Why Kids Need More Freedom – Peter Gray on Play, Education & Mental Health
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It’s all about kids today
What if I told you that we are raising kids in a way that makes them less happy, less capable, and less resilient than ever before? What if the very things we do to “help” children—constant supervision, structured activities, and the endless rat race of school and homework—are actually making them anxious, depressed, and unprepared for life?
Peter Gray is the guy who actually understands childhood. He’s an evolutionary psychologist, a research professor at Boston College, and the author of Free to Learn—a book that will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about kids and education. His work focuses on how play, autonomy, and self-directed learning are not optional—they are essential for kids to become competent, happy, and resilient adults.
He’s also the co-founder of Let Grow, an organization dedicated to bringing back free play and independence for kids, and a founding member of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education. His writing on childhood, education, and mental health is a must-read, and you can find his latest insights on his Substack, Play Makes Us Human .
Want to go deeper? Check out his website, for research papers, talks, and everything else he’s done to shake up the world of education.
The Crisis of Modern Childhood
Kids today are struggling. Anxiety, depression, and even suicide rates among young people have skyrocketed in the past few decades. And yet, we live in the safest, wealthiest, most technologically advanced society in human history. How is that possible?
The answer is both simple and painful: We’ve taken childhood away from them.
Kids have lost autonomy. They are constantly monitored, scheduled, and controlled by adults.
They’ve lost free play. Everything is structured, supervised, and optimized for “learning.”
They’ve lost time with peers. The natural, messy, creative problem-solving that happens among kids without adult interference is disappearing.
And here’s the kicker—this isn’t just a modern problem. It’s a fundamental shift away from how humans evolved to learn and grow.
What Hunter-Gatherers Knew That We Forgot
For 99% of human history, kids learned by doing. Hunter-gatherer societies didn’t have schools, homework, or helicopter parents. And yet, their children became competent, capable adults. How?
They played. All day. With mixed-age groups. Without adult interference.
They learned by watching. Nobody taught them how to hunt, gather, or build. They observed and experimented.
They weren’t bossed around. Adults didn’t tell kids what to do. Hunter-gatherers are radically egalitarian—no one gives orders. Kids figured things out for themselves.
And the results? Resilient, self-sufficient, and socially competent adults.
Now compare that to today, where kids are micromanaged every second of their lives and then suddenly expected to function independently at 18. It’s no wonder they struggle.
The School Trap
Gray argues that school, as we know it, is part of the problem. Not because education isn’t important, but because we’ve confused schooling with learning.
Kids today spend more time in school than ever before—longer school years, longer school days, more homework.
They are drilled on standardized tests that don’t measure anything useful.
They have no time for free exploration or play, the very things that build autonomy and competence.
This shift isn’t making kids smarter or better prepared. It’s making them miserable.
What’s the Alternative?
So if school isn’t the answer, what is? The future of education isn’t about doubling down on structure and testing. It’s about moving toward autonomy, play, and self-directed learning.
There are already models that work:
Self-directed schools. Places like Sudbury Valley School allow kids to learn through curiosity and play, not coercion. The results? Happy, self-motivated young adults who go on to do incredible things.
Unschooling. Families that trust their kids to learn organically, following their interests, see remarkable outcomes.
Summer Camp. Yep, you read that right. A well-run summer camp is one of the best educational environments on the planet. Kids are away from their parents, immersed in mixed-age play, learning real-world skills, and solving problems on their own.
The irony? We keep trying to make schools more like work, while the future of work is looking less like school. In a world where AI can handle repetitive tasks, the most valuable skills are creativity, adaptability, and emotional intelligence—the very things kids develop through play.
The Future Is Already Here
The best news? Change is happening.
Homeschooling and unschooling are exploding. Post-pandemic, more families than ever are opting out of traditional school.
Camps and alternative education models are growing. Parents are looking for better ways to give their kids real-world skills.
Even mainstream schools are starting to recognize the importance of play, autonomy, and mental health.
The future isn’t about forcing kids to memorize facts for a test. It’s about letting them live, explore, and figure things out for themselves.
We can’t keep raising kids in a bubble and expecting them to function in the real world. If we want independent, competent, resilient adults, we need to give them back their childhood.
And that starts with letting go.
Thank You!
Huge thanks to Peter Gray for joining me in this conversation and dropping absolute gold on childhood, play, and why we need to get out of kids' way.
Peter, your work has changed the way I think about education, summer camp, and what it really means to grow up. Your insights on autonomy, play, and mental health aren’t just important—they’re a wake-up call for anyone who cares about kids.
Get my newsletter every week.
It’s all about kids today
Jack Schott
Summer Camp Evangelist
Transcript:
Cabin Chat Ep 5
Jack:
Peter, I'm so happy to have you. I'm Jack Schott and today I've got Peter Gray, an old friend and evolutionary psychologist, founder of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education with some other folks and then with Jonathan Haidt and Lenore Schenese started the Let Grow Foundation. He's the author of my personal favorite sub stack. You should all go subscribe. And also the book, Free to Learn, Researcher Dad, just an all around great guy.
Peter, I'm gonna hit you with a tough one, to start off here. You've dedicated your whole life to building kids' back into the culture that we live in today. Why bother spending so much time and money and energy trying to make that possible?
Peter:
That's a good question. You know, I guess...
You know, there some of us who want to make the world better. are various ways that we, you know, it takes a little bit of hubris to think you might make the world better in some ways. And there are various causes that people get involved with. So I got involved with this long ago. I wasn't initially involved in it in a practical way in terms of changing.
I was involved as a scholar, as a researcher. I'm a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College. At this point, I'm no longer teaching, but connected with them doing research. But for many years, I've been conducting research on children's play and got interested also in the fact.
that children's mental health has declined enormously over my lifetime. Since I was a child, children today are far less happy, far less mentally, far lower mental wellbeing today than children did in the 1950s when I was a kid.
And for the most part, it's been a continuous decline, although there's an interesting bump in it that I could talk about later on. I've certainly become concerned with, you know, we're not raising children in our times in a way that allows children to be happy and to have the kind of internal resilience
Peter:
that allows them to deal with the stresses of life. And so to the degree that I'm involved in trying to change the world in some way, I'm trying to bring back those aspects of children's experiences that I think really are the essence of childhood. mean, children are biologically designed to play and explore.
and do independent things away from adults. And I really want to emphasize away from adults. What has happened over time is children can't get away from adults. So they are increasingly over time constantly monitored, directed, controlled, protected, corrected by adults.
And so they don't have the opportunity to learn how to take charge of their own lives, to solve their own problems. They don't have the opportunity to develop the sense that I can do things myself. Things can happen and I can take care of them. And if you don't have that sense, what psychologists call this internal locus of control, that I can do things.
then that sets you up for anxiety and depression. So the things that I've been involved with all have to do with trying to bring more autonomy to children's lives. Trying to develop situations where there's not always an adult in the child's face. Because children need to get away from adults, they need to be in what sociologists used to call a culture of childhood in order
ultimately to become adults. Because it's when adults are not around that the child has to, in some sense, be the adult. The child has to figure out how to solve problems, how to do things. So that's a long answer to a question that I could have answered in a sentence or two.
Jack:
No, so this obviously makes a lot of sense to me. Of course, how could you learn how to make decisions without making them? We need some practice, right? In almost anything we do, we need practice. And I see this at camp all the time. I'm obsessed with summer camp and the chance for kids to be physically away from their grownups for a while. But.
Peter:
Right.
Jack:
You're a evolutionary psychologist, which is a word that I didn't know until I met you. So what does that mean? And how does that, how, what have we learned from hunter gatherers or the past that make you feel like there's a, a scientific argument for, for this, not just Jack goes in the woods with kids and is like, obviously this is what kids need.
Peter:
So evolutionary psychologists are interested in human nature. So, and how that human nature came about by natural selection. And so I'm interested in the nature of human children. What does it really mean to be a child? What are the instincts and drives of children and why are they there? And so that's the framework, the evolutionary psychology framework that I come from.
And so as an evolutionary psychologist, of course, I was interested in and interested in children interested in what are the lives of children in hunter gatherer cultures like? Because during the great bulk of our evolutionary history, we were all hunter gatherers. agriculture only came about 10,000 years ago, which is a speck of time in terms of our evolutionary history.
In some sense, we are the product of hunter-gatherer of life. Now, there were multiple ways of life among hunter-gatherers, I've become convinced. But to the degree that we can tell by looking at modern hunter-gatherers, those that have into rather recent times,
managed to survive living a hunter gatherer way of life in kind of isolated parts of the world. There's really, as far as I could tell, no pure hunter gatherers today. are groups that are still called hunter gatherers, but they've all been influenced by Western cultures in one way or another. But...
Back in the middle of the 20th century, it was still possible for anthropologists to trek out to remote areas of Africa and Asia, South America, and find people that were living almost uninfluenced by modern culture. And so along with the graduate student in the, around 1990, or maybe a little after I contacted
Peter:
10 of these anthropologists who had done that and surveyed them about what they observed in children. I first tried to read everything I could about children in hunter-gatherer cultures, but there wasn't a lot that had been written at that time. So I figured even if these anthropologists haven't written much about children, they couldn't help but have observed children when they were there. mean, children are around. So I wanted to know.
Well, you know, what are children's lives like? And so we gave them a survey, a survey questionnaire to fill out. And among the seven anthropologists, had studied, I'm sorry, among the 10, they had studied seven different hunter-gatherer cultures on three different continents, you know, and quite geographically different from one another and different in various ways. But there are certain similarities among all of them.
And one of the most striking similarity to me, given my interest, was their attitudes about children and the relationship between adults and children. So one of the questions we asked was how much time did children have to play in the culture that you read with, that you observed? And essentially everyone, really everyone, he said,
in various different words, they were always free to play, dawn to dusk. They had very little responsibilities. Sometimes they gladly helped, but it turns out that there's not a lot of work requirements for hunter-gatherers that children can actually do well. Hunting is very difficult. have to, and the kids go along would kind of disturb the hunt. They do engage in gathering, but they enjoy it. You know, that's just part of their play. They engage, they...
They engage in gathering, but they are in their play constantly practicing hunting. They're playing at hunting, not because anybody is telling them to do that, but they just naturally do that. They can see, they look around, they see this is what people do. This is if you're a boy, this is what the men do in our culture. If you're a girl, there are other things that more likely the women do when the girls may be playing at those things. And the other thing that I learned, and this has even surprised me, I've always had a very
Peter:
kind of liberal attitude, some might say permissive attitude towards kids and child raising view, but I was struck by how extreme they are in never telling kids what to do. I can you believe that? Not telling kids what to do. And as I try to understand that,
What I learned both from my reading and talking with anthropologists is that within, so hunter gatherer cultures, these band hunter gatherer cultures are highly egalitarian. They depend upon constant sharing. They can't survive without sharing. So they share food. You may go several days, even weeks without killing anything if you're
hunting big game, but somebody else in your group does. And thank goodness they share with you. And when you get something, you share with them. But they don't just share meat, they share childcare responsibilities, they share information, they share, they really, really the unit is the band more so than the family. They're all, it's like they're all one big family. There may be
there may be anywhere from 20 to 50 people in a band and they share. Now part of, they're also extremely wary, extremely wary of anybody who thinks they're better than the rest of the people. So they're especially concerned about young men.
That's surprisingly they're concerned about any young man who thinks too highly of himself and So they're raising people in a way that you will get shot down Usually through humor if you in any way brag or if you anyway boast or if you if you in any way try to Defeat somebody in some kind of a game no matter what kind of it They have no this only culture a hunter-gatherer culture the only cultures that have no competitive games
Peter:
all their games are cooperative. So they are, the way I look at it is all these different hunter gatherer cultures have independently discovered that in order to cooperate to the degree that we have to cooperate, we have to treat everybody equal. We have to treat everybody as equally important.
and we can't have a competitive kind of attitude amongst ourselves within the band. And part of that, part of not acting like you're a big shot is never telling somebody else what to do. Because when you tell somebody else what to do, that sounds like you think you're better than them, that you know more than they do, right? Now, that doesn't mean that you don't in some subtle way, like if you
If you, as I understand it, I'm kind of making this up, but this is sort of the gist I get from the anthropologists study there. If I see somebody who's, you know, using an axe and they're not using it right. And I kind of would like to help them. I won't go over and say, you're using the axe wrong. Let me show you how. But I might go and start chopping some wood myself, doing it in an appropriate way so that they can see me do it.
I asked them, well, is there any case where there's sort of teaching going on? Like teaching as we think of it, sort of verbal instruction. And what I learned is there is some. So for example, the adults will point out to the kids, so don't eat those mushrooms. Those mushrooms are poisonous. There are certain things that you don't want kids to have to learn by trial and error because if they make an error, that's the end of them.
So those kinds of things they teach them, but they don't teach them anything about how to hunt or how to gather or how to build huts or how to sing the songs of their culture or do the dances of their culture. They have rich cultures, but they just assume the kids are gonna pick this up. The kids are gonna observe, they're gonna play at these kinds of things and they're going to become good at these kinds of things. So from the age of about four, which is
Peter:
The age at which hunter-gatherers regard children as having common sense and don't have to be watched by adults all the time. From the age of about four on through the mid to late teenage years, the kids are spending much of their time outside of the camps. These are nomadic groups, they move from place to place, so they don't have permanent dwellings.
they're basically living at campsites where they build huts and they hunt and gather and then they'll leave to go someplace else. They kind of have a circuit that they go through. So the flora and fauna can kind of regenerate themselves at the place that they were when they go someplace else. So that's the way they live.
And within this context, the children, the other thing is there's no punishment, zero punishment. In fact, to hit a child, what an anthropologist told me, is a clear taboo. It would be in the same category as, almost the same category as murdering somebody, certainly in the same category as incest. You would never hit a child. And the other thing that happens is if they see,
You know, there's very little privacy here. So if they see that, you know, people get angry in such a culture just as people get angry everywhere. And if they see that some young kids' parents are angry and it looks like they might be expressing that anger towards the kid, they'll go and take the child to their hut. Well, that child may sleep in their hut that night rather than with these angry parents. So that's a little bit about hunter-gatherer culture.
The point I wanna make is that the learning that's occurring is primarily learning among the kids. So you've got age-mixed kids, you've got kids from age four on through teenage years playing and doing things together. And the younger kids are modeling themselves after the older kids. And when they're playing in those age-mixed groups, the older kids are scaffolding them up to higher levels.
Peter:
The older kids, some of the older kids may already be going on hunting trips with their dads, if they're males. Actually, one of the cultures, by the way, I should mention that was a culture in the Philippines where women also hunt. And in those cultures, girls are also playing at hunting games. So that's what I observed. Now, the point I wanna make is that,
If this represents a normal childhood, this is the exact opposite of what childhood is like today. It's not the exact opposite of what childhood was like when I was a child in the 1950s. So this is not just a difference between hunter-gatherers and the United States of America in the 20th century and beyond. In the 1950s, I often say,
I had two educations. I had school, but school was not the big deal that it is today. We have greatly increased the amount of time and effort that is required for kids in school. And I can elaborate on that if people are interested. But when I was a kid, first of all, we had five more weeks of vacation from school than kids have today in the 1950s. We've added a full month.
of school year taking it away from summer vacation and another week of school year from what was mid-year vacations. But even worse than that, we've added homework, especially in elementary schools. So the result of this is that kids today are spending huge amounts of time in school. But when I was a kid, we were spending much less time in school. And when we were not in school, we were largely outdoors playing with other kids.
adults were not involved in what we were doing. In fact, adults did not want to be involved. And one of the reasons we were outdoors playing is that adults would kick kids out of the house. Houses were smaller then, much smaller. The average house was half as large in the square foot area in the 1950s as now. And families were much bigger then on average.
Peter:
So you wanted to get the kids out of the house, especially if you were a mom. And so kids were kicked out of the house and there a lot of kids, this was post-war and the baby boomer generation, there were a lot of kids and they were kicked out of the house and you would find kids outdoors. They didn't usually have to be kicked out of the house because they wanted to be out of the house unless in Northern Minnesota it's 20 below zero, in which case the parents, the mom.
as I remember at least once saying, it doesn't matter that it's 20 below, just dress up. So at any rate, that's the, so I spent far more time outdoors playing with other kids than I spent at school. I haven't added it up and maybe far more time is an exaggeration, but I don't think it is. If I include the summer when there was no school and we didn't have school as much and.
The typical day, if you went to school and school ended at three o'clock, you would stay outdoors and play with the kids until supper time and then you'd go home and have supper and then you might go back out again. So that hunter gatherer life where you're interacting with other kids and you're learning how to get along with peers, you're learning how to solve problems, you're learning how to do things, you're learning among other things.
how to take care of yourself. You're learning what some people might call street smarts. You're learning how to deal with bullies. Because there always are bullies. There are bullies among kids, there are bullies among adults. And you can't help but experience it. And when there's no adults there to protect you from it, you figure out what you're gonna do about that. And there are different ways of different kinds of people solve those problems.
In those days, it was possible to get lost because we didn't have GPS's in our pockets. And you'd get lost and you'd find your way home. You would get into trouble and you'd find your way out of trouble. So there was a lot of problem solving going on. were a lot of and this was this was people's own efforts. is so children developed an internal locus of control. They developed this sense that I can solve problems. But over time, since the 1950s,
Peter:
We gradually changed all this. We gradually increased the amount of school. We gradually decreased the idea that children are welcome outdoors. We gradually developed increasing fears among parents that it's dangerous for kids to go outdoors, even though it's not, but people believe it is. So I could run through and one of my substacks, I...
actually list a whole set of changes that occurred in the culture that led ultimately to the situation we're in today where it's almost not too much of an exaggeration to say that children are imprisoned. They are imprisoned in school where more than ever they're told exactly what they have to do.
even more so than prisoners in an actual prison are told. They're micromanaged all school day long. Then they go home and they've got homework and their parents are supposed to monitor that. And so in some sense, they're still in school. And then they're in this situation where the parents are afraid to let them just go out and play. So they have to be with an adult, which means that they're either indoors
or they're put in some kind of an adult directed thing like adult directed sports activity or some other adult directed thing, which is very much like school where they're told what to do. There's an adult telling them what to do. So in some sense, you know, it's not too much of an exaggeration to say that children are either in prison or in home confinement pretty much all the time. And then we wonder why they're not happy.
Jack:
I lived this very viscerally. I grew up in the city of Rochester and up until I was seven or eight, we lived in this neighborhood where my dad would say, go blow some stink off and he'd kick us out of the house and we weren't allowed to come home until the streetlights came on. But we couldn't have been happier. There were, I don't know, dozen other kids in the neighborhood that we would get up to stuff. We'd play games and we'd do stupid things and whatever. We did kid stuff, no adults.
no water bottles. We just went and lived and then we'd come home and we knew enough people in the neighborhood that if we had a real problem, we'd go find someone and they'd help us. And then when I was seven or eight, we moved from the dangerous city to the suburbs where there were no other kids in the neighborhood. And so we'd still get kicked out, my brother and I would still get kicked out of the house to blow the stink off, but there was no other kids around. And it became...
a lot less fun to be outside. know, my brother and I would have enough, some fun together, but it's much more fun with more kids and more stuff going on and sort of more exciting moments that can occur. And so, you know, I distinctly remember this transitioning from getting home from school and being so excited to go outside to trying as hard as I could to be allowed to be in the basement playing video games.
And, you know, and at the time the video games are way less sophisticated than they are now. But, you know, at least I was, I was able to go and find some, something exciting through a video game because there was more going on. You've written recently about the connection between self-determination theory, which is that humans are intrinsically motivated when their physical and psychological needs are met. Their psychological needs are autonomy, belonging, and competence.
and mental health and a version of self-directed time for kids. Can you try to connect that triangle and add in whatever else helps make it make sense?
Peter:
Yeah, so psychologists have, you know, there are actually, you know, literally hundreds of studies that show that regardless of what age you are, your mental wellbeing depends upon the satisfaction of three basic needs. These three basic needs are key to mental wellness. One need is autonomy. You need to be able to make
some of your own decisions and do your own things. Nobody is designed to be a puppet or a slave. So you need some freedom. You need freedom to decide what you want to do and then to do it. So autonomy is one character. The second characteristic is competence. So you not only need to feel free to do things you want to do, but you need to feel
Like I actually am competent to do it. I not only wanna do this, but I could do this. And of course you develop competence by doing things and becoming competent at it. And then the third need is for friends really. The people doing this research call it relatedness, it's really or reconnectedness. You need a network of peers.
And it's good, of course, if you're a kid, it's important to have parents that you're connected with, and it's hard to have adults. But what we neglect is how extraordinarily important peers are to kids. We greatly overemphasize the importance of adults and underemphasize the importance of kids. If you really look at kids at any time,
they are doing everything they can to connect with other kids. Unless the whole idea that they can has been sort of quashed out of them. And there are of course temperamental differences. It turns out I was a very shy kid. It wasn't that easy for me to connect with other kids, but there were always other kids around and I wanted to connect with other kids and I could do it, thank goodness. So connectedness, having somebody, other kids, and this becomes
Peter:
even more important as you become a teenager. Teenagers everywhere, hunter gatherer cultures, 1950s teenagers everywhere, teenagers spend enormous amounts of time hanging out with other teenagers. So they may be beyond, they're not so overtly playing necessarily. They might, they still are to some degree, there's a lot more just hanging out.
with one another. They might be listening to music in the background and depending on what era you're looking at, they might be smoking cigarettes. But the real purpose of what they're doing is they're connecting with one another. And this sense of, know, I've got my people here. I've got these people that care about me and I care about them. And you...
And girls are better at this than boys, but boys have this way of doing it too, of their sharing their thoughts, their emotions, their feelings, their getting advice in some sense, often interact. So they're feeling like they're not alone in this world. Now, I know a lot of parents think, well, of course they're not alone in this world. They've got me, they've got the parent. But here's what we miss. That's not enough. They need other kids. And in some sense,
And I don't mean to diminish the role of parents, but we adults exaggerate our role. We're less important to children's development once they're four years old. Of course we've got to feed them, we've got to, but we're less important to their development than peers are. And that's hard for parents to admit, especially in this day and age. I think in the 1950s it was easy. Yeah, I'm not important. Get out and go with your peers.
But today, it's hard for parents to admit because parents are constantly getting this message of, if your kid's got a problem, then this is what you've got to do. It's all the parents, especially the moms. I mean, we're driving moms crazy with all these messages about what they're supposed to do for their kids. And the truth of the matter is, is the primary thing parents should be doing right now is figuring out how to...
Peter:
to get their kids away from them and with other kids. And that's the hard thing in our culture today. So this relatedness, this sense of being with peers is extraordinarily important. So people, for example, now wonder why are kids on social media so much? Why are teens on social media so much? Well, I'll tell you why. They're doing just exactly what hunter gatherer teens did. They're hanging out with their friends.
They're sharing experiences, they're sharing their emotions, they're gossiping, they're doing all the stuff that teens always have done. But in the past, we allowed them to do it in the real world. And now we've cut off that possibility. So they've found a new way to do it. They're doing it online, thank goodness.
Jack:
And so there's a lot of angst about these things. I'm holding up my phone in the world today. And I don't know what to think about it personally. And I'll tell you my personal struggles here. One, I love my phone. We're on a computer right now talking. And we wouldn't be able to do this without technology.
Techno-optimist, I'm glad AI exists. I can't wait for the world that lets us have more human-to-human time and AI can take care of more of my emails. Please, thank you so much. And then I also, I run summer camp where largely we don't have phones and we're restrictive of phones. We often say, you know, no phones are allowed here for the kids at least. But at the same time, I guess the crux of my question is,
You talked about how a adult using an axe is the perfect opportunity. If they're using the tool of the culture for the child to come over, see what the adult is using the axe for and start to mimic that, whether it's through direct instruction or mostly just watching and trying. And then you said that they might point out poisonous mushrooms or berries and say, don't eat those, those are bad. And so I guess my question is,
How do we balance the phone as both a tool of the culture and as potentially a poisonous mushroom?
Peter:
So, yeah, so the...
So here's, yeah, so the first thing let me say, if I ran a summer camp, I would say no phones at the camp. And it would probably be, I don't know what your experience is, it would probably be the parents who would protest. Because they want to talk to their kids every day. And they're afraid that the kid, well, something will happen to the kid and they want the kid to be able to call them if something happens. So.
My experience when I've talked to camp directors, I've given some talks to camp directors who have asked that exact question. My experience is that at least some camp directors are saying they would love to not have phones, but the parents are insisting that the kids have phones. So that's, but here, why would I say no phones at camp? And the reason I would say that is camp should be a place to be outdoors, to be with other kids. And if you had,
In this day and age, if you haven't had a lot of experience with that, the phone might inhibit you. You might spend your time on the phone instead of interacting with these other people who are right in front of you. And the camp experience should be an experience of interacting with other kids in the real physical world, playing in the physical world, and not just on the online world. So.
That's, and so that should, that should in my mind be part of the bargain, no phones. And I also think there are other places where, where people, where it's quite appropriate to limit phones. So within a family, I think that having a rule that says no phones at the dinner table, and I also think these rules should apply to adults just as much as they apply to kids. I don't think it's fair to say that kids should have these rules and adults in that same environment shouldn't.
Peter:
So the dinner table, nobody is gonna be on technology. Dinner table is a time for everybody to be there in the physical presence with one another. I also think it's a good rule to not take your phone into your bedroom at night. And it's a good rule for adults as well as for kids.
because that phone might keep you awake. You you just might be tempted to look at it, the damn thing beeps and you answer it and then you're up late at night and then you're suffering the next day from lack of sleep. A lot of kids are missing a lot of sleep, partly, partly not just, partly from homework, but also partly from the phones. So there are these problems. I also think that
So this is kind of the analogy to mushrooms. I also think that it's important to point out to kids realistic dangers and to teach safety rules. So when I was a kid, adults did not prevent children from going outdoors, but most adults who were conscientious adults taught safety rules about being outdoors.
So I remember, for example, believe it or not, when I was four years old, we lived in, at that time in Minneapolis, in a very busy street, in a working class district of Minneapolis. And my mother was a single mom at that time. And my grandmother lived with us and she was somewhat crippled. And so when I was four years old, she would send me two blocks away to buy stuff.
in busy, very busy street, area of Minneapolis that some people regarded as a dangerous area. And she didn't think twice, except that she taught me how to do it. The first time I went, even though it was hard for her, she went with her cane. She walked me there all the way and all the way back, showed me how to cross the streets. Then she had me do it by myself while she sat on a stoop and watched me at least as far as she could see me and watch me come back.
Peter:
and she allowed me to buy a popsicle that was the motivation for my doing this. So, and then after that, she would send me, you know, this was actually 1948, she would send me to buy cigarettes for her. So that was my four years old experience. But the point I want to make is she didn't just send me out there. She taught me how to do this so that I would be safe.
And I remember parents even back then would say, even though there wasn't such awareness of it, but parents, least enlightened parents would also give other kinds of advice. So advice like, so if somebody stops their car next to you and they invite you into their car and they're gonna give you candy, don't do it. So there are certain kinds of common sense things.
They also taught us, and this is common sense, if you get lost, go knock on somebody's door and ask for directions. So this is good common safety advice. 99.9 % of people are helpful to children, and if somebody's not, you just go away. So there's all kinds of advice about how to be safe outdoors. Now we...
It wouldn't be a bad idea for us to be teaching kids about safety online. There are certain kinds of things that you shouldn't do. Many teens understand this. They learn it from one another, but not everybody does. And I could run through a list, but you probably can imagine what it is. Anybody can imagine what there is as much as anybody else. But I think it's important to teach.
safety rules. those are the things that I think are key. Taking the cell phone away from the child is no different in this day and age from taking the opportunity to go outdoors away from a child back when I was a kid. You are depriving the child of a major means of play, a major means of communicating with friends, a major meaning of connecting.
Peter:
Among other things, kids use the cell phone in order to arrange how to connect in the real world. They'll say, well, know, I've got this and this and all these things on my schedule, but I've got a little time between this and this. Are you free then? Can we meet in such and such a place? And would your parents let you out? You know, this is a lot of what they're talking about. So some people, I think Jonathan Hyde who wrote this awful book on
claiming that the problem is the cell phone. He believes that somehow you take the cell phones away and then somehow magically the kids are gonna be outdoors playing with one another. But the truth of the matter is, by 1990, we had already pretty much reached the point where kids were not outdoors playing with one another. We had already reached the point.
where most kids were being prevented in various ways from going out freely to play. And it's interesting that, you I talked about the increase in anxiety, depression, suicide, all these rates increased tremendously, about five, the rate of suicide, for example, was about four or five times in 1990 what it was in 1950.
And then interesting, here's what's really interesting that most people aren't even aware of. Between 1990 and 2010, the rate of suicide among teenagers decreased. And so did the rate of anxiety and depression. Not all the way back to 1950s levels, but about a third of the way back. A significant decline, which even I had ignored. Everybody's ignored this. People pay attention when...
bad things happen, they don't notice when good things happen. Why did that occur? This is, I've been looking into every possible reason why it occurs, and there's only one reason that makes full sense to me. The 1990s is when kids got computers. 1990s, in mid 1990s, kids were on the internet. When kids got computers in almost every home, this has been documented, the kids,
Peter:
became the computer experts. You had a reversal of authority in some sense because the parents became dependent on the kids. The kids figured out how to use these newfangled things and they taught the parents how to do it. And the parents became dependent on the kids for how to do this. And so suddenly kids talk about competence. One of the things kids were the competent ones in the family with this new technology. Moreover,
once you had the internet, and by about 1995, most families with teens had an internet, you were playing games with other kids. You were doing the equivalent of going out and getting up a game of stickball, but you were doing it online with other kids. And this is real play. There's no question. This is real play.
It's creative, it is challenging, it is social, it is, and it builds, there's actually been research showing that the games that were most popular are the very games that you would expect would be most likely to promote a sense of competence, a sense of autonomy where there's a lot of choice and freedom within the context of the game, lot of creativity within it.
and connectedness because it was the multiplayer games, the games that you're playing with either with just one friend or a bunch of other people that became the most popular games. So to me, it's pretty clear. And then once you had social media, as I said, now you're hanging out again with your friends and which you need for that sense of connectedness. So I think that's what happened to lead to
Jack:
you
Peter:
an improvement. It wasn't an improvement all the way back to 1950s levels. But then what happened? Why did things get worse again beginning about 2012? So Jonathan Haidt and some other people believe, well, what happened is this was when most teens had cell phones, had smartphones and were on social media and that it's self smartphones and social media that played the role. I really looked into that.
And first of all, there's no significant correlation between how much you're using a cell phone and your mental well-being. This has been shown over and over and over again. In Height's book, there's some cherry-picked data that seems to suggest that there is, but everybody who actually does research in this area says there's not, and I've looked at the research, there's multiple studies. There's also...
Also, know, Jonathan Haidt found a couple of other countries that showed a similar trend of increased anxiety, depression, suicide as smartphones and social media rolled out. The UK is really the only one that's very clearly that happened. But in the rest of the world, almost all the rest of the world, this didn't happen.
The European Union, so the UK is not in the European Union. The European Union, all those European countries, I've looked at the data. If you look at the suicide rate among teens between 19, between 2012 and now, where you see a big increase in that in the United States and a moderate increase in that in the UK, you see no increase in that throughout the rest of Europe.
They were not being deprived of smartphones and social media. They were on it just like our kids were. Asia, look at South Korea. Now, South Korea had a high rate of suicide. At the time that smartphones came around, the suicide rate went down and it stayed down. It didn't go back up again. And I've looked at the data. How are people explaining why the suicide rate went down? And they're explaining.
Peter:
We figured out that our school system is too harsh and we're working on making it less harsh and that seems to be why. There's actually some research studies that show there's a correlation between school pressure and the suicide rate. So what happened in the United States to create that big increase? I'm convinced that the, I think a number of things happened, but I think the primary thing that happened.
is that schools changed dramatically beginning around 2011, 2012. This was when Common Core was adopted by most states and programs similar to Common Core elsewhere. This was all in response to a federal mandate that schools had to submit proof that the students in their school were improving their scores on standardized tests from year to year.
and that whole school systems would be judged on that, and that teachers would be judged on that, and teachers would be regarded as incompetent if the scores didn't improve. So now there was enormous pressure on teachers and on whole school systems to narrow the curriculum, to focus on what's being tested on. And the more pleasant things were taken away.
Recess was decreased even more than it was before. Lunch hour in many schools, I think even most schools was reduced to 20 minutes. So you hardly had time. If you had to go to the washroom and then stand online, there are actually documents where people have observed what happens. Many of the kids at the back of the line, by the time they get their food, the bell rings and they just dump it in the garbage and go to class.
we have sacrificed a normal environment for the sake of test drill. Now school was never the greatest place for kids, but it became a far worse place. I happened to have some first-hand evidence with a sister of mine who was teaching in middle school. And when these changes occurred, she resigned because she absolutely could not teach the way she felt you have to teach.
Peter:
in order to actually be educating kids. You have to engage them. You have to do things that are interesting to them. You can't be just doing test drill. And she was good at that. But then suddenly there were administrators telling her she can't do that anymore. She has to be on the same page as everybody else. And she has to be focused on this test stuff. And I heard from teachers all over the country, many of the best teachers quitting around this time because they weren't going to do this. This was especially true at the lower levels where kindergarten
teachers who say kindergarten should be a place to play or suddenly they're having to drill these poor little kids, making them sit in their seats doing all this stuff. So here's the best evidence that I know of. There's a lot of evidence that I've summarized and I'm actually writing a book on this, but the best evidence that Common Core resulted in great increases in psychological problems with kids.
is the American Psychological Association. Every year does a study called Stress in America. Most years they only do it with adults. they do a survey, a demographically balanced survey across the country in which they assess through self-reports how much stress and anxiety people are experiencing. Now it turned out that in 2009, which was before Common...
and then again in 2011, which is after Common Core, those two years, they decided to include teenagers in their study. And what they found with teenagers is that in 2013, teenagers were the most stressed out people in the country. They were more stressed out than adults were. And...
And they were they're given a list a pretty long list of things that you can check What are what which of these things are important sources of your stress significant sources of your stress? And they could check as many of the things as they wanted to check the most checked item was school pressure 83 % of the kids in 2013 checked school pressure things like family problems were way down the list
Peter:
Things like bullying was pretty far down the list. Things that we wanna say are the problems. School pressure was far and away the highest. The next most common thing checked was fear, worry about getting into a good college or getting a good job. So kids are stressed out about school and they're stressed out about the future of their schooling and they're stressed out about whether they're going to get a good job. We've scared the bejesus out of kids.
And so now that's after Common Core. Now before in 2009, it was still the case that school pressure was the most often checked thing, but it was checked by 50 % of the kids, not 83 % of the kids. So there were other things that were more competitive with school pressure in terms of stressors. And schools and kids were not as stressed out then by their own reports as they were in 2013.
So what happened between 2009 and 2013? Common Core happened. That increased school pressure. There's no question about it. Everybody who's involved with schools and is willing to admit it knows that this is what happened. Now to ignore that and say it's cell phones is really somewhat disastrous because what doing that does is it takes
the nation's attention away from a very serious problem. We began to think, all we have to do is take cell phones away from kids and this is gonna solve the problem and that's not gonna solve the problem. What we really need to do is really rethink what we're doing with kids at school. Kids are spending a lot of their time at school and doing schoolwork after they're in school-like conditions almost all the time.
If we want kids to be happy, if we want kids to be mentally well, we have to make schools and the whole school-like environment kid-friendly. And that means giving them a lot of autonomy, giving them the opportunity to become competent in the things that they wanna become competent at, because becoming competent in things you don't care about doesn't count in terms of mental wellness.
Peter:
and we need to give them lots of opportunity to play with one another because that's how they form connections.
Jack:
And so Peter, most parents are still gonna send their kids to school and kids are gonna educate themselves in a variety of different ways at school and not at school. So I interviewed Seth Godin a few weeks ago who's mostly a marketer and he has a famous Ted talk that is Stop Stealing Dreams. In the beginning of it he asks,
You know, what is school for?
Peter, what is school for?
Peter:
So what is it for or what should it be for?
Jack:
What should it be for?
Peter:
So let me tell you, instead of talking about school, let me talk about education for a minute and then I'll come back to school. So I'm a big believer in education, not a particular believer in school. And so how do I define education? Education is everything that a person learns that helps them in life. That's a very simple definition of education. It's hard to refute that as well.
Isn't that what we want kids to learn? Whatever you learn that helps you in life. Helps you become, helps you live a happier and more contented life, helps you live a more moral life. And also, you know, sometimes they add to that everything you learn that helps not only you personally, but helps society in general, because you become a more contributing person to society. So moral development is part of it, you know? So that's what, isn't that what we want?
So that's what education is. Now, I think most people, if you really think about that as education, will recognize that not a lot of your education occurred in school. That most of your education occurred in life itself. life itself, and especially in play for kids, you're learning the most important things you have to learn.
You're learning how to get along with other people. You're learning how to compromise. You're learning how to negotiate. You're learning how to solve problems because you've got to solve problems. You're learning all kinds of really, really important things. You're learning that you can do things. This is all part of education, but this is not what kids are learning in school. The things that kids are learning in school, there are some things that are really important. In our culture, it's important to be able to read. It's not as important as...
being able to make friends. There are people who can't read who are living very successful lives, you know. Some of them become CEOs and they hire people to do their reading, right? So, but reading is important. of us would agree that reading is important. But you know something, even before we had schools, most kids could read. Reading is not that hard to learn.
Peter:
There are actually studies in the United States prior to emancipation, prior to the end of enslavement, a high number of slaves could read, even though it was illegal to teach them to read, illegal to give them a book. Somehow they learned to read. Sometimes I think if we banned reading, kids would learn to read more quickly. Reading is not hard.
Kids learn how to read. I study kids who are learning in a center where nobody's teaching reading, but everybody learns to read. But they don't all learn to read at the same age. Some kids learn to read considerably earlier and some considerably later than the typical school age for learning to read. But everybody at some point figures out, know, I really need to know how to read. And many kids just pick it up, just like they pick up, especially in this day and age when they're texting and there's so much
so much communication is occurring through the written word. Kids are picking up reading and typing, not writing, but typing on their own very easily. So that's important. Numbers, being able to calculate with numbers, that's important. But where do you really learn that? How many people really remember and use much, if any, of what the...
of what arithmetic or what math they've learned in school. Everybody studies quadratic equations. How many people have met a quadratic equation? I've even asked that of scientists. Have you ever met a quadratic equation? And no, I barely remember what it, I don't even really remember what it was. I know we studied that, but.
So we teach all this stuff that's kind of irrelevant to life and people just forget it. And they actually, part of reason they forget it is they never really understood it in the first place because it's taught in a shallow memorizing kind of way. So school is not the same thing as education. What we need to provide if we want kids to become educated is we need to provide opportunities, not coercion.
Peter:
You don't learn from coercion. You don't learn from reward and punishment. You don't learn from being forced to do things. The primary thing that you learn when you're being forced to study history is, hate history. The primary thing that you learn, I got a glimpse of this when I was teaching freshman psychology at Boston College many years ago, and I would sometimes ask the psychology majors,
So why did you choose psychology to major in? And they said, actually, this literally happens in a couple of cases where the person said, well, know, in high school, I took biology and I learned I really don't like biology. And I took history and I hate history. And I took math and God, I can't stand math. But I never took a psychology course. And I like people. So maybe I'll like psychology.
So, you know, what we're primarily doing, and there's actually research evidence that shows the more courses kids take in science in school as they go through school, the more they hate science. This is literally true. mean, there's studies like this. So why do we think that forcing kids to do this stuff is beneficial? It turns out it's a cruel game that adults have set up. Cruel. Because
the children are the victims of this game. And the game is this, what school or what parent or what school or what school system or what nation can produce the highest test scores in their kids? And the kids are the pawns in this game. The worst thing that happened worldwide for education is the
international PISA tests, where kids across the world in nations that have adopted this all take the same standardized tests in their language. And nations compare themselves and are pride themselves in how high the kids score. And in fact, because we were doing so badly on the PISA tests, that was compared to the East Asian countries, that was one of the reasons that
Peter:
the federal government decided we need to model these Asian countries. We need to have a school system more like theirs. They weren't paying attention to the fact that the suicide rate among kids was through the roof already in those countries. That was irrelevant to their considerations. It was the damn test scores that they were looking at.
Jack:
So the work you do now is to try to understand the current state, understand what happened before us, and then try to paint a potential future. And there's an expression that is something like, the future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet. And so...
What are some examples of what school or education can look like or does look like that is self-determined and supportive of autonomy, relatedness and competence?
Peter:
So there is a certain sense in which the future is here for some people and the future is on its way. And the future does not entail an improvement in our standard school system. We're moving towards the future because an increasing number of families are taking their kids out of the standard school system. There's been an increasing number for
the last two or three decades, but it really accelerated during COVID. So a large number, lots of people took their kids out of school for homeschooling during the pandemic. And a lot of them did not put their kids back into public school. They kept them in homeschooling. So the number of homeschoolers is now, there are various estimates of it, but is somewhere between six and 10 % of American school children.
depending on estimate, probably the best estimate is around eight or nine percent of American school children are being homeschooled right now. So homeschooling can be bad or it can be great depending on how it's done and depending on what the opportunities are for the family. And so I've done studies of homeschooling families that are doing very well and the kids are doing very well.
And so that's one place that I've gotten a sense of. So what's a great system? What's a great opportunity for education? The other thing, even well, many years ago, in fact, in some senses where I got started in this whole thing, I got interested in a remarkable alternative school called the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts. And for anybody who reads my
book, Free to Learn, I tell the story there. And this is something that really changed the whole trajectory of my career. I had been doing brain science in the lab up until then. But my son had been going to school and hating it, absolutely hating it. And it was a fight every day to get him to go to school. And he fought the teachers at school, not physically, but in every other way. He resisted it.
Peter:
He would come, every morning he would say, you know, you're sending me to prison. At five years old, he would say, you're sending me to prison. And I would say, come on. Everybody does this. You can do it. It's not that hard. Just go and do it and do what they tell you to do. But he would resist. He was somehow a kid who was not dispositionally,
And this is still true to him as an adult. He can't do something just because this is what you're supposed to do. He has to see some sense in it. And he saw no sense in doing what they were making him do. And he would find every conceivable way to make it interesting. And the only way he could make it interesting would be to do it in some entirely different way. So if it was solving...
arithmetic problems, he would find some totally different way to solve it. And then the teachers would count it wrong, not because he got the wrong answer, but because he didn't show his work in the right way. And when it came to learning capital letters and punctuation, he decided it was time to write like E.E. Cummings, who the poet who put caps in
punctuation wherever he darn pleased to put it. And so he drove the teachers crazy. I mean, I'm sorry for those teachers. I wouldn't know if I were a teacher, I wouldn't know what to do with a kid like that. So his mom and I were constantly being called in to talk with the teachers. And I think they thought this must be something we're doing wrong. And maybe it was, you know, because
we were kind of treating him with respect at home and he wasn't used to being ordered around to do things that didn't make any sense. He said, you know, I wouldn't write my writing stuff is it had a purpose. Like I'd write a letter to the president telling him what he's doing wrong, but to just write a letter for the sake of writing a letter, that's stupid. So that was his attitude about. the, so it.
Peter:
It all came to a head when it was very clear the school didn't want him. By fifth grade, this had really gotten out of hand. By the end of fourth grade, really, it gotten out of hand. And so we knew we had to take him out of school. And at that time, homeschooling was not really much of a thing. And we were not a good family for homeschooling. So what were we going to do with this kid, not have him be truant? So it turns out that two miles from our home.
there was this remarkable alternative school, which I knew about, and I had thought about it earlier, but my late first wife was at least initially against it, but by this point she said, know, yeah, let's go look at that school. And so we went into that school and my son, after being there for a little while, he said, you know, unless they're just putting on a show for me, this is what a school should be.
And that's where he then went. And he stayed there for the rest of his school years. And so let me tell you what this school is like, because this is a school that's now been in existence for about 55 years. It's got hundreds of graduates who are doing well in the world. It charges very low tuition just because it can't get public support. has to charge some tuition.
Most of the kids who come to the school are coming from a public school background. These are not kids who normally would be coming from families that could afford private school. And some of them are coming precisely because of various kinds of problems in school, but some are coming because the parents believe in it in the beginning. And so they're coming from a variety of backgrounds. So I did a study within a few years of my son being there of the graduates of the school. And
I had two motives for doing the study. One was the motive as a concerned father. What if he stays in this school and doesn't go to a regular school? Is that gonna limit his options in life? I was a college professor. I'm not, even then was not the kind of person who would push college, but I wouldn't want him to not have the.
Peter:
option of college. And so one of my questions was, well, can you graduate from such a school and go on to college if you want to do that? And another question, since you walk around the school, you see a lot of art and music going on. And so another concern, do they all become starving artists and musicians living in their parents' basements the rest of their lives? You know, they all these parent fears. And in addition, I was beginning to get academically interested in this. Are they actually
Jack:
I got his like a... You can pick up like a fighting kit that gives you like some ice cream.
Peter:
are they actually becoming educated so that they can go out in the world and live good adult lives? So I studied, at that time there were about something like 90 graduates of the school by my definition of a graduate who had left at typical sort of school graduation age or sometimes younger, but had not left to go on to any other secondary schooling. So they had left either to go on to higher education or life in one other, some other way.
and managed to, with the help of a part-time staff member, managed to locate the great majority of the graduates and get the great majority of the graduates to fill out an extensive questionnaire. Some of them had been at the school for all of what would elsewhere be called their K through 12 education. There's no grades of either type. There's not kindergarten, first-rate, second-rate. They're just kids. They're all mixed together.
They can go anywhere they want. And there's also no grades in terms of report card grades. And there's no courses unless a child, that's a group of children want a course and then they have to get it together. And sometimes they can talk a staff member into leading it. But the staff members don't call themselves teachers because they don't believe they do any more teaching than anybody else at the school. The whole philosophy of the school is that children learn primarily from one another.
And they learn in an environment where they're free to pursue their own interests in an age-mixed setting where they can learn from one another and younger kids learn from older kids and so on. so that's the educational philosophy of the school. The school is run democratically. So students and staff members all have one vote at the school meeting. And of course, there many more students and staff members.
So all the major decisions of the school are made by one person, one vote. All the rules of the school, which have nothing to do with academic learning, all of, they just have to do with kinds of rules you need to get along with one another in any kind of a setting where there's a fair number of people. So that was the school. And what I found in this study of the graduates is really what turned my career around. They were doing very well in
Peter:
Those who wanted to go on to higher education were going on to higher education. Those who didn't go on to higher education were people who said, I don't need higher education. The kinds of things that I wanna do in life don't require college. Some of them were starting their own businesses. Some of them were crafts people. Some of them, you know.
So I found that they were going on to higher education at about the same rate as kids from the fairly elite local public schools in that area. And they were doing well once they were in. And so I got interested, well, how on earth did they get in? No grades, of that. So I pursued that. And that's very interesting story, how they get in. They're doing well once they're there. One of the most interesting things I found in that study
is that when I asked them about their careers, what career they're interested in, or if they're in college at that point, what career are they aiming for, I found that their careers matched very well with what it was that they were most interested in and played at the most when they were kids at the school. play is sort of how you discover your passions, how you discover what you really love to do.
And when you have lots of time to play at it, you become good at it. And once you become good at it, you we live in a world, people complain about the job market, but we live in a world in which if you are really good at something, there's probably a way you can make a living doing it. You have to be really good at it. You have to be passionate about it. And you have to really want to do it. But there's probably a way. I became convinced of that by seeing how these young people were pursuing amazing careers.
that they were passionate about. One was an inventor, one was a ship captain, one was a professor of mathematics. That's the one that went to college. The others, I could tell similar stories. They had developed real interests as kids and then they were pursuing that. That's very different from the typical kid coming out of our public school who hasn't had time to develop a real interest, doesn't really know what their passions are.
Peter:
Choosing careers based on, you know, maybe I'll make a lot of money doing this. You know, I'll be a doctor, I'll be a lawyer, I'll be a business executive. These are prestigious careers, maybe I'll do that. But they don't know anything about what it is to be a doctor or a lawyer or a business, you know? And so they go on, they spend a lot of money to get educated in this, and then they go into it, and then a good number of them learn. I actually don't really like being a doctor very much. We have a lot of unhappy doctors. Very high suicide rate among doctors.
a lot of unhappy lawyers and a lot of unhappy business executives because they're going into these areas because it sounds prestigious to them and they can get there by doing well in school. But that doesn't mean that they're actually good at it or that they really and truly are interested in it. So I discovered that when kids are left to pursue their own interests,
They figure out what they want to do. They become good at it and then they go on to careers. So that's my model of education. Now, a school like that, I think works for anybody. With few exceptions, somebody who has a very severe brain disorder who really needs the help of somebody who knows how to work with somebody with that brain disorder. I'm not talking about things like ADHD. There's a lot of kids diagnosed with They do fine. I'm not...
I'm not talking about kids who are a little bit out on the autism spectrum. They do okay too. They do fine. In fact, it's a good environment for them. Those farther out on the autism spectrum need the kind of help of somebody who is aimed at being able to help that. And they wouldn't do well in that setting because they don't have enough social skills to interact with the others and learn from others in the ways that you have to learn from others at a school like this.
But by and large, there are kids diagnosed with dyslexia. The school system has decided they can't read. They go to the school and they learn how to read. This has happened over and over and over again. I've become convinced that dyslexia, most of the kids that get diagnosed with dyslexia are diagnosed with that because they've been going through the regular school system. Probably they're a little slower at learning how to read.
Jack:
you
Peter:
and they aren't learning how to read at the time they're supposed to learn how to read. And then they get really nervous and ashamed of it. You learning how to read in front of other people, we're embarrassed, you you begin to get ashamed of it, you've developed a mental block against it, and it's very hard to overcome that block. And as long as people are putting pressure on you to read, the block persists. So what I've discovered is kids who...
who are diagnosed that way and then they leave school, either for a school like Sudbury Valley or for a relaxed kind of homeschooling, which at the extreme is called unschooling, where nobody's putting pressure on them. At some point they decide, it's time for me to learn how to read and they learn how to read. I have yet to find somebody who can't learn how to read in that kind of setting. There may be such people, there probably are such people, but they're very rare. They're very, very rare.
I actually think I met one such person who was a college student of mine, a very intelligent person who really, I think, had a kind of difference and they didn't enable him, prevented him from being able to read and he had a tremendous memory and all kinds of compensatory abilities. So I think it may exist, but it's very, very rare.
Jack:
So I haven't put this exactly together, even though I've largely as much as I can imagine that you've written. The argument that you're sort of making is that curiosity is the number one skill. The number one skill is maybe not the right word. The number one drive. If we can optimize spaces for kids to have a chance to be curious, then...
Peter Gray (01:18:16.386)
Motivator, yeah.
Jack:
we can mostly get out of the way.
Peter:
Yes, I would amend what you say about curiosity. The two primary natural drives for learning are curiosity and play. And if you think about education, there's sort of two aspects to it. One is the acquisition of information. What's out there? What is that? How does it work? What can I do with it?
That's curiosity. Kids are naturally curious. They're exploring their environment almost from the moment they're born. There's actually research showing that as soon as they can fix their eyes, they're looking around and looking at stuff. if you show them a pattern and they look at that, now that you show them a choice between that pattern and new one, they spend more time looking at the new one. I kind of understand that one. What's this one about? And this is a baby about four hours old. the eyes are beginning to fix.
By the time babies can move around, we have to baby proof our house. Why do we have to do that? Because they're getting into everything. Why are they getting into everything? Not because they're naughty, but because they want to understand everything. What would happen if I pulled this lamp off the table? What would happen if I stuck a bobby pin in that electric outlet? that's the, you know, that's everybody who's seen a child knows they're just.
born with this tremendous curiosity. So some developmental psychologists think that that curiosity goes away around age five or six. It does tend to go away around age five or six, but not naturally. It goes away around age five or six because that's when we put them in school. And that's when they're told what you are curious about, that doesn't count. What counts is what we tell you, you have to learn. So we suppress their curiosity. Curiosity
disrupts the school setting. My son couldn't live in the school setting because he was too curious. And he was not willing to suppress his curiosity. He was not willing to suppress doing things that he really was interested in and really wanted to find the answers to as opposed to stupid things. So that was the...
Peter:
So curiosity is one, the other part of education is skill development, becoming able to do certain things. And skill development comes from play. Curiosity is looking around, exploring things. Play is doing things. And when you're doing things, you're developing skills. And it's very interesting that throughout the world, when children are free to play, they play at the very skills
that are most important for people anywhere in the world. So what do they play on? We're the animal that communicates by speech. Children play at speech. They learn to talk through play. Children play, we're the animal with opposable thumbs. We have always survived by building our environment. Children play at building things, constructive play.
We are an incredibly social animal. We can't survive without knowing how to get along with other people. So children play socially. They practice getting along with other people. They practice creating rules, negotiating with one another because this is what you have to be able to do. This is crucial to your education. They play at imagination. We're the animal that thinks.
hypothetically, which means that we think in terms of imagination. What would happen if this were so? This is the way scientists think. so this is regarded as the highest order of human thinking, hypothetical deductive reasoning. Children are playing at that all the time, especially little children. They're playing these imaginative games. So.
you know, one four-year-old says there's a troll under the table. There's a troll under the bridge. And everybody looks at the table and the table now is a bridge. And then somebody says, yeah, well, we better not go under the bridge. Well, this is hypothetical deductive reasoning, right? And then somebody else says, well, maybe we could give the troll a cookie and then it wouldn't eat us. So again, you know, this kind of play that is so natural and we look at it and we're not impressed by it is terribly impressive if you think about it.
Peter:
Think what those kids are doing. Think the level of thought that they're engaged in, what they're practicing in. Not because any adult is instigating this. They're doing it. So play is how you develop skills.
Jack:
So curiosity and play are the cornerstone. And if you add in nature, they're the cornerstone to sleep away camp. know, sleep away camp is a perfect tool to build autonomous relatedness and competence. It is away from, from the child's grownups. There's other grownups there. Many of the grownups are 18 year olds who are just barely grownups themselves. There's mixed age. It's a.
It is a perfect education laboratory the way that you're, you know, you're describing education. And when I talk to camp directors now, and I talk to hundreds of camp directors every year, there's, there's a push for more control at camp. There's a push from many, many camp directors think that parents want more math, more, more, more schooling.
to come into summer camp. So how would you advise camp directors to be able to tell this story to parents?
Peter:
Well, you know, that's a really good question. I often think when I talk with people who are faced with this problem, in some cases camp directors, in some cases they're, believe it or not, school principals who want to bring more play into the school and the parents are resisting it.
And the first thing I say is your real job as an educator is not educating the kids, it's educating the parents. You have to take that job seriously. parents aren't bad, but they're ignorant. They don't understand, and they're made ignorant by the rest of society because they are constantly getting messages about
about teaching. Toys are supposed to be teaching them something rather than something you're just playing with. Parents, you it used to be in the 1950s, the parents job, if you call it a job, but most of them wouldn't have called it a job. Everybody calls it a job now and it is. But back then, you know, it was a job until the child was four years old. But then after that, you were free. But to the degree that parents had a job, it was
to provide shelter for the child, to provide clothing and to provide food and to provide love, to love the child. That's pretty easy. It's hard not to love your child. But teaching your child, that was not part of the job description. Now it's become part of the job description. So it pollutes the parent-child interaction because it...
Instead of just accepting the child, loving the child for who they are, enjoying the child, no, they're constantly trying to teach the child. So the poor kid can't get away from being taught. And so parents need to learn that children, that in today's world, a big part of the job of parents ought to be to figure out a way for my kid to be in a setting where my kid is with other kids and can truly play without adults.
Peter:
direction and control. That's the difficult thing. Now, I'm working on this and one of the ways I'm working on it, I published an article a little more than a year ago in the Journal of Pediatrics about all of the kind of stuff I've just been talking about, but loaded with references and evidence that children need freedom to learn, to grow, to be mentally healthy.
And I deliberately published in the Journal of Pediatrics because I'm trying to get to pediatricians. And so I'm now working with the, along with the National Institute for Play to develop instructions for pediatricians to be able to...
when they meet with families, when they meet with parents and kids to talk about the importance of independent play and other independent activity in children's growing up. We actually created a little brochure that the pediatricians can give to the parents. And I think a similar brochure is something that camp directors could give to parents. And they could say, you know, part of the requirement for applying for sending your kid to this camp.
is that you join a meeting with us where we talk about what's going to happen at this camp and why. When we don't jump immediately if some kids skins their knee, it's not that we are negligent. It's because we want the kids to take control to figure out what to do.
If they come to us and say, hey, I skinned my knee, yeah, great, we'll do something about it. But we're not gonna act like this is a big emergency. If there's a little squabble, you know, if there's actual physical fighting, that might be another thing. But if there's a squabble between, some disagreement between kids, we're not gonna step in because the learning experience comes from their figuring out how to resolve this. Now, you know, what I observe at a place like,
Peter:
like the Sudbury Valley School where the kids of different ages, and I also observed this in what we've called play club at schools where we have age-mixed play after school or before school, and generally from kindergarten through fifth grade all playing together, is that when there's a little squabble, if the teacher, if an adult doesn't step in, usually some other kid steps in, usually an older kid steps in, and that is so much better than if an adult does.
So I've seen it over and over. You've got these couple little kids and they're squabbling about something. It almost looks like it might turn into a physical fight and then some older kid. So this might be a nine-year-old stepping in to intervene in something going on between a couple of five-year-olds who says, hey, what's going on here? And then there's a discussion about it and the kid will say, well, here's the way you could solve it. That is so much better.
than if an adult authority figure, because even though this is an older kid, it's not exactly an authority figure. This is closer to a peer. This is somebody who's a little bit more like you. This is somebody that you could emulate. You could be like, you wanna be like that person. You wanna be like those, if you're five years old, you wanna be like those cool seven and eight and nine year olds. The adults are too different from you. You wanna be like those cool, so.
So that's a far, and think of what that nine-year-old or eight-year-old who's intervening, what he's learning or she's learning, they're learning, you know, I can solve a problem for other people. I can be helpful to other people. I can be the mature one and help out kids who are immature. So, you know, this is part, this is an extraordinary part of growing up. This is what happened naturally all the time.
back in the days when kids were out there playing in age-mixed groups. But it's hard to find that kind of a setting now. But it's important to educate parents about this. Parents don't know this. A lot of young parents today grew up in a world where they didn't have outdoor play. They grew up controlled and restricted, and they just think that's naturally how you're supposed to grow up. And then they hear these messages all the time from so-called experts about
Peter:
all these things that you as the parent are supposed to be doing. God, you're supposed to be starting to talk with your child while the child's still in the womb. You're supposed to be playing Beethoven. You're supposed to be, once the child is there, you're supposed to be interacting with the child all the time. And it is important to interact with the child, especially if you don't have other...
kids to interact with the child. Now, after you gather a child, the mom doesn't have to worry about that because there's all these other kids who love this baby and are carrying it around and are interacting with the baby all the time. But if you don't have that, yeah, it's important while your child is little to interact with it. But as your child gets bigger, it's far more important to stop interacting with your child all the time. Find opportunities for your child to get away from you and interact with other people, other kids.
Jack:
Well, thank you, Peter. I love this tension that you described about the hunter-gatherer societies around having kindness and egalitarianism while also taking the kids seriously. we in today's world struggle sort of on both sides of that, sort of too often probably. And I wonder what...
a world can look like with a little more kindness and a little more taking kids seriously. That's the world I want to live in. And I'll wake up every day trying to figure out how to do that for kids at camp for now. Peter, I'm going to make sure to link to Play Makes Us Human, which is petergray.substack.com, where you send out tons of awesome stuff. So I'll make sure to link to that. there other places
Peter:
Great.
Jack:
that you want to direct folks if they're interested in learning more.
Peter:
Well, I do have a personal website, just PeterGray.org, where people can download many of my academic articles, which are kind of all written in a way that anybody can read them. Then there are some videos there that people could see or download. So that's another place people, if people want to pursue some of my other work, could find them there.
Jack:
Thank you so much. Peter, you're amazing. It's been, we were supposed to talk for an hour, turn in an hour and a half. Here we are. have great stuff to say. Thank you so much.
