Some books you read and think "Yes! Yes! Yes!" Some others, "No, No, No." This one, for me, had parts of both.
The "Yes!" parts:
1) A very insightful critique of traditional education. Peter Gray offers a rare, poignant critique of what is fundamentally wrong with public education in his outline of the seven sins of forced education. As he states, children generally don't like school, and for many good reasons, the paramount of which is that government schools are forced education:
"A prison, according to the common, general definition, is any place of involuntary confinement and restriction of liberty. In school, as in adult prisons, the inmates are told exactly what they must do and are punished for failure to comply. Actually, students in school must spend more time doing exactly what they are told to do than is true of adults in penal institutions. Another difference, of course, is that we put adults in prison, because they have committed a crime, while we put children in school because of their age."
Beyond the denial of liberty, Gray also identifies many other real problems of schools:
- They interfere with the development of personal responsibility and self-direction.
- They undermine intrinsic motivation to learn, and turn learning into work.
- They judge students in ways that foster shame, hubris, cynicism, and cheating.
- They interfere with the development of cooperation, and encourage bullying (in large part by their forced nature and their strict age-segregation.)
- They inhibit critical thinking, because of their focus on getting high marks on very simplistic multiple-choice tests.
2) An insightful analysis why and how play and playfulness can foster real learning. This is the part of the book I loved most: Gray shows, in many examples and lots of detail, how a playful attitude can foster learning. He specifically describes five key attributes of play, which I found illuminating: play isn't just crazy running around, or fantasy. Play, to Gray, is defined by choice and self-direction; it's an end in itself, not a means to something else; it's not crazy chaos, but defined by mental rules the players either design, or freely accept; it draws on a human beings unique attribute of using imagination; and it is characterized by an alert mental attitude that is stress-free. As a Montessori parent and professional, I just wanted to say "Yes!" to each of these, as they so clearly line up with what happens in a Montessori preschool or elementary environment--but many observers think Montessori is all work, because children don't run around, or yell, but instead are rather calm, intent, and joyful in a quiet way. Yet because they choose their activities freely, they learn so much; to them, their learning is play, in the sense identified by Gray in this book.
Gray's advocacy of child-led, mixed-age environment and intrinsic motivation for learning is right on target. This is what education can and should be all about. Yet...
The "No!" part:
Rejection of any structured curriculum. In an insightful chapter on play as learning in early hunter-gatherer times, Gray makes the point that children in these societies learn solely by play, with hardly any direction by adults. Later in the book, he presents the Sudbury Valley School as an example of this same approach applied to modern times. At Sudbury Valley, children run the school. There are no adult-imposed areas of study, no schedules, no curriculum: students freely decide what to do, all day long, every day, without, apparently, much or maybe any adult direction. Adults serve as resources - but only if and when children ask for help. The hypothesis here is that children will naturally learn what they need, that their innate curiosity about the world is not just necessary, but sufficient to enable them to self-educate, provided they have an environment where they are free to do so in the presence of older children and helpful adults.
The question is: while this may have worked for hunter-gatherers, does it still work today?
Gray's answer is an emphatic yes. How could that be, though, when what we need to know in today's modern, conceptual civilization is fundamentally different from the perceptual level knowledge required to be a great hunter or gatherer?
Most of the knowledge hunter-gatherers needed was perceptual level knowledge, ideas about things that are very near to what we can see, hear, smell, things we can perceive directly with our senses, or that are just a few steps removed from direct perception. This knowledge may well have been very sophisticated, as indicated by Gray's review of anthropologist studies, and becoming a good hunter may well have taken decades of study. Yet hunter-gatherer knowledge is substantially different from the very conceptual knowledge needed to really understand the world today.
Philosopher Ayn Rand showed that knowledge is hierarchical, that higher ideas build upon lower ideas, and that in order to understand sophisticated concepts like individual rights, or gravity, or photosynthesis, we need to be able to retrace the chain of ideas that led to the discovery of these concepts. Knowledge is not just repeating back memorized words (that's dogma, and it's unfortunately what happens in most schools today); it's being able to have a first-handed grasp of what, in reality, gave rise to an idea. To know something means to be able to point to the facts in reality that make it true.
In a hunter-gatherer society, pointing to reality to support ideas is very simple. In ours, it's not. Just ask yourself: how do we know that the earth rotates around the sun? What gives rise to the theory of evolution? What is it that makes the US Constitution so unique: what are individual rights, and why do they matter? Most adults cannot answer these questions: they live in a society that calls for conceptual thinking every day, yet they function at the perceptual level of hunter-gatherers, accepting (or rejecting) many ideas without truly understanding them.
This hierarchical nature of knowledge gives rise to the need of educated adults to shape children's education so they can come, over the course of many years, to understand the essential ideas of the modern world--in history, in math, in science, in literature, in language arts. If our goal is to equip our children to be conceptual thinkers, thought-guided actors, it is our role as educators to help train their conceptual minds by equipping them with the essential knowledge and skills they need to thrive in today's world which is fundamentally different from that of hunter-gatherers. Today, we live in a modern, conceptual civilization--which demands a modern, conceptual education.
(I don't dispute that children can self-teach many practical skills for our modern world, like how to operate a computer, or play an instrument, or learn photography or film editing. Many of these are modern-day equivalents of hunter-gatherer knowledge, and playful self-education among differently-skilled peers is probably a great way to learn these skills. What unguided self-education will not do, however, is train the conceptual mind in the systematic, careful thinking that is needed to understand big questions, to be able to tell truth from falsehood, and to maximize the potential to understand and apply conceptual level knowledge to ones life in a principled way.)
The real challenge today is not to abandon curriculum, and letting children play all day, like hunter-gatherers did. The real challenge is designing a curriculum and an educational environment that will enable children to playfully, joyfully learn the conceptual knowledge they must have to thrive in the 21st century and beyond. The real challenge is to bridge the gap between the content-focus of traditional education, and the process-focus of progressive education, and create a third way, which combines the best of the two, and truly prepares children to live in the modern world, as conceptual, thought-guided, joyful doers.
For those who embrace this task, "Free to Learn" is a great book to read, as it provides many insights into the catastrophe that is today's public education, and into the essential role that intrinsically-motivated, playful learning plays (no pun intended) in any truly meaningful educational revolution. Despite (or maybe because of) the "No!" parts, I'll definitely recommend the book to friends and to my colleagues at LePort Schools, where we are working on creating a different educational model, one that is playful and conceptual at the same time.
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![Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life by [Peter Gray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51vRMZ8TbJL._SY346_.jpg)
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Robert Panter
A must read for parents, teachers and grandparents
Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on July 12, 2018
