
{
"end_time": 1805.589,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1775.691,
"text": " And some people are going to get through there and some are not going to get through there. You know, that doesn't happen in self-directed education. Now it's true, it's true that we live in a world in which some people are suffering severely from poverty. We've got to solve that problem. People growing up in poverty don't have the same opportunities for lots of reasons as people not growing up in poverty. And that is, from my observations, even more true if you're going to the standard school system because in that"
},
{
"end_time": 1832.056,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1805.776,
"text": " in that competition, you fall behind and you fail, you get labeled stupid, you become a dropout. When people are allowed to be, when basically what you've set up instead of a school is something that is a rich environment for self-directed education, which is cheaper to set up than a school, then you make things more equal for people."
},
{
"end_time": 1858.2,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1833.899,
"text": " For the people watching, just in full disclosure, Peter, great. I've watched many of your TED Talks and I'm very much inclined to agree and I even showed it to my wife. We're thinking, putting considerable effort into thinking about raising our kid. We don't have a kid, but when we do have a kid or kids,"
},
{
"end_time": 1883.831,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1858.49,
"text": " raising them in an unschooling manner. So when I'm asking you these questions, please know I'm just playing devil's advocate. There are some questions that are lingering in my head. You mentioned that there are hunter-gatherer societies, and you're using an evolutionary model, and then you can think of the hunter-gatherer societies as acting more in accordance with what evolution would want. But then another side of me says, well, evolution also says that what's successful is what's more populous."
},
{
"end_time": 1911.118,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1884.07,
"text": " and less famine and less disease and so on. But these hunter-gatherer societies, although they may be happier, they are more prone to famine and disease, particularly when they come in contact with the West. But then that would, to me, indicate that, well, evolution doesn't care about happiness. It cares about other strategies. And so this pursuit of meaning, which I agree, I totally agree with you on, but this pursuit of meaning can be seen as an evolutionary dead end or relative dead end."
},
{
"end_time": 1937.312,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1911.613,
"text": " And I'm curious, how do you make congruent both an evolutionary model of what is supposed to be successful, agree with the data that the West or other societies are far greater in their success evolutionarily without this approach to unschooling? You're saying that other societies are"
},
{
"end_time": 1965.64,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1937.739,
"text": " more successful evolutionarily than hunter-gatherers, because we've killed off the hunter-gatherers. And we'll continue, if we continue that way, we'll continue killing off one another. Or outgrowing. So that's cultural evolution. And so the question is to me, there's so many ways to look at what you've just"
},
{
"end_time": 1994.326,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1966.067,
"text": " at the question that you've just raised. And my answer to this is, I guess, is so we have one educational system, this top-down forced educational system, in which everybody has to learn the same things and the use of reward and punishment as the means of making you learn it, in which basically children become subservient. Children are taught that you don't know anything,"
},
{
"end_time": 2023.2,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1994.667,
"text": " you have to do what you're told to do in order to develop wealth. That's one system. The other system says, wow, look at this little baby. He's already exploring the world. He's learned language without anybody teaching him. He's learned to talk. He's learned an enormous amount about the physical world by exploring. Wow, what would happen if we just let that continue to happen and we"
},
{
"end_time": 2048.302,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 2023.336,
"text": " supported it by providing the conditions so that this child can grow in this kind of way. And, and we provide the conditions. So, and it's easier to provide these conditions now because we've got the internet, we've got everybody has access to the whole world's knowledge. Let's let them explore that way. And also let's do it in this non-competitive way instead of growing up feeling like this is"
},
{
"end_time": 2072.09,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 2048.643,
"text": " Like, we're living in a dog-eat-dog world. Let's grow up the way that's more natural to people, the way hunter-gatherer people grew up, the way kids naturally want to be. It's cooperative. We're helping one another. You know, which is a better scenario for the future of the world? To me, it's pretty much a no-brainer."
},
{
"end_time": 2096.084,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 2073.951,
"text": " There's a certain sense in evolution too of the Red Queen effect, where you have species competing with one another, so they sort of get into a quagmire of competition, each one being unable to ward off external forces. It comes from Alice in Wonderland, where the Red Queen grabs Alice and says, come on, let's go."
},
{
"end_time": 2123.353,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2096.34,
"text": " Okay. And they start walking, but they're not going anywhere. And so the Red Queen says faster and start running, not going anywhere. And then next thing you know, Alice is getting dragged behind the Red Queen and they're still not going anywhere. They're staying in the same spot. And Alice points that out. The Red Queen says, in my kingdom, you must run to stay where you are. Right. There's a quagmire of competition in that way between species."
},
{
"end_time": 2143.643,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2123.848,
"text": " You know, let me talk about running to stay where you are for a minute because some of my research has shown and it's not really so much my original research as my bringing together other research. Over the last actually six or seven decades, this hasn't happened all at once."
},
{
"end_time": 2172.039,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2144.172,
"text": " Our school system has become more and more weighty to children. We've increased the amount of time they spend in school. We've taken away recess. We've increased the amount of homework after school. We've increased the number of school like activities outside of school. So just instead of just going out and playing, you're being put in adult directed sports or other kinds of things, which are school like where you still are not free to do what you want to do. You're still doing what you're told to do."
},
{
"end_time": 2197.09,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2172.739,
"text": " In all of these activities, they're all kind of competitive, if not fully competitive, where you're kind of being judged and evaluated. Over this same period of time that this trend has occurred, and this is a period of my lifetime. So school, when I was a kid, school was nothing as nowhere near as stressful that it is today, nowhere near as time consuming as today."
},
{
"end_time": 2225.23,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2197.415,
"text": " Kids in the 1950s, when I was a kid, spent more time outdoors playing with other kids, like hunter-gatherers do, than they spent in school. No longer true. No longer true. So over this time that we've seen this change, there have been huge, well-documented increases in all kinds of psychopathology among school-aged children and young adults. Huge increases in depression and anxiety,"
},
{
"end_time": 2255.93,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2226.34,
"text": " suicides among school-age children, which, of course, is the tip of the iceberg. And this is not that we're diagnosing things differently. My data are based on standardized questionnaires that have been given in unchanged form over the years, such as Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory Scale for Depression. By that scale, the rate of depression among school-age children is now about 10 times what it was in the 1950s."
},
{
"end_time": 2284.684,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2256.425,
"text": " Similarly, there are scales for anxiety, indicating that rates of anxiety are something like 10 times what they were in the 1950s. I've asked anthropologists, does anxiety and depression even exist in children in hunter-gatherer cultures? No. They don't see it. They never see it. We are hurting children. By some data, 30% of American school children have suffered from anxiety at clinically significant levels"
},
{
"end_time": 2311.493,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2285.742,
"text": " There was a study done by the American Psychological Association a few years ago in which they assessed, called Stress in America, in which they polled Americans about the degree of stress they're experiencing in the past week. And the most stressed out people in America are teenagers in high school. The most stressed out. And 83% of them attribute their stress to school."
},
{
"end_time": 2340.128,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2312.193,
"text": " This is what we are doing to our young people because of our inane belief that the goal is to increase their test scores. And that happiness gets second shovel. How do skills deal with this? Not by decreasing all the drill, not by increasing recess, not by decreasing the hours so the kids can spend time playing,"
},
{
"end_time": 2369.616,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2340.503,
"text": " but by adding more and more therapists. For sure, there's a sense that these are sort of bandages to an otherwise deeper wound. This expansion of competition above sort of the organic play that we would otherwise see, I'd imagine, in these other societies is, if you were colonizing more than just recess, but also sports, games,"
},
{
"end_time": 2398.933,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2369.991,
"text": " mental institutions of play, such as chess competitions, things of that nature. What effect does this assessment of games, this competitive assessment of these sort of structured play games have on students? Does this fit what you were saying about education becoming more institutionalized, play becoming more institutionalized? Absolutely. So let me give you an example."
},
{
"end_time": 2426.544,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2399.531,
"text": " When I was a kid, I played a lot of baseball. So here's how I played baseball, just like all the other kids in the towns that I lived in. You'd go out to the vacant lot. There'd be a bunch of other kids there. There's no manicured field. There's no adults in sight. You go to the vacant lot. Somebody's got a bat. Somebody's got a ball. It might or might not be a real baseball. Some people have gloves."
},
{
"end_time": 2453.814,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2427.312,
"text": " Some of them are big kids who are good baseball players. Some are little kids. There's a few girls who throw like girls back in the 1950s. Most girls threw like girls, right? And so you got to make a team out of this. You got to choose upsides, right? So you choose upsides. You create the ground rules. You know there's a busy street over there. Anybody who hits it into the street, automatic out."
},
{
"end_time": 2468.473,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2454.258,
"text": " Windows in the house over there anybody who bats it towards those windows automatic out there's big Billy who can clobber the ball. He's got a bat left handed with a broomstick There's little Timmy, you know"
},
{
"end_time": 2496.254,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2469.172,
"text": " Anybody who pitches hard to little Timmy is going to get teased mercilessly. What are you doing to this little kid? You know, pitch softly to him. So think of the lessons that are being learned in that, that are so much more important than baseball itself. You're learning how to create an activity. You're learning how to create rules. You're learning how to negotiate differences."
},
{
"end_time": 2522.483,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2496.817,
"text": " you are learning how to cooperate because if you don't cooperate you're learning how to keep your playmates happy because if you don't keep them happy they're going to go home and the game is over right and you got to keep the kids on the other team happy just as much as you have to keep the kids on your team happy if it's a lopsided score the only thing you know is well you didn't choose up teams right let's put big billy over in the other team now right so"
},
{
"end_time": 2548.49,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2523.746,
"text": " Nobody cares who wins or loses. Everybody cheers wildly when their team makes a point because that's the goal of the thing is to make scores. But in the end, nobody cares. There's no trophy on the line. There's no parents there watching you. Thank God. So that's the way we played baseball. And there's a lot of lessons. That's the way kids have played, whether it's baseball or anything else throughout human history."
},
{
"end_time": 2573.166,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2549.172,
"text": " And that's how kids have learned to cooperate, it's how they've learned to pay attention to whether they're playmates or enemies, it's how they've learned to negotiate, it's how they've learned to take initiative. So how do you play baseball today? Even little kids, even toddlers I've seen in their uniforms, ridiculous, right? I mean, what sense does that make? Kids are going out and playing baseball as if they're"
},
{
"end_time": 2603.78,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2574.002,
"text": " as if they're major leaguers. They're in uniforms, they're at this manicured field, the coach is telling them what to do, they're not making up what to do, most of them are sitting on the bench most of the time instead of running around as kids should be doing. None of what you learned in the pickup game as baseball is being learned. It's not a bad place to learn baseball if your coach is good, but how many of them are going to go on and need baseball scores to live a happy and meaningful life as opposed to how many are going to"
},
{
"end_time": 2628.541,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2604.343,
"text": " When it comes to this age-mixed play,"
},
{
"end_time": 2650.094,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2628.951,
"text": " Let's say that someone listening has a kid or a couple kids and they are convinced and they're like, I want Peter Gray's model of unschooling. I'm going to do that or at least homeschooling. But they, they don't know how to encourage play with people who aren't just within the family because as soon as you allow your kid to go outside, there's a lack of other kids."
},
{
"end_time": 2680.111,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2650.776,
"text": " Right. How do we solve this in absence of a large scale policy change? How do individuals solve that? Do they join a Facebook group for unschooling? That's a very serious problem in our society today. And I hear from many, many parents, I want my kid to go outside. I'll send him outside. And there's two problems with it. One is the one you've just described. So my kid goes outside and there's nobody to play with. You know, the truth of the matter is some people think kids love the great outdoors. They don't particularly love the great outdoors."
},
{
"end_time": 2708.865,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2680.606,
"text": " what they love is other kids to play with. And if there's nobody else to play with out there, who can blame them? They'll get on their iPhone or smartphone and communicate with their friends in the only way they can, or they'll go back in and beg to come back in. So that's one problem. And the other problem, at least in the United States, is there's a decent chance that if your kid is outdoors and you're not there watching your kid,"
},
{
"end_time": 2739.77,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2709.923,
"text": " Somebody's going to call the police. There's a positive feedback loop of unsafetiness, because the less kids there are, the less safe they are, and then that increases the chance that... That's true, but you get called even when there are kids. So there are cases of siblings playing together who have been called upon. And when I was a kid, you could play outdoors without other people, and it was less safe then than it is now. There is less crime now in America than there is now of all kinds."
},
{
"end_time": 2769.718,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2740.452,
"text": " So we have greatly exaggerated the dangers out there. The thing that most parents are afraid of, that somebody's going to come along and molest their child, or kidnap their child, or even murder their child, these crimes almost never happen. They happen, but they don't happen outdoors. They're not strangers on the street. When those things occur, it's relatives, or priests, or teachers, or"
},
{
"end_time": 2795.333,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2770.213,
"text": " Very, very rare. Somebody calculated that you would have to leave your child on the worst corner, supposedly worst corner in New York City for something like 500,000 or 50,000 years. I don't remember the exact number, but a huge number. Before on a statistical basis, somebody would take it, come and snatch your kid away. It's rarer than being hit by lightning. So we have greatly exaggerated that danger."
},
{
"end_time": 2825.52,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2795.606,
"text": " And so what has happened is because of public service policies that were designed to protect children that really came into effect in the 1980s and 90s in the United States at least now have become standard policies and they have and you are labeled as a negligent parent if you if you give your child the same freedom that basically all families gave to their children when I was a kid and even when my son was a kid, which was"
},
{
"end_time": 2839.172,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2826.049,
"text": " Today,"
},
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"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
},
{
"end_time": 2886.442,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2857.961,
"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business, so that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence."
},
{
"end_time": 2902.807,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2886.442,
"text": " It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything."
},
{
"end_time": 2932.09,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2902.807,
"text": " If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. You can't you can't do it. And so that's so these things have to change. So I'm I'm part of an organization called the Let Grow"
},
{
"end_time": 2961.493,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2932.312,
"text": " a non-profit organization. Lenore Skanezy, who's the president of that, wrote the book Free Range Kids, is the primary person in this organization. But we're working with whole communities to try to change policy. We're working with schools, standard schools, to bring age-mixed play into school. So there are schools that now have an hour, they call it play club, an hour of free play in which"
},
{
"end_time": 2990.725,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2961.698,
"text": " It's age mix, all classes. This is elementary school, so it's kindergarten through fifth grade. They're playing together for a full hour and using, in some cases, the whole school, most of the school as their playground, the outdoor playground, the gymnasium, the art room, the hallways. I visited one of these schools and there are kids running around in the hallway and nobody's stopping them. There are kids engaged in a little rough and tumble play, nobody's stopping them."
},
{
"end_time": 3018.763,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2991.442,
"text": " These are, we have in some sense taught the teachers who have to monitor that they are not teachers while this is occurring. They are like lifeguards on the beach. If somebody's going to kill somebody else, intervene. But otherwise, let them be. And what they're finding is that it's working out wonderfully. I was a little concerned at the beginning. I thought kids not growing up playing, they might not know how to do it. But I think the fact that there are little kids there who haven't forgotten how to play,"
},
{
"end_time": 3046.869,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 3019.121,
"text": " helps the older kids know how to play. Bullying doesn't occur because older kids are protective of the younger kids, and older kids are nicer to one another when there are younger kids around. This is something I've talked about prior to ever doing this, and there's other research besides my own demonstrating this. So there are things that we can do, but we really have to work more at doing. There are also things that any given neighborhood could do, but it takes somebody with initiative to do it."
},
{
"end_time": 3070.572,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 3047.568,
"text": " So just to give you one example, some years ago, I don't know if it's still going on or not, but in the Bronx and New York, the people living in public housing development, so they're living in poverty and it is a dangerous neighborhood. There are guns, there are drug pushers, and there's a lot of traffic on the street and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 3098.029,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 3071.237,
"text": " But some of the parents got together and they said, our children need to get out and play. It's dangerous for them to get out and play. In this case, they were right. It is dangerous for them to get out and play. So what are we going to do about it? So they got the city to close off the streets during certain hours after school, and they got a group of grandmothers to sit out and drive the drug pushers away. This is Marshawn, Beast Mode Lynch. Prize pick is making sports season even more fun. On prize picks, whether"
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"text": " Anything from touchdown to threes and if you're right you can win big. Mix and match players from any sport on PrizePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. PrizePix is available in 40 plus states including California, Texas,"
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{
"end_time": 3160.435,
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"text": " Florida and Georgia. Most importantly, all the transactions on the app are fast, safe and secure. Download the PricePix app today and use code Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. That's code Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. PricePix. It's good to be right. Must be present in certain states. Visit pricepix.com for restrictions and details. Get off my lawn. So this was their solution to it, right? You know, so"
},
{
"end_time": 3189.121,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3161.169,
"text": " If they can do it, any neighborhood can do it, if you take the initiative to do it. But somebody's got to care enough about it to take the initiative to get together with other neighborhoods. You know, you live in a suburban neighborhood, maybe, and nobody's outdoors, so you get to know the other parents. You find at least some other parents who say, yeah, I remember, or maybe it's the grandparents who remember, yeah, we used to play outdoors. What a great experience that was. Too bad our kids can't do it. And then you say, well, maybe"
},
{
"end_time": 3219.036,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3189.65,
"text": " Maybe our kids can do it and maybe we can work out a system and if we're afraid that something terrible has happened, maybe we can work out a system where we take turns kind of keeping an eye out and we say they have to stay in the neighborhood but they can play freely but there'll be somebody there keeping an eye out to make sure that it's safe enough and then maybe they'll do it and then maybe over time they'll gain confidence that actually it is safe enough, they don't have to keep an eye out. There are people in suburban neighborhoods who have done that kind of thing. So it can be done. What I'm saying though,"
},
{
"end_time": 3245.947,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3219.599,
"text": " is it doesn't happen naturally the way it would in a hunter-gatherer culture, and it doesn't happen naturally the way it did in 1950s America when I grew up. It takes somebody with initiative to create the opportunities for it to happen. You know, it also sounds like we as adults now, let's say 25 year olds and above, are much more socially awkward and socially distanced, especially now, social distancing."
},
{
"end_time": 3275.128,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3246.408,
"text": " So it's in essence up to us to create a community. I don't, we don't knock on our neighbor's door to ask for milk anymore. We don't, we barely know our neighbors. So before we were saying, well, how do we fix it for our kids? Maybe we fix it for ourselves so that we get to know the neighbors and then tell them about these new parenting ideas and say, do you want your kid to be involved in something like this too? Because I would love to let my kid out. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. It's, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 3303.507,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3275.879,
"text": " It's the adults' responsibility. The kids can't necessarily do it. I mean, I could do it when I was a kid. I remember when we moved into a new neighborhood, I was... I talk about this in my book, Free to Learn. I was five years old and I said, we moved to a new neighborhood. I was missing my friends and my mom said, why don't you just go knock on the doors and see if there's anybody your age living there? So I did that all by myself. I knocked on doors."
},
{
"end_time": 3329.974,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3304.053,
"text": " And I found right across the street this little girl, Ruby Lu, we became best friends and I tell this story about that in my book. Kids can't probably do that now, but at 25 you ought to be able to do it. One of the questions we have for you is about David Sloan Wilson's book, This View of Life."
},
{
"end_time": 3359.77,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3330.213,
"text": " He advocated for age-mixed play as well. When you look at the Sudbury Valley School and you see this age-mixed play, would you say this is more akin to hunter-gatherer societies? Did they have rites of passages that were, if you would, harsh breaks and segmented, that segmented their population in terms of who got to play with who, or is it just something more collective in that?"
},
{
"end_time": 3390.009,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3360.265,
"text": " Yeah, well, so in hunter-gatherer cultures, all the play was age-mixed. I mean, because first of all, the bands are small enough that even if you wanted to segregate by age, there wouldn't be enough of a group to play with. It was a similar thing in neighborhood play when I was a kid. You know, you played the neighborhood, you know, to get that baseball going, you had to play with kids of all ages. There weren't 18 people who were within a year or two of your age. So even if you wanted to self-segregate that way, you couldn't do it, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 3419.735,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3390.708,
"text": " So age-mixed play was the norm throughout human development. Play evolved in a context, the whole drive to play evolved in a context in which social play was always age-mixed. It was basically never age-segregated. Age segregation came about with the shift from small schools to large schools and then this, as you described it later on, the factory model, the idea that education is like an assembly line. You move the kids from"
},
{
"end_time": 3448.763,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3420.128,
"text": " step one to step two to step three and then you age you know in step one you add a certain component of knowledge you move them on to grade two add another component of knowledge and so on and so forth and then over time because of the school model we've gotten used to that we've got we've developed the absurd idea that children only the children's peers are those kids who are the same age that that's who they who their natural playmates are the same age so we invite only same-aged kids to the birthday parties those are the kids they know"
},
{
"end_time": 3476.374,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3449.002,
"text": " Little League sports, adult-directed sports are age-graded and age-segregated and so on and so forth. Even developmental psychologists have done almost, aside from my work, have done almost no study of age-mixed interactions among kids because it's as if we live in a world, and to some degree we do, where there are sort of two groups that kids interact with, those who are the same age and those who are adults."
},
{
"end_time": 3504.053,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3477.142,
"text": " So, but this is an artifact of modern times. This was never true historically. When it comes to certain skills like, let's say, the throwing of an arrow or certain physical skills, I can imagine that a kid would learn naturally an aged mixed play, and they would say, okay, I have a proclivity for this. Let me investigate and learn further about how to hunt, for example, or gather."
},
{
"end_time": 3532.056,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3504.974,
"text": " For abstract skills like mathematics, you mentioned mathematics or computer science. I'm not talking about just playing with your iPad. I'm talking about coding or programming. How is a kid supposed to play and, and learn that? Now I studied some, some math, but it's not like when I was a kid, if I was around other kids, I would notice, Oh, that person is studying math. Maybe I should study math. It wasn't like that. We'd play tag."
},
{
"end_time": 3557.892,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3534.087,
"text": " Yeah, of course you're not going to be attracted to somebody studying math. That's the most boring thing in the world. But suppose you are attracted to somebody who's playing mathematical puzzles. Suppose you see some kids who are just enjoying playing with mathematical puzzles, or they're playing these games that involve mathematics. So you might get attracted to that. I know quite a few kids."
},
{
"end_time": 3587.398,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3558.524,
"text": " Or suppose you're playing computer games. These days, most kids are playing computer games. And a lot of those computer games involve math. I heard from a mom. So I did this little study, informal study. It's not something I could publish because it was sort of a self-selected group in which on my Psychology Today blog post, I put out a request to parents who have kids who are either being unschooled or going to a school like Sudbury Valley where math is not being taught."
},
{
"end_time": 3609.292,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3588.029,
"text": " who've never been taught math. And I asked, so how have your kids developed the basic math skills? How have they learned adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, you know, that kind of stuff. And it turns out, and in fact, this is also my observation, everybody learns those skills because they're part of everyday life. If you're engaged in activities,"
},
{
"end_time": 3638.865,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3609.497,
"text": " So we talk about the survival math that you need in order in your daily life. You learn it because it's part of your daily life. You don't need to be taught in school separately. So what about kids who go beyond that? First of all, why would everybody need to go beyond it? There's no need to go beyond it unless you've perceived a need. And if you perceive a need, there's so many ways to learn it. And some kids are perceiving a need because they're playing computer games for which there's a need. So one of the moms said, so my"
},
{
"end_time": 3669.121,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3639.138,
"text": " My child, I think she said he was 10 years old, is playing this computer game that involves several different currencies and he has to be able to translate from one currency to another. It involves earning compound interests for certain investments. He has to calculate compound interests and he's doing all of this. You know, what fourth grader, this is what he would be in if he was in school, would be doing that stuff and understands it."
},
{
"end_time": 3691.118,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3669.838,
"text": " But he's learning it in this computer game. Of course, people think computer games are next to the devil, but the fact of the matter is that kids are learning amazing stuff in these games. It's also the case that kids are playing all kinds of games in our culture for better or worse, and whether you're really playing them hard-nosed competitively or not involves keeping some kind of score."
},
{
"end_time": 3721.015,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3691.92,
"text": " So even in Candyland, you're counting things off, or you're calculating totals if you're playing a card game, or if you're playing baseball and you're interested in your batting average, you're calculating a batting average, or even if you're following baseball, you're trying to understand the batting average of the players and so on and so forth. If you're cooking, you need to cut a recipe in half. So in all of these activities, you're learning that math. Now suppose you need"
},
{
"end_time": 3751.067,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3721.817,
"text": " Suppose you need higher math. Suppose you need... So we operate on the assumption, which is a stupid assumption, that everybody has to learn algebra, trigonometry, maybe calculus, because someday maybe they'll need it, right? We all learned... I mean, I imagine that you studied quadratic equations as I did at some point in high school."
},
{
"end_time": 3772.944,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3751.578,
"text": " You know, I've done these things as have other people. I'll ask a whole audience of adults. So do you remember quadratic equations? Everybody raises, yeah, I remember quadratic equations. Does anybody know what a quadratic equation is? Have you ever used one in your life? Nobody. Maybe there'll be one person out of a hundred who'll raise their hand."
},
{
"end_time": 3784.428,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3773.865,
"text": " You know, and first of all, nobody even understood the quadratic equations when they were being taught and it was just a formality that we put people through because we think it's good for them to torture them in this way."
},
{
"end_time": 3811.049,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3785.026,
"text": " So we do all this and it's useless. Listen Jerry, I don't want to overstep my bounds or anything. It's your house. It's your world. You're a real Julius Caesar. But I'll tell you how I feel about school, Jerry. It's a waste of time. A bunch of people running around bumping into each other. Guy up front says two plus two. People in the back say four. Then the bell rings. They give you a carton of milk and a piece of paper that says you can go take a dump or something. It's not a place for smart people, Jerry."
},
{
"end_time": 3837.705,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3811.049,
"text": " Now, I've even asked scientists. So I've asked scientists who use math. So did the math you learned in school help you become a good scientist? Pretty much they all say no. The math I use is the math I've had to learn in relationship to the problems I work on here. It's not quadratic equations. It's not what I learned in high school. It's the math that I need to know now. There's two times to learn anything."
},
{
"end_time": 3867.585,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3838.422,
"text": " One is when you are so curious about it that you can't stop yourself from learning it. Nobody can stop you. And the other is when you need to know it. And today, fortunately, we're in a world where almost no matter what you need to know, you can learn it so much more efficiently than you ever could in the past. You can find YouTubes on it. You can find a lecture by the world's expert on it."
},
{
"end_time": 3895.845,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3868.046,
"text": " You don't have to go to college. You don't have to spend all that money. You don't have to go to school for this and be drilled in all kinds of stuff that's irrelevant to you. Whatever you need to know, you can just hone in and learn it. The philosopher of education, Rudolf Steiner, created a school, a Waldorf tobacco factory building."
},
{
"end_time": 3924.735,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3896.288,
"text": " It was the birthplace of Waldorf schools, schools that followed his philosophy. And Waldorf teachers for early childhood education, I'm not going to say they don't do much, but they have a very laissez-faire hands-off policy towards the children. The children interact in unstructured play. There's a sense that it isn't about instruction, but rather you unleash human potential and that students will figure out themselves"
},
{
"end_time": 3946.391,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3925.128,
"text": " morality in this way you know through the negotiations of play they will figure out how to interact with their peers of their age groups younger or older and also their their teachers and the teacher models instead that's the form of instruction instead of you sit everyone in rows and we teach them"
},
{
"end_time": 3974.241,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3946.732,
"text": " If the teacher wants the students to play with blocks, the teacher will go amongst, like an anthropologist, amongst these young students and then just start playing with the blocks. And lo and behold, the other students will look at this teacher, understand what they're doing, and then seek to imitate or to model. Is there a sense that getting students to go to something like a co-op or a"
},
{
"end_time": 4003.729,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3974.428,
"text": " you know, sending them to a place where they can learn directly under facilitators or instructors who are in the field that they want to go to. Is that better than maybe sitting in a classroom? Yeah, so you know the the schools that I study that have looked at such as the Sudbury Valley School go much farther than Waldorf schools or Montessori schools and that"
},
{
"end_time": 4030.776,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 4004.275,
"text": " Because in Waldorf and Montessori schools you still have the sense, there's still the understanding that teachers ultimately are responsible for children's learning and that children are supposed to be learning certain things and so you set up, you know, like they have certain kinds of materials there because those materials are supposed to be materials for learning certain kinds of lessons and the teachers tend to try to draw the students interest towards"
},
{
"end_time": 4057.227,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 4031.118,
"text": " The things that the school has decided are important things for the children to learn at that stage. Plus, you've got all these children, pretty much, although there's more age mixing, especially in a Montessori school than there is in a regular school, you've still got a lot of age segregation. You don't have teenagers and little kids all interacting together. So the schools that I'm most interested in, that I've studied, are schools where you've got kids aged four on through teenage years,"
},
{
"end_time": 4083.2,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 4057.517,
"text": " just as you do in hunter-gatherer culture, you've got kids of all those ages interacting with one another, learning from one another. And then you don't need that much adult involvement because the kids are, you know, like you walk into a Sudbury Valley school and the teenagers will be reading to little kids, not because they're trying to teach the little kids reading, but just because teenagers love to read to little kids. You know, and you'll find kids playing games with one another where one of them knows how to read and the other doesn't. And as part of the"
},
{
"end_time": 4104.906,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 4083.609,
"text": " Just to make the game go on, the one who knows how to read is kind of pointing out how to read to the one who doesn't. So this kind of teaching occurs very naturally when kids are playing and exploring together in an age mix situation. So the Montessori classroom or the Waldorf classroom is much more artificial and that's because it derives from the standard classroom. It's a modification from"
},
{
"end_time": 4133.643,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 4105.486,
"text": " And it's probably no surprise that most people in our culture think it's okay to send your kid to such a school when the kid is very young, but you don't see them going on through high school age, or if they do, they change very much. The Montessori high schools, I'm aware of, are not that much different from regular high schools. So that's the difference that I'm interested in, that I would point out, between truly schools for self-directed education, where"
},
{
"end_time": 4159.394,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4134.633,
"text": " where children, also children not confined to a space the way they are, you know, Sudbury Valley, you can go anywhere in the building, you can go outdoors, you can play in the barn, you can walk in the adjacent woods and so on and so forth, without anybody, without adults watching you. Even four-year-olds are trusted, just as four-year-olds in the hunter-gatherer culture are."
},
{
"end_time": 4183.234,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4160.299,
"text": " So that's the, and yeah, I think that's the kind of environment that's designed for self-directed. There's all kinds of opportunity for learning. The most important opportunity for learning is other kids of varying ages. Those are the group, those are the people that children naturally learn from. Most hunter-gatherer kids are not learning how to hunt and gather from adults. They're learning how to hunt and gather from older kids."
},
{
"end_time": 4213.712,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4184.155,
"text": " and ultimately some of the older kids are going out with the adults. So the adults become kind of the models for the teenagers and their learning, but then the teenagers are models for the 12 to 10 year olds and the 10 year olds are models for the six year olds and so on. And that's pretty much the way it occurs at Sudbury Valley. You don't, one of the things, the schools you've described, the Waldorf schools and Montessori schools, one reason that we don't see many of in the public school system is they're very expensive. You need a lot of teachers per student to do that."
},
{
"end_time": 4241.323,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4214.633,
"text": " Sudbury Valley, you don't. You need fewer teachers, fewer adults per student than public schools do because most of the learning doesn't involve adults. Most of the learning involves kids interacting with other kids or kids exploring things in their own ways. Let me give you an example. One of the graduates of Sudbury Valley who became a mathematician, ultimately a mathematician, I asked"
},
{
"end_time": 4265.947,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4241.732,
"text": " The founder of the school, Sudbury Valley, Daniel Greenberg, was an expert in mathematics. He was actually a physics professor at Columbia University before he founded the school. He left academia very young and went off and founded Sudbury Valley way back in 1968. And so I asked this, at that time he was a young man, he's now a middle-aged man."
},
{
"end_time": 4295.316,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4266.425,
"text": " about his study of mathematics when he was at the school. I said, so I bet Danny Greenberg was a great resource. And he said, well, I may have talked to him once or twice about math. It was pretty much all on my own. And I didn't really need to go to him. I asked Danny Greenberg the same thing. And he said, I seem to remember one time he came to me with something that he had solved and he was interested in sharing it with me. So you don't need, you know, we"
},
{
"end_time": 4319.821,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4295.776,
"text": " The problem is, educational theories are made by adults, and so we think it's all about adults, what adults do to kids. And that's the wrong way to think about education. Education is what kids do for themselves, and sometimes they make use of adults, more often not. One of the most brilliant mathematicians alive, his name is Terry Tao, if you look up his biography,"
},
{
"end_time": 4345.776,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4320.111,
"text": " He wasn't taught by his parents mathematics, nor was he taught how to read. He taught himself, and his parents just encouraged him because they saw he had a pension for it. What I'm thinking is, well, you mentioned that some of these people who have self-directed play, children, they go on to have similar metrics of success, even though you have issues with the word metric. And I was wondering what those those measures were. You said life satisfaction and job acquisition."
},
{
"end_time": 4373.148,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4346.442,
"text": " Although I'm curious, what else is it? Is it life expectancy? Is it similar rates of cardiac arrest? I remember when I did my first study of the graduates of Sudbury Valley School many years ago, and I have to admit this was not a disinterested study. I was concerned about the results because my son had recently started as a student at the school."
},
{
"end_time": 4401.22,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4373.933,
"text": " And so I wanted to make sure that he wasn't cutting his options short if he were to stay at that school through what would be his high school years. So I did a study of the school, and what did I have in mind? I wanted to make sure that there weren't a lot of the, if a significant portion of the graduates were in prison, or they were in mental hospitals, or they were homeless,"
},
{
"end_time": 4426.135,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4401.817,
"text": " or they were living in their parents' basement, which wouldn't be a disaster, but I didn't want that. Then I would have tried to do whatever I could to get my kid to go to a more regular school, but I did not find that. I found that they're employed, they're earning their own incomes. At the same rates as people."
},
{
"end_time": 4452.671,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4427.193,
"text": " At the same rates, at the same levels as people who weren't, who weren't directed in their education? I didn't do that kind of comparison. And also, to be honest, it would be impossible. You can't do a really scientific study here. Let's admit that. To do a scientific study, you'd have to randomly assign a group of people, some of them to Sudbury Valley, some of them to a regular school, and follow them up. You just can't do that with human beings."
},
{
"end_time": 4481.596,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4453.712,
"text": " So it was enough to me to show they're doing okay. What I can say is I believe they're doing better. I can't prove that to you statistically. I can't prove that to you statistically. And I can also say they're doing okay regardless of the reason they came there. Some of them came because they were failing in public school. Some of them had learning disorders. Everybody gets diagnosed with some kind of a learning disorder these days. Some of them had learning disorders, dyslexia."
},
{
"end_time": 4502.142,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4482.073,
"text": " And they came to the school and learned to read, you know, because there was no longer the pressure on them. They were learning to read because now they wanted to learn to read and they were free to learn in their own ways. These observations were absolutely eye-opening to me. I can't prove it statistically because what you can always say"
},
{
"end_time": 4532.449,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4502.654,
"text": " So even though it's a fairly economically diverse group, not a particularly racially diverse group at this school because it's kind of in a suburb that there isn't a lot of racial diversity. And also because at least at that time in the study, most people who were not sort of the typical whites of that neighborhood were not interested in being different in yet some other way by sending their kid to such an unusual school. That's changing, by the way. There are more and more in the United States, more and more people of color"
},
{
"end_time": 4557.466,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4532.91,
"text": " choosing self-directed education precisely because they see it as a movement towards liberation. That's a little bit of a digression. But the point is, people who were doing badly in public school, people who were doing well in public school, I couldn't see a difference between how they were doing. Those who wanted to go on to college, imagine this. I thought at least there would be some handicap in going on to college."
},
{
"end_time": 4578.148,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4558.08,
"text": " You've never taken a course, let alone the courses that the colleges claim are required for you to get there. You don't have any record of grades. You've never taken a test unless you took what in the eastern part of the United States would be the SAT test if you're going on to an elite college that requires that."
},
{
"end_time": 4607.159,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4579.241,
"text": " and yet they're getting in, including in some cases to elite colleges, without ever having done any of what people think you have to do to go on to college. And they're not only getting in, but they're succeeding in college. This was very eye-opening. So what should be, you know, where should the burden of proof be? Should the burden of proof be that, hey, freedom, should the burden of proof be on the method of freedom?"
},
{
"end_time": 4635.93,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4607.363,
"text": " You have to prove that freedom is better than enslavement before we choose freedom over enslavement. You have to prove that, or should the burden of proof be the other way? You have to prove that the standard system of forced education, where children have no choice but to go to school, where they have almost no freedom within the walls of school, where all their basic human rights are being violated in school every day,"
},
{
"end_time": 4658.046,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4637.875,
"text": " My view is that's the system that should have to prove itself before we put people into it. The system that says, let kids be and let's support their being. Let's provide them with what they need to learn. Let's not force them to learn to read. Any view of democracy says,"
},
{
"end_time": 4687.807,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4658.712,
"text": " You institutionalize people only if you can prove that they need institutionalization. Nobody has ever proved that kids need to be in school to succeed. You know, I can see the approach working for kids who want to grow up or kids who do grow up to be entrepreneurs or some job where they have an internal locus of control being important or vital to it. Though I'm wondering,"
},
{
"end_time": 4715.811,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4688.131,
"text": " for a kid who's never felt much discipline or structure from an external source, how is it that they can go on? How do they, you say that they fare similarly when it comes to a job, when it comes to a job acquisition, but, but I'm wondering how, how the heck, how does, how does that happen if they. Okay. So let's step back to your idea of growing up with no discipline or structure. It's impossible to grow up without discipline and structure."
},
{
"end_time": 4743.626,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4717.039,
"text": " Play is one of the things when I talk about play is it's always structured. There's no such thing as unstructured play. All play involves rules. All play involves you've got something in mind you're doing and there's a set of rules implicit or explicit for achieving what it is you're doing. You're building a sandcastle. You're not randomly piling up sand. You're creating something structured. You've got a structured activity in your mind."
},
{
"end_time": 4769.753,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4744.036,
"text": " You're doing it with other kids. You're talking about it. You're making sure that you're both in agreement about what this sandcastle is about. So it's not Lord of the Flies. You're playing, you know, Lord of the Flies, I've got to remind people, was fiction. There's a great new book out. I'm not thinking of his name, a Danish author. The English translation just came out, and he describes"
},
{
"end_time": 4795.299,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4770.162,
"text": " the real story of Lord of the Flies. There was a real case of teenagers being left on an island. They cooperated. They helped one another. They saved themselves by doing so. Everybody thinks Lord of the Flies tells something about human nature. Maybe it tells about the nature of British prep school kids."
},
{
"end_time": 4819.002,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4795.64,
"text": " at that time who've learned to be bullies. And that's who it was, you know, British boarding school kids. Maybe it would be true for them. I don't know. I don't think it would even be true for them. But we have this thing. Almost the sophisticated thing is to believe that human beings are naturally competitive and fierce and dog-eat-dog and"
},
{
"end_time": 4842.671,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4819.497,
"text": " And therefore, if you don't impose rules upon them, everything's going to fall apart. The truth of the matter is, or look at the lost boys of Sudan who saved themselves. By cooperating, helping one another, and so on and so forth, the stories are endless of how children without adults help one another instead of defeat one another."
},
{
"end_time": 4871.698,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4843.063,
"text": " And yet we use Lord of the Flies. In the end of the novel, the soldier who finds lost boys on the island is meant to sort of reflect, at least in Golding's conception, human nature. It's interesting here how you're saying that kids, in essence killing each other on the island, represents the tyranny instilled by society's nature as opposed to the reverse. You know, schools have been used in a way to instill all sorts of ideological, let's say,"
},
{
"end_time": 4897.91,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4872.312,
"text": " world views from higher authorities, whether it be corporate world views in the initial creation of public education, or Napoleon's license, Napoleon's high schools, so that students would be trained as enlightened French citizens. Could this type of, let's call it, not necessarily programming, but directed instruction be"
},
{
"end_time": 4926.323,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4898.439,
"text": " possible in the schools that you are proposing in Sudbury Valley for example or is Sudbury Valley immune from this kind of encroachment? Well I wouldn't say that directed instruction can certainly occur at a Sudbury school but it only occurs if you want it and it only lasts as long as you want it. So I'll give you an example that at Sudbury Valley there are oftentimes"
},
{
"end_time": 4953.217,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4927.039,
"text": " At some point in the year, there's a group of kids who say that they're planning to leave the school and go on to college, and they recognize that they need to take the SAT test. And for the verbal part of the SAT test, there's no problem, but some of them are concerned about the math portion. And what's not surprising is that they will ask for a little course in math."
},
{
"end_time": 4980.367,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4953.916,
"text": " And I've talked to the person who they most often ask. And so he organizes this little course in math for people who want to take it. This is direct instruction, no messing around. He just gives them assignments. He tells them what to do and so on and so forth. But they do it and they learn it very quickly. He says that the typical way it works is that it typically takes him six total class hours. He meets with them one hour a week for six weeks."
},
{
"end_time": 5007.654,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4980.998,
"text": " He gives them an assignment between time, which he thinks takes a couple of hours for them to do. So this is what, a total of six times three hours, 18 hours they're spending on this, as opposed to think of all the hours that kids are typically spending from kindergarten on through high school on arithmetic and math. And by doing that, he says over and over, he's found that the kids learn enough math"
},
{
"end_time": 5038.643,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 5008.916,
"text": " that they can now study the SAT prep book themselves, which everybody studies whether they're going to regular school or not. So that's an example of very directed instruction. You know, there are kids who have been messing around with the guitar and now they want to learn it in a more formal way. They'll take a lesson from a music teacher. So there's a place for direct instruction. Direct instruction is oftentimes the best way to learn something if you want to learn it, but if it fits"
},
{
"end_time": 5068.319,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 5039.121,
"text": " I'm curious my last question. I'm curious if there's a way to apply unschooling your method"
},
{
"end_time": 5097.278,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 5068.712,
"text": " your methodology to us as adults. Yeah. You know, before I answer that, there's one part of your question, your previous question that I failed to answer. And that is that at Sudbury Valley School and other schools like it, there are rules. It's not like there, it's not like this is an anarchy. There are rules. In fact, there's a lot of rules and the rule, but the rules are all made democratically by vote of the school meeting."
},
{
"end_time": 5126.903,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 5097.995,
"text": " So there are rules against littering. There are rules that if you take toys out, you have to put them away even if you're four years old, you're expected to put your toys away when you're done with them. And the rules are created democratically and they're forced democratically. So there's a lot of experience living by rules. And in fact, the rules are taken more seriously at Sudbury Valley than they are in a typical school, but they're democratically created, which makes all the difference. If you had a vote in creating a rule,"
},
{
"end_time": 5154.07,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 5127.261,
"text": " you're more likely to respect that rule. And if you violated a rule and you're tried by a jury of your peers, other kids, you know, this is the way it works at the school, you're less likely to be resentful that some higher authority figure has arbitrarily singled you out for punishment. These are your friends who are telling you, hey, you know, we're tired of you leaving your toys out."
},
{
"end_time": 5180.657,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 5154.582,
"text": " You have to stay out of the playroom for the next two days. That's your punishment. That's the typical kind of sentence that might be given. So don't get the impression that this is chaotic and, you know, the school is very well organized and it's organized because there are a lot of rules. So I'm sorry, I wanted to be sure and answer that previous question. So now tell me the next question again because I forgot. Yeah, yeah, no problem."
},
{
"end_time": 5208.302,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 5180.742,
"text": " I'm wondering if there's a way to apply unschooling to ourselves as adults. Now, there's a book by Cal Newport about the perils of following your passion, which runs contrary to most spiritual and new age advice, which just follow what you're interested in. He says, well, that's true. But also keep in mind that you get most interested in a subject of the cusp of the knowledge, which requires you to spend much of your time reading what is somewhat boring to you. And then you get to innovate at the edges."
},
{
"end_time": 5231.442,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 5208.541,
"text": " So don't follow your passion because if you do, you'll be torn asunder in many ways. So the way that I think about applying unschooling to us as adults would be follow our passion, but that doesn't seem like that's efficacious and I'm curious what you think. I think we apply unschooling every moment to our adult lives."
},
{
"end_time": 5260.674,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5231.903,
"text": " You know, all of our learning, once you're out of school, is self-directed education. You know, you're constantly learning. You've got some new tasks that you have to do, whether it's at work or at home. You know, some of my faucet leaks. Do I go and take a course on how to fix a faucet? No. Even if I took a course on it, it'd be self-directed. I chose to take the course. But no, I look up, I find a YouTube."
},
{
"end_time": 5288.319,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5261.084,
"text": " exactly my kind of faucet. I watch it and they show me how to fix it. Let me tell you another very quick story. I happen to know a biologist who's, you would know his name actually, he's a pretty famous biologist, who is known as an evolutionary theorist and he told me, confided to me that he went into biology"
},
{
"end_time": 5317.039,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5288.899,
"text": " because it doesn't involve mathematics. He loved science but hated mathematics and he said he was always terrible with mathematics. And then at some point he developed an evolutionary theory of something that somebody disproved by a mathematical model. And so he said, oh damn, I can't understand what this person's writing. I guess I'm going to have to learn mathematics. So he set about, you know, learning the math,"
},
{
"end_time": 5343.695,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5317.858,
"text": " And he told me, you know, once I got into it, hey, you know, I could, I could learn it. I could understand it. And he developed a math, I don't know whose model was right, but he developed a mathematical model that proved that the other person's model was wrong and his was right. Well, I tell this story because it's such a perfect example of self-directed education in adulthood. And it's such a perfect example of how the time to learn something is when you need to know it."
},
{
"end_time": 5373.063,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5343.985,
"text": " He didn't need to know any mathematics until somebody challenged his model mathematically. Then he needed to learn it. And then even though he had believed he just didn't have a mind for mathematics, now that he needed to know it, lo and behold, you could learn it. Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on Peacock. I'm going to need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us."
},
{
"end_time": 5387.108,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5373.729,
"text": " So this was all planned? What did you get it to? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All Her Fault, a new series streaming now only on Peacock."
},
{
"end_time": 5416.288,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5388.643,
"text": " On that subject of human beings in adulthood also, you know, getting direct and following direct instruction willingly without coercement and this still fitting the model of unschooling in a way, right? Because it's not coerced, it's willing. You know, there's a certain sense that the rules are something that we do want in a way, right? You were mentioning the rules at Sudbury Valley School as not lawless."
},
{
"end_time": 5443.848,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5416.664,
"text": " There's a line in William Golding's book, Word of the Flies, where the two civilized child, quote unquote, and the uncivilized child, quote unquote, are talking to each other. And, you know, the uncivilized child says bollocks to the rules. Why do we need the rules? And the civilized child says, because the rules are the only thing we've got. It seems that what you're telling me is, well, even in a tribal society, someone would be saying, yeah, we need rules. They're not totally lawless, not totally anarchistic."
},
{
"end_time": 5472.995,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5445.572,
"text": " But with these rules, wouldn't centralization, with these courses that are sort of emergent in these decentralized schools, would centralization sort of come back? Is it sort of inevitable that, you know, eventually, imagine a bunch of Sudbury Valley schools, Okshuit the Nation, and students are interested in having more directed courses, would we see an emergence of"
},
{
"end_time": 5500.06,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5473.439,
"text": " Instructional Hierarchical School Systems. In a democratic school, would it evolve into a... I'm sorry. In a democratic school, to clarify the question, in the democratic school, would centralized school structures emerge? Is there a tendency to centralization from decentralization? I think that there can be, if you don't take safeguards against it."
},
{
"end_time": 5523.012,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5501.049,
"text": " So the Sudbury schools take safeguards against it. It's built into their constitution. And the democratic procedure is a basic part of it. One thing is they eliminate parents from the decision-making process. Parents are not allowed in the school."
},
{
"end_time": 5550.606,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5523.217,
"text": " except when they're just bringing their kids out. They're not supposed to be there. Parents are not part of the school environment day to day, and they don't have any say in how they run the school. In schools that I've observed, which are parent co-ops, there's so much pressure from parents to do certain things and have certain rules, like let's not allow people on computers so much. And so pretty soon you get imposed things"
},
{
"end_time": 5579.309,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5551.288,
"text": " And then the school people, the staff members think, well, the parents are going to take their kids out if they don't do this. And pretty soon the democracy is subverted. I've also seen, and there's going to be people who'll disagree with me on this. And these are some of my best friends who will disagree with me on this. I've seen schools that say, we're not a democratic school. We don't make decisions democratically."
},
{
"end_time": 5609.258,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5579.531,
"text": " our decisions by consensus. We make our decisions by long discussion. I think that evolves into the adults dominating and the adults making the decision. I visited one such school. It actually was in Europe. I was touring some schools and so this was a school very proud of using what they call sociocracy. I think they call it. There's a lot of schools that use this and that means that"
},
{
"end_time": 5637.449,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5609.889,
"text": " So they believe that voting on something is wrong because there's always somebody who loses the vote, right? And they don't want anybody to lose the vote. I will take issue with that. So they want to make decisions where everybody's talked through, everybody's completely satisfied. Who's the they in this? And so this is a... Where is this? Where is this vote? Schools that use this. I'm not going to name the school."
},
{
"end_time": 5664.172,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5637.619,
"text": " but this is a school in Europe, one of several schools I visited that is modeled in many ways after Sudbury Valley, but they don't vote on issues. They use sociocracy. They discuss it out until everybody agrees. I see. So I'm sitting there with one of the staff members who's telling me about all of this and how wonderfully it works."
},
{
"end_time": 5692.858,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5664.957,
"text": " And I'm noticing a couple of the teenagers off to the side and their eyes are rolling. And so I asked the staff member, so can you give me an example of a decision that was made? And she gave the example. So we made unanimously a rule that nobody can use screens except on Friday afternoon. My eyes were raised. I've never seen a school"
},
{
"end_time": 5720.179,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5693.37,
"text": " that purports to be a school where children can choose their own things, where they're not allowed to use screens except for half a day a week, right? And so I looked over at those kids whose eyes were rolling and I said, so this is a rule that you agreed to? And they said, that's not the way we remember it. And suddenly I felt like I was initiating a little revolution right there."
},
{
"end_time": 5747.227,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5720.759,
"text": " So I think that there can be the pretense. So when you're in a situation where you kind of feel like you're just holding everybody back unless you agree, you're a bad person if you don't agree, right? So all the way to the weighty people, including your own parents who might be there. It's a worse kind of tyranny. And you become, you're just holding up the meeting if you don't agree."
},
{
"end_time": 5776.954,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5748.08,
"text": " I think very often what happens is a false consensus. So I think it's much better to vote. So if you have a rule like this, it would be outvoted totally in any school that I know of if it's an honest vote and parents aren't allowed to vote, if it's just the people who are there every day, the staff and the students, and the students always greatly outnumber the staff. No group of students today in their right mind would vote against using screens."
},
{
"end_time": 5800.674,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5777.363,
"text": " It's the primary vehicle for learning today. It's like cutting your head off. But because adults have such a prejudice about it, their weight overflows. So yes, but I think as long as you are clear about it, that this is a democratically operated school and it's in the Constitution and we can't override that."
},
{
"end_time": 5830.845,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5801.903,
"text": " or the school becomes something entirely different from what it was before. It's interesting to me that Sudbury Valley School was founded in 1968, so it's 52 years old. It's still going strong. In that same year, many so-called free schools were founded. All of them went under, and they all went under for a variety of reasons, but one of the reasons is they didn't have clear-cut procedures for making decisions."
},
{
"end_time": 5855.009,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5831.613,
"text": " And the result was that there were endless arguments, there were parents who took over, and the whole concept of it's really the children who are running their lives got lost. So either the original staff members resigned and the school was folded, or the school evolved over time to be really kind of a progressive version of a hierarchical, more traditional school."
},
{
"end_time": 5886.783,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5857.039,
"text": " Thank you, Peter. Peter Gray, appreciate it. Why don't you tell the audience what you're working on next and where they can find out more about you? I'm working on a lot of things at once, but one of the things I'm just getting started on is a new book. The book that I've had out for a number of years is called Free to Learn. And the next book that I'm planning to write, just getting started at is, it will probably be called The Obsolescence of Schooling."
},
{
"end_time": 5905.299,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5887.5,
"text": " So you've got some idea what I'll be talking about in that from what I've talked about here. I'll lay out, among other things, my vision for an educational plan of the future. So that's one thing I'm doing. We need more traditional schools. Yeah, of course. We need that hierarchical model."
},
{
"end_time": 5933.951,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5906.015,
"text": " We need to bring back corporal punishment, actually. I read Lord of the Flies, I didn't realize it was an instruction. And I'm also working on a number of research projects that have to do. One of the projects I think people will be interested in is the idea of libraries becoming the replacement for schools. So libraries are already publicly supported centers for self-directed education."
},
{
"end_time": 5959.633,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5934.514,
"text": " Many libraries are already moving in the direction of more general learning opportunities in the library. And of course, this is all free for everybody. It's publicly supported. So many libraries have maker spaces in them. Many libraries welcome teenagers just hang around and play. And so I've done a study of what libraries are already doing. And the next step is to try to get funding"
},
{
"end_time": 5982.944,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5960.23,
"text": " It's a wonderful project."
},
{
"end_time": 6002.756,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5983.251,
"text": " We look forward to reading your book when it comes out and we wish you the best at, you know, challenging the established understanding of how we should treat our children and innovate. And we want to thank you for the conversation. And thank you for having me on and thank you for asking me the hard questions."
},
{
"end_time": 6025.623,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 6006.476,
"text": " The podcast is now finished. If you'd like to support conversations like this, then do consider going to patreon.com slash C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L. That is Kurt Jaimungal. It's support from the patrons and from the sponsors that allow me to do this full time. Every dollar helps tremendously. Thank you."
}
]
}No transcript available.