Free To Learn

Traditional schools don’t embrace play-based learning enough, especially secondary schools.

In his 2013 book titled Free to Learn, developmental psychologist Peter Gray argues that in order to foster children who will thrive in today’s constantly changing world, we must entrust them to steer their own learning and development.

Toward the end of his book, Gray writes,

“I’m optimistic about the future of education. I’m optimistic that we as a culture will come to our senses and restore to children the freedom to take control of their own learning, so learning will once again be joyful, exciting, and an integral part of life rather than tedious, depressing, and anxiety provoking.”

“My optimism does not come from the education establishment. That establishment – including schools of education, the textbook and testing industries, and organizations of teachers and school administrators – is so entrenched in the status quo and its own self-interests that all it can do is push for more of the same. When it becomes clear that children aren’t learning much of what is taught in school, the hue and cry from these sources is that kids must spend even more time in school and do more schoolwork at home. If two hundred hours of instruction on subject X does no good, let’s try four hundred hours. If children aren’t learning what is taught to them in first grade, then let’s start teaching it in kindergarten. And if they aren’t learning it in kindergarten, well, that could only mean that we need to start in prekindergarten! If children forget over summer vacation what little they learned during the previous school year, then let’s abolish their summer vacation – and diminish further their possibilities for life outside of school.”

“Almost everyone involved in the education enterprise considers himself or herself to be a ‘reformer,’ in tacit acknowledgment that the current system doesn’t work. This has been true since the dawn of compulsory schooling. Some want to reform the system by nudging it one way (maybe by offering a few more choices and lightening up a little on the testing). This is the stuff of countless books and articles written by professors of education. But no one in the education establishment is willing to admit that coercive schooling doesn’t work precisely because it is coercive and that the only meaningful reform is one that puts kids in charge of their own learning.”

“Instead, my optimism comes from what is happening outside the education establishment. I’m cheered by the ever-growing stream of people who are leaving coercive schooling for relaxed homeschooling, unschooling, Sudbury schooling [inspired by the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, committed to self-directed learning and democratic governance], and other forms of education that allows children to control their own learning. The more oppressive the school system becomes, the more it is driving people away, and that is good.”

“The movement out of schools is also facilitated by the revolution in information technology. Today anyone who can get their hands on a computer with Internet access – even street kids in India – can access the world’s entire body of knowledge and ideas, all beautifully organized and available through easy-to-use search engines. For almost anything you want to do, you can find instructions and video on the Internet. For almost any idea you want to think about, you can find arguments and counterarguments on the Internet, and even join a discussion about it. This is far more conducive to intellectual development than the one-right-answer approach of the standard school system. The idea that you have to go to school to learn anything or to become a critical thinker is patently ridiculous to any kid who knows how to access the Internet, and so it is becoming harder and harder to justify top-down schooling. And with text-based electronic communication becoming almost as commonplace as oral communication, more and more kids are learning to read and write on their own before they start school, which also prompts parents to question the necessity of coercive schooling. If Johnny can read before starting first grade, why send him to first grade?”

“At some point in the not-too-distant future, I predict, we’ll reach a tipping point…. People will begin to say things like, ‘Look at Kate, and Bob, and Mary Jane; none of them went to school and they’re happy, productive, responsible citizens. Why should I send my kids to school if they are unhappy there?’ People will begin to demand changes in the laws that make schooling compulsory or that define what schooling has to be, and this will enable more to leave the compulsory system without having to do the legal loop-de-loops that are now required and that keep many from even trying.”

“Like all major social changes, the key here is a shift in beliefs about what is normal and not normal. Not many years ago being homosexual was seen by almost everyone as abnormal – a sin or a disease, depending on whether you took a religious or a secular view. There are still some people who feel that way, but few of them are under the age of thirty. The norm has changed. Being homosexual is now largely seen as another normal human variation, like being left-handed. That change came about because some brave gay people took the plunge. They came out and declared pride in their sexual orientation. As more and more people discovered that some of their valued friends and relatives were homosexual, and that some of society’s idols and heroes were, too, it became harder to condemn it or call it a sickness. There is an analogy here to what I think will happen in education. As more people meet adults who didn’t go to a coercive school, or who don’t send their kids to one, it will be ever harder to think of that decisions as aberrant or abhorrent.”

This year, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s enrollment has dropped to fewer than 400,000 students. LA Unified’s enrollment has been dropping about 4% every year for 20 plus years. In the early 2000s, the Los Angeles school district had over 700,000 students.

Now where did almost half of those kids go?

Lower birth rate? Yes.

A crackdown on immigration? Yes.

But the rest?

Most scholars believe those kids have just walked away from traditional school in search for a better approach to learning.

And it’s not just Los Angeles. Districts across the country are losing enrollment due to kids and families making different choices about how to learn.

If we really believe that freedom to learn is today’s most important civil right, then why would we prevent young learners and their families from finding something better than their traditional school?

Til tomorrow. SVB