The Real Problem with Education Today?
Kids Hate School -- and Here's Why
Author Peter Gray talks
about why children today have such trouble learning.
April 8,
2013
The following is a Q&A with Peter Gray about his
new book Free to
Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More
Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life,
which argues that students learn better when they are free to play, explore and
teach themselves.
1. Can you
explain briefly why you were motivated to write this book? You wrote about your
son, who had trouble learning in a traditional school?
I wouldn’t say that my
son had trouble learning in a traditional school, certainly not any more so
than anyone else. I would say, rather, that he found that he was not free
in school to follow his own interests, ask his own questions, solve problems in
his own way, and present his own ideas honestly. He found it to infringe
on his rights as a human being. Once he finally convinced his mother and
me of this, we found a very different school—a school that is really a setting
for self-directed learning. Ultimately, this experience led me to change
the direction of my research. I began to focus on how children educate
themselves—largely through free play and exploration—when they are free to do
so and are provided with a setting that optimizes their ability to do so.
I wrote the book because I came to believe that we, as a society, are stunting
children’s social, emotional, an intellectual development by depriving them of
the freedom they need to play and explore.
2. You write
in your book that not only is the decline in children’s freedom hindering
learning, but also it’s actually increasing psychological, emotional and social
disorders in children. Are people seeing this? Are parents seeing this? Why is
there not more outrage?
The decline in
children’s freedom to play and explore, undirected by adults, has been gradual
over the past 50 or 60 years. This gradual decline has been accompanied
by a gradual increase in anxiety, depression, and other mental disorders in
children. Because the change is gradual, people don’t necessarily see it.
Yet, over time, the change has been dramatic. Today, by unchanged
measures, the rates of anxiety disorders and major depression in children and
adolescents are five to eight times what they were in the 1950s. When
people see that their own children are depressed or anxious, they tend to blame
themselves, as parents, rather than the social conditions that have deprived
children of freedom. Or they assume that this is just a normal part of
childhood or adolescence, because it is so common.
3. In
education discussions, people often talk about poverty and its relation to poor
parenting and that relation to their children failing in school. But it was
intriguing to read that parents who are over-concerned about their children’s
education can perhaps be even more destructive to their growth. What are your
thoughts on this?
Researchers have found
that rates of anxiety, depression, drug abuse, and general cynicism are
remarkably high among children and adolescents in middle-class and upper-class
families, especially those in which the parents are carting their kids from one
adult-directed activity to another and are insisting on high grades and honors
in school. These young people are seeing life as a series of hoops to
jump through, hoops set by the adults in their world. They are not seeing
life as a joyful adventure in which they are in control. They are not
finding their own passions and pursuing them. This is a very sad
development.
4. Do you
think part of the problem of teachers not allowing their students to take
charge of their own education is that they don’t believe they can learn
anything from their students? What should be the goal of a teacher? Should they
have a desire to “learn from” instead of “teach to” students?
I don’t blame teachers
for the problem. The problem is a structural one. It is impossible,
given the structure of our schools, to allow students to take charge of their
own education in school. To do that we need to start from scratch and
re-design schools in such a way that the adults are helpers and not
directors. I think teachers can make some difference, however, by creating
as much flexibility as the system allows, by respecting students, and by
permitting students to pursue their own interests to the degree that the system
permits. Unfortunately, it is harder now than ever before for even the
most enlightened teachers to follow this path. Increasingly, their job is
being defined as that of somehow getting students to score higher on
standardized tests. Nobody is much concerned any more about true learning in school—the concern now
focuses on test scores.
5. There are
students who would claim to enjoy school and its structured environment —
probably the “expert” students who excel almost effortlessly. Are they
different? Or are they repressing something?
Research has shown that,
overall, students are much less happy in school than in any other setting in
which they regularly find themselves. However, it is true that some
students claim to enjoy school. I think many of these are people who have
learned to enjoy the competition of school. They feel good about getting
high grades, praise, and other rewards for doing well. Even many of those
students, however, when questioned, will show cynicism about the actual
learning that occurs in school. They will admit that they have mastered
the art of figuring out what the teachers want and then supplying it. I should
add, however, that many students say they enjoy school because that is where
they see their friends. Kids really need friends; if school is the only
place where they can see them, then, for that reason, they like school.
If they had a chance to play with friends out of school, they would like that
much more.
6. You talk
about human beings as having a “natural” state, which you say is best expressed
in a hunter-gatherer society. You blame agriculture as the beginning of the
shift away from a hunter-gatherer society to an industrial society, where
children generally don’t like school and, to add my own extension, adults
generally don’t like work. If we are “naturally” inclined to live in a
hunter-gatherer society where children can teach themselves and adults can
produce what they desire, why did we move away from it? Can it be that
agriculture was a pure mistake that snowballed into today’s society?
We were hunter-gatherers
during all but a very small portion of our evolutionary history, so in that
sense the hunter-gatherer way of life is more natural to us than is our present
way of life. However, we are also extraordinarily adaptable and
inventive. It’s not hard to imagine how and why humans in various parts
of the world began moving gradually toward agriculture beginning around 12,000
years ago. Inventive people began to realize that they could increase the
yield of vegetation if they scattered seeds or planted roots and dug some
ditches for irrigation. Ultimately, this led to full cultivation, tending
of the land, domestication of animals, and so on. It also, of course, led
to land ownership, status hierarchies (as those who owned land had power over
those who did not) and hierarchical systems of governance. The end result
was a world in which children had to be trained to obey those in authority in
order to survive. This led to systems of child rearing aimed at
suppressing the child’s will rather than fostering the child’s will. Our
schools emerged a few centuries ago out of that atmosphere. The early
developers of our modern system of schooling were quite clear in their writings
that the purpose of schools was indoctrination and obedience training; they
spoke openly of the duty of school masters to break students’ wills.
Remember, by that point in history, willfulness and sinfulness were considered
to be almost synonyms.
7. You state
in your conclusion that you believe that “eventually the coercive system will
fade away.” With our society getting worse and worse — more corruption, more
inequality, more hatred (and therefore, having less and less of a
hunter-gatherer society’s values) —how do you believe this to be true?
Actually, I don’t
believe that our society is getting worse and worse. In fact, even in my
lifetime we have made great progress toward more equality, less corruption,
less violence. We now live in a world that, in theory, and increasingly
in practice, accords equal human rights to people regardless of race, gender,
or sexual orientation. As Stephen Pinker documents in his book,The Better Angels of Our Nature, history
has shown a continuous decline in violence of all sorts, worldwide, and
increase in human tolerance. We, of course, have a long way to go, abuses
today are well known and are terrible; but we are, in fact, all in all, kinder
and more tolerant of one another than we have been in the past. We are
also entering into an era of history in which creativity and initiative—rather
than blind, rote, rule-following—are valued in the workplace. Our school
system has not caught up to these trends, and that is why many people are
beginning to see it as repressive and counterproductive to healthy education in
today’s world. I think the change will come as people leave the school
system, as they currently are at an accelerating rate.
8. How is
your son faring now? Did he attend Sudbury Valley? — the fascinating school you
write about in your book that allows children to roam freely, educate
themselves and attain a degree by preparing a thesis.
Yes, my son was a
student at Sudbury Valley School from age 10 to 18. Then he went on to
college and did well there, though he claims that much of college was a waste
of time and that he educated himself much more by reading books that were not
assigned than by doing assignments. After that he worked for a while as a
computer specialist. He is now, very happily, a staff member at the
Sudbury Valley School.
