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May 24, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
57:17
2388 Free To Learn - Dr. Peter Gray Interviewed by Stefan Molyneux

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, interviews Dr. Peter Gray on his latest book, Free To Learn, and the fundamentals of effective education.

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Hello, everybody.
It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
We are back with one of the most popular guests this show has ever had, Dr.
Peter Gray, who has written a book that you actually just turn off your computer right now, go to your bookstore or turn on your iPad and get this book.
It's called Free to Learn.
It just came out a month or so ago?
That's right.
Well, and you have to read it.
You know, I've been looking at alternative ways of thinking about the world for a couple of decades, but there's stuff here.
I had a full mohawk when I started, and the ideas just blew the hair right off my head.
And so it's a very radical...
A book and radical in its accuracy and it contains stuff that intuitively makes sense but it's great to have the evidence for it.
So thanks for taking the time to chat and I again strongly urge people to get this book however you can.
Thank you.
Let's start with some of the criticisms that you have.
I think the last time we talked was about the idea that school is a prison, and you, I think, openly and courageously call it a forced education, forced schooling.
And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, because a lot of people, I don't think, really understand the degree to which compulsion is involved in what we do to children.
Well, I mean, you know, we call it compulsory education.
And what does compulsory education mean?
It means forced education.
So not only are children required to go to school, but once they are in school, their basic human rights are pretty much taken away from them.
We talk in the United States about freedom of association, freedom to choose your own path to happiness.
Freedom to vote on the rules that affect your behavior and so on and so forth.
None of those apply in school.
Rules are forced rather arbitrarily by the administration.
There's no due process if somebody's accused of violating rule.
So schools are settings in which children are really deprived of what we normally think of as human rights.
We do this presumably for their own good.
I mean, people—I'm not saying people do this out of ill will.
People believe that this is what children need, that children aren't going to grow up to become responsible citizens without it.
And we've now had this kind of education for at least three generations for almost all families, longer than that for many.
So it's hard for people to imagine something different.
So, you know, if this were just suddenly imposed on children, In this day and age, people would be outraged.
The children would be outraged.
But this is something that was imposed on children quite some time ago when we didn't have notions really of freedom as we do today.
And it was imposed really for a different reason from education.
It was imposed for the purpose of indoctrination and obedience training.
The schools were well designed for that purpose and still are well designed for that purpose, although most people in education don't see that as the purpose today.
Most people who are, you know, teachers are people of goodwill.
They really See themselves as helping children develop their own critical thinking, their own passions, and so on and so forth.
But the schools that they have to work in are Diametrically opposed to the kind of, diametrically the opposite of the kind of environment that's necessary for people to really develop creativity and critical thinking and the kinds of things that we would hope that children would develop in their education.
Yeah, I was thinking of one of my favorite quotes by Nietzsche is, whatever lives long enough, sorry, when something lives long enough, its irrational origins become improbable.
In other words, it's hard to understand how crazy something is if the crazy can just manage to stick around for long enough.
So what is it that people don't understand about the origins of our existing school system, its original intent, not just the sort of the cover story that was given, but what was it all about?
How did this change?
Because it wasn't broken before.
You had a literacy rate of 80 to 90 percent.
The 19th century novels like Herman Melville's and Moby Dick and Thomas Paine's books and the American Population was incredibly literate, very well read.
De Tocqueville mentioned it in his Democracy in America book.
So nothing seemed to be broken.
So what was trying to be done with the imposition of this sort of centralized coercive school monopoly?
Well, the initial, the first compulsory schools were religious schools.
They were Protestant schools.
Both in Europe, especially in Prussia, and in the United States.
So, you know, going way back, Massachusetts has always been the leader.
My home state here has always been the leader in forced schooling.
Going way back to 1642, Massachusetts had compulsory school laws.
Nothing as big as today.
I mean, I think kids had to go to school for something like 14 weeks out of the year.
age of eight to 14 or something like that.
So nothing as much as today.
But they were required to go to school so that they would grow up to be good Protestants.
The primer was the little Bible of what's called the Little Bible of New England.
It was full of verses and it was full of little stories designed to induce the fear of God and the fear of authorities in general in children.
The method of instruction primarily was to beat kids when they disobeyed or didn't know their lessons and so on and so forth.
This was all in the record.
So the first schools were designed kind of, you could almost say, to beat the devil out of kids.
The belief is that people are naturally sinful.
And so free will is part of the sinfulness of human nature.
And therefore, you need to suppress the will, and you also need to teach children to not follow their own will, but to follow their leaders, their elders, and ultimately God, who was the king of kings in a way, even though in our country we had denied the idea of king, yet in that sense we hadn't.
So obedience was the main lesson, and a lot of indoctrination about the Bible.
There was teaching, reading, Because the Protestants, unlike the Catholics, believed that it was very, very important for people to read the Bible and interpret it on their own.
So for anybody who otherwise wouldn't naturally learn to read, it was important to be sure that everybody learned to read.
So that was the original purpose of schools.
And then at some point, first in Prussia and then elsewhere, including in the United States, As the religious powers declined and the powers of the state increased, the state took over these schools, but primarily for the same function.
It was obedience training.
It was now a different kind of indoctrination and patriotism and so on, particularly in Prussia.
The lessons were all about how wonderful the German language is and how marvelous the King Frederick was and how Prussia is just surrounded by enemies and so on and so forth.
So the doctrine changed to a secular doctrine, but the lesson of obedience continued.
Nowhere along the way was there any pretense that the purpose of schooling was to create free thinkers or to create creative people or You know, if anything, the purpose of school was quite the opposite.
There was concern, I mean, in all of Europe, and particularly by the beginning of the 18th century, there was a lot of concern That the people were becoming too educated and too willful.
They were reading books by Tom Paine and getting rebellious.
So school wasn't so much about teaching people to read.
People could read.
School was more about trying to have some control over what they read and what they thought.
Right, right.
The quality, I think, of education has declined.
I mean, statistically, it has declined.
I think there's some tests floating around, the origins of which are somewhat doubtful, sort of an eighth or ninth grade test from 150 years ago, which is incredibly challenging when you think about it.
And I think since the 1960s in America, when it became pretty much impossible to fire teachers, there seems to have become a rigidification in education.
I gave a speech at Drexel University a couple of years ago where I pointed out that 150 years ago when the government took over education, you had a bunch of kids in rows with a teacher and a blackboard, and the only thing that's changed is in some schools it's changed into a whiteboard, whereas everything else has changed.
We got to the moon, we got iPads, and we can have these amazing conversations, but so much remains static in the realm of education.
Why do you think that is, if you agree with the assessment?
Well, I do agree that much has remained static, and the changes that have occurred are in many ways for the worse, especially in recent times.
But, you know, we have this model, and from a certain perspective, it makes sense, right?
I mean, if you think we want an efficient way to educate children, we think that education is the job of teachers, the job of the school.
So we think of this as a little bit like a factory.
You know, it's like sending the child along an assembly line from one grade to the next.
And at each grade, there's going to be certain items of knowledge added into the child's mind.
So we segregate children by age, we move them along, we have to give them tests to pass them along from one grade to the next.
We divide the whole world of knowledge into specific subjects, bits of chunks to put into their brains.
It's a kind of an assembly line model.
Once you've established that model, how do you change it?
There's a certain basic logic to it if you believe that it's the job of adults to educate children that children are the passive recipients of education.
That's the way you do it.
It's hard to even think of another way to do it.
So unless there was some kind of radical reconception of what education is, the kind that I'm proposing in my book, the kind that others have proposed too, that education is something that children do to themselves, for themselves, and that we need to provide the opportunities.
We don't need to force them to do it.
Unless you have that view, this is the logical way to do it.
You can never do it well.
You can't possibly do it well because every Every bone in the child's body, every neuron in the child's brain resists it.
People naturally want to be free, and children especially do, and they naturally want to ask their own questions and try to answer their own questions, not answer the questions that aren't even real questions of the teachers, but are just questions of some curriculum that has nothing to do with what the child is interested in.
So that's the way schools operate.
That being said, I would argue that schools have actually gotten much worse over the years.
Worse because, you know, as I said, way back in the 17th, 18th century, kids didn't have to spend that much time in school.
They had a lot of time out of school to educate themselves.
And even in the 1950s, when I was a student at school, school was not nearly the big deal that it is today.
And we didn't have, we had tests and they were a pain, you know, and nobody particularly liked school, but we didn't spend that much time, as much time in it today, and there wasn't that much concern about it.
You know, parents weren't held responsible for making sure that their kids did homework.
We had hardly any homework.
So we were really pretty free after school.
Moreover, at that time, at least in the schools I attended, and they tended to be small schools in Minnesota and Wisconsin, so this might not have been typical everywhere, but the teachers had a lot of freedom to do what they wanted, and the teachers, you know, at least, of course, you were the victim of who your teacher might have been, but I remember some very...
Nice teachers who really understood kids, and they would see that if they saw that we were restless, they'd say, hey, let's go outside and play.
You're tired of sitting here doing this.
And now teachers can't do that.
A teacher would be fired for doing that.
You know, the teacher's job is to increase test scores.
The teachers don't have any freedom in the classroom any more than the kids do, and they used to have some freedom, and so teachers who understood kids would make the environment not as bad as it otherwise would be.
I might point out, too, I mean, here's a contrast.
We had school for six hours a day, pretty much as Kids do today when I was in grade school.
But two of those hours were recess.
We had a half hour recess in the morning, a half hour recess in the afternoon, a full hour at lunch, and we could go anywhere we wanted.
We didn't have to stay on the campus even.
We'd go anywhere in town.
So only four hours of that six were actually in the classroom, and never were we in the classroom for more than an hour at a time.
And even then, the teacher would see that if we were restless, she'd say, you know, get up and play.
I can see that you're restless.
So, teachers can't do that today.
Now we expect kids to sit for hours and do what they're told to do, and if they can't do it, nobody kindly says, well, I see your wrestlers get up and play.
They say, you know, you better go get tested for ADHD so we can put you on drugs.
Make sure that you can sit.
It's a mental illness not to be able to sit.
One of the things that struck me about what you were talking about, and you didn't mention this explicitly, but I don't want to go over everything that's in the book because people should read the book, but one of the things that struck me is the degree to which it seems like our society is terrified of the free exploration and curiosity of children.
It's almost like we have this structure within society, this hierarchies within society, this militarism within society, this way of organizing society.
And it's like we've got this house of cards and children are just going to come running in and smash it all up and throw everything awry.
Like why would we need – we control that which we fear generally, right?
So it seems to me like you point out two examples with a number of studies that back it up.
And the one is of course ancient societies where children learned through playing.
I remember when I was in theater school many years ago, I had a movement teacher who said, "Play like children play, seriously." And I thought, what a wonderful phrase that's always stuck with me.
So you pointed out in ancient societies and you also pointed out in the The modern democratic schools in America and in Israel and other places where there doesn't seem to be this fear of allowing children to explore and to pursue their own knowledge on their own schedule according to their own desires.
Do you think it's fair to say that we seem to be quite paranoid about the free choices and explorations of children?
Yeah, I think that is fair to say.
And it's a good question why that's true.
I think in general, we have become a people who are very, very concerned with control.
We want to control the whole world.
We want to control everything.
We can't just sit back and let things happen.
This general view came about with the beginning of agriculture.
Prior to agriculture, hunter-gatherers did not have the view that they controlled the world.
They were simply part of the world.
You adapt to the world.
Animals are wild, plants are wild.
They didn't have domesticated animals and plants that they controlled.
And children, too, are wild with quotation marks.
And I don't mean wild in the sense that they run around crazy.
I mean wild in the sense that they're not controlled by others.
They grow up with their own will.
But, you know, the amazing thing is that people want to live in society.
People want to connect with other people.
It's very, very natural to.
And when children really are allowed to play, they play in ways that they learn to get along with one another.
All games have rules.
And when kids are playing games together, They make up the rules.
They figure out how to follow the rules.
They have to learn to see things from others' perspectives.
Play is sort of nature's way of socializing children.
We've lost sight of that.
We went through this long stage of history in which play was suppressed.
Children became laborers.
On farms and in factories.
Children worked in mines.
They had to be forced to do this.
Play was suppressed.
And so, as a culture, over this long period of history, we lost sight of the value of play and how children naturally socialized themselves.
And over this period where children had to more or less be beaten and forced to work in factories, punished if they didn't, we developed the view that, well, unless you punish children, they're just never going to do what they ought to be doing.
So that same view that was used to make kids work in factories and in fields was that same belief was transported into the schools, at first with physical punishment, then with more Gentle forms of reward and punishment and shaming and competitions and contrasts of trying to get people into competitions of who's going to be the best student, who's going to get the A's and so on.
We use all those techniques because we don't believe that children are going to do anything wrong.
Anything productive on their own otherwise.
But that view, most people recognize that that view is wrong when they look at very little kids, because little kids are pretty free.
We don't make them before they ever start school.
They are learning on their own, and it's amazing what they learn, and it's amazing the social skills as well as the intellectual skills that they acquire by the age of four.
So the evidence is there in front of us, but somehow we don't see it.
And we've become so used to this carrot and stick idea.
If you want someone to do something, put a jar of honey up where you want them to go.
And if you don't want them to go somewhere, throw a scorpion down and they won't go there.
And I thought one of the very fascinating parts of the book was the degree to which attempting to incentivize creativity inhibits creativity, which is, again, very counterintuitive.
It's almost like we want to train children like we would train...
lesser animals.
Did you know that before going into the research?
Was that something that you found surprising in the research?
Also, if you could just give a brief taste of it just for the listeners to understand what we're talking about.
Well, actually, this kind of research is very well known in psychology.
It just doesn't seem to be taught in schools of education, but there's a long line of research showing that You know, you give people tasks to do that require insight, or require new learning, or require creativity of some sort, and you do it under varying conditions, and in some conditions, you know, you induce a kind of play-like state.
This is just for fun.
It's not going to be evaluated in the other condition.
You evaluate it the way we do in school.
We're going to measure your performance here and compare you to others.
Inevitably, in those experiments, the ones who are just doing it in a playful way learn better.
Giving rewards and punishments and all the monitoring and testing that goes with it.
Rewards are just as bad as punishments on this score.
They're seen as things that are controlling your behavior.
They dominate your thinking.
I'm aiming to get this reward.
It interferes with your ability to think about the task you're actually doing.
And it interferes with your ability to really be creative because you begin to get this fear of failure.
If I don't win, if I don't do this right the way somebody else is measuring it, then I'm not going to get this reward or there's going to be a negative judgment of me or whatever it is.
So...
So these results, these are really well known in psychology.
It's just that somehow people generally don't put that together with what we're doing in school.
We're just providing the conditions in school, which are precisely the conditions that are known by research psychologists to be the conditions that inhibit learning and creativity, insightful thinking, and so on.
So...
So that was no surprise to me at all.
And it's certainly no surprise to any other research psychologist who is interested in cognitive development or cognitive processes.
These are well-known phenomena.
Yeah, and it is really tragic.
If you give someone a prize for achieving something, then the goal becomes not the satisfaction of achievement, but the acquisition of the prize, and then whatever momentum they have stops when you don't keep running after the finish line.
So I thought that was really interesting.
And of course, I'm thinking about this as a parent as well, as my daughter is four and making sure that I try and stay away from the carrot and the stick, which is sort of what I was raised with and understanding the degree to which that's going to inhibit her just curiosity.
Now, another thing that I thought was fascinating was the age mixing is really, really interesting.
And I think as you point out, age mixing, which is like you have five-year-olds playing with 10-year-olds in between and some people on the outliers and so on.
The age mixing… It never occurs in school, of course, maybe a little bit in the playground, but of course everybody's locked in, you know, in that 12-month window in their classrooms.
And I hadn't really thought, I mean, I sort of understood, oh, age mixing, okay, so the kids are going to learn from the older kids, the younger kids learn from that, it's good stuff, right?
But I didn't think about, and I think you elucidated it beautifully, the degree to which older kids benefit from education.
Mentoring younger children, the leadership skills they develop and all that kind of stuff.
What if you could touch on some of the benefits of age mixing and how tragic it is that it's missing from our classrooms?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, age segregation is really, in the long history, biological history of human beings, age mixing is the norm.
Age segregation would never have occurred before schools were developed and we started.
I mean, even the early schools tended to be one-room schools with kids of various ages in it, at least in rural communities, that was true.
But during all of history, when the whole biological self-educative instincts evolved, children would have been playing with kids of all ages.
And that's certainly true for hunter-gatherers.
First of all, the bands are relatively small, so even if they wanted to segregate by age, there wouldn't have been enough kids to play with.
So they're playing with kids across, you know, a typical playgroup might include kids from age, you know, 4 on through 12, or age 8 on through 17, you know, big age spans.
And similarly, at the school where, you know, the radically alternative school, Sudbury Valley School, where I've done much of my research, there are kids from age 4 to 18, and they're not segregated by age.
They intermingle, and they're attracted to one another.
Little kids like the bigger kids, bigger kids like the littler kids.
So there's a lot of interaction among them.
And what you see in this setting is that You know, it's fairly easy to think what the little kids are learning.
You know, clearly they're being surrounded by people who are speaking a bigger vocabulary.
They're learning new words from them.
They're seeing little kids who can't read or seeing somewhat older kids who are reading and talking about books and then, oh, they want to do that.
They want to read books, too.
They want to Join that magic club of people who can read.
They see kids climbing trees, and they're motivated then to climb trees, so the modeling that occurs, and then when they're actually playing together, older kids and bigger kids, the older kids are sort of boosting the younger kids along, allowing them to do things that they otherwise couldn't do.
So, you know, sometimes it's a literal boost, helping them up in the tree and standing underneath to catch them if they were to fall, and sometimes it's A metaphoric boost.
Let's say you're playing a card game, which the typical eight-year-old can't really play cards very well with other eight-year-olds because they lose track of what they're doing and they don't fully understand the rules often.
But an eight-year-old playing with a 12-year-old, playing with a bunch of 12-year-olds, the 12-year-olds remind them, hey, pay attention to the cards.
Don't show your hand, idiot.
And so they're constantly boosting their intellects in this sense.
I mean, this is, you know, they're scaffolding their intelligence.
I mean, intelligence is the ability to pay attention to things, to remember things, and the older kids are simply reminding the younger kids to do that in these games.
So there's an enormous amount of advantage to the younger kids.
Now, what's the advantage to the older kids?
First of all, The older kids are getting a sense of their own maturity.
I mean, even a seven-year-old is mature compared to a four-year-old, and the seven-year-old feels mature, feels, hey, I'm responsible.
I'm capable of helping somebody.
That's an extraordinarily powerful and important feeling for a person of any age is to feel, I can help somebody else.
You know, and to grow up feeling that you can help somebody.
What could be a more important thing to develop than the ability to help other people?
And teenagers like to play with little kids.
They, you know, they roughhouse.
The boys tend to roughhouse with them.
Girls sometimes do too.
They read to them.
You'll often find in this school that I look at, there'll be teenagers doing teenage things, but they'll have little kids sitting on their laps while they do it.
And the little kids are just so delighted to be there and part of it in the middle of all of this.
And I think that the older kids are kind of learning how to be parents.
I think this is completely natural.
In the course of evolution, it was pretty important that we had some experience with kids before we had our own kids.
In an age-mixed environment, kids are getting that experience.
They're learning what younger kids are like.
They're learning how to help them.
They're learning to be nurtured.
The other thing that I think...
There's actually a lot of evidence, some of which I summarize in the book, from a variety of sources that...
The presence of little kids brings out the nurturing instincts in older kids, and then that nurturing instinct even generalizes to their interactions with one another among the older kids.
And I think that's why anthropologists, that's part of the reason, not the whole reason, but part of the reason why anthropologists report that they never see bullying in hunter-gatherer bands.
And why we don't see it at the Sudbury School.
If it occurs, it's in a very incipient fashion and is quickly stopped by other kids.
So if somebody begins to bully somebody else, some older kid will step in and stop it.
But I think that in general, the presence of little kids tends to make us all kinder, even to each other, than if there weren't little kids around.
Yeah, and when I was a teenager, I worked in a daycare for a couple of years.
It was an after-school program, and the kids were 5 to 11.
And there was a lot of mixing, and you could really see, I mean, why play with a doll when you can play with a 5-year-old, you know, for some of the other girls.
And it was really interesting the degree to which they had to negotiate with each other to make sure the games were fun for everyone.
And you brought that up in the book and I just wanted to run a little wee thesis by you, just get your thoughts about it.
I don't know where you stand in terms of economics.
I'm a big fan of as much free market as you can possibly stomach.
And what seems to be happening in the West is more centralized command and control.
And the people seem to grow up without much of an understanding of the value of voluntary interactions, win-win negotiations, which the market is supposed to, in its ideal form, represent.
And one of the things that I thought was really interesting was when you talked about how a bunch of kids get together with no adults around.
Well, they have to figure out what to do.
They have to negotiate.
If they all choose an activity, they have to make sure that everyone enjoys it, especially if it's an activity like baseball or soccer or whatever, where if some kids leave, you can't play.
So I really thought that kind of negotiation and win-win was really interesting.
It kind of mirrors what happens a lot of times in the free market, whereas As you pointed out in the book, now what happens a lot is the parents drive the children to an organized activity with another parent or a coach in charge who tells them where to play and who's going to play and how long they're going to play for, and they don't negotiate.
Because to me, the point, like when I was a kid and my brother was older, so we hung around a pretty wide age range of kids, so some were better, some were worse.
We all had to negotiate.
We all had to find a way to make everyone happy.
And we'd actually sometimes spend more time negotiating than we would playing.
And really the point of the playing was to learn how to negotiate win-win for as wide a circle as possible.
It just strikes me that as things become more sort of centralized command and control economically, I don't know what causes another, but it seems to mirror itself in the way that we sort of centralize command and control childhood these days.
Yeah, I mean exactly right.
I mean what The essence of play is that it's a free choice, and you're always free to quit.
If you're not free to quit, it's not play.
And so if you and I are playing a game and we're really playing, we're both free to quit.
There's no pressure on us saying, you know, except I may try to say, oh, please play, you know, but even that's negotiation.
But you are always free to quit.
And so if I begin to bully you in some way or if I want to just have it my way and not take into account what you want to do, you're going to quit.
You're going to just leave me alone.
And if I behave that way to enough people, I'm going to be just left alone.
Well, I've got this enormous drive as a human being to play with other people, to associate with other people.
This is a terrible punishment if people just leave me.
But it's a completely natural one.
It's a completely natural one.
And so I have to learn To take other people's views into account.
I have to learn to see things from other people's point of view and not think that it's just the whole world circles around me.
And the children are constantly practicing that in play.
That is one of the major lessons of social play.
And I'm sure that in the course of evolution, one of the reasons this strong drive to play socially came about in the human being It's because that's how human beings learn to cooperate, learn to negotiate, learn to get along in groups, in cooperative sharing groups with other people.
You couldn't design a better system for learning it.
And lo and behold, Mother Nature has designed that for us through the natural selection process.
Well, we totally circumvent that when we put adults in charge and have adults telling the rules and solving the problems and telling everybody how to play.
You know, the adult-led Little League game is maybe a good way to learn baseball, how to throw a curveball or how to slide into second base.
But, you know, baseball is far less important for most of us to learn than how to get along with other people, how to solve our own problems, how to negotiate differences, how to make sides even, how to decide what's fair and not fair.
And kids, when they're playing on their own, are constantly involved in this.
And you're right.
They may be spending more time negotiating and more time talking about the rules and arguing it out than they are actually spending playing the game.
But which is more important?
You know, learning to play the game or learning to play the game in big letters, meaning...
The social game, how to get what you want while also allowing other people to get what they want.
That's the big skill that everybody has to learn in order to play with other kids.
And what more important skill can there be for us adults all through life?
You know, this is what it's about.
We can't We're not individuals who live all by ourselves.
We always depend upon cooperation with other people, and the most successful people are the people who know that and understand how to cooperate.
Successful in all terms, in terms of being able to find ways to support themselves, but also in the sense of having happy marriages, having happy friendships, having basically a happy life.
Yeah, I mean, I think I would argue that almost all the relationships that matter the most to us are voluntary.
I mean, if my wife couldn't leave me, it wouldn't be much of a marriage.
If I couldn't leave my job, it wouldn't be much of a job.
And so learning how to find win-win involuntary in situations is something that… We have this consequentialism style of parenting which I've been exposed to recently, which is that if your kid just grabs a toy from another kid, all the parents in the world come raining down and, oh, no, don't do that.
You've got to learn to share, blah, blah, blah.
And there's an interesting argument which says, well, let them experience the consequences of grabbing other kids' toys, which is that the other kids don't want to play with them very much.
And there's a consequentialism which is much more important than intervening in the natural consequences of, say, selfish or antisocial behavior, assuming it's not obviously violent.
But the idea that children are going to make mistakes has become progressively less tolerable for us.
And I don't know what that is.
I think it has something to do with the fact that...
Parental time seems to be stretched very thin these days.
You know, I mean, lots of two-parent families or single moms and so on.
When I was a kid, you know, go play.
Get out of the house.
I have things to do.
Whereas now, parents don't have nearly as much time with their children.
So I think they want to kind of hold them a lot closer and not sort of push them out to go and explore the world on their own.
Right.
You know, you made a good point a moment ago, and I want to go back to it, about...
In a marriage, if you bully your wife, she'll leave you.
It wasn't all that long ago that she couldn't leave you.
Either because divorces weren't permitted or because there were no independent ways for women to make a living.
And so people were more or less locked in marriages and there was an enormous amount of spouse abuse.
Terrible.
It was only when divorces became possible and when people could leave a marriage That marriage became a happy state of affairs for most people because...
Sorry to back you up there, I mean, I read a statistic recently that women's suicide rate went down enormously, women's depression went down after a no-fault divorce came in.
Depression went down, suicide went down, other mental health problems went down because you have the choice and the choice is everything in life.
The freedom to leave the relationship is critical to making that relationship work.
And here we put children in school where they're not free to leave it.
They're forced to be with this other group of kids.
And if they're bullied, they can't leave.
And that's when kids commit suicide.
That's also sometimes when kids just flip out and commit mass murder.
I mean, this is an abnormal condition where there is not the freedom to leave.
And when there's not the freedom to leave, bullying becomes possible.
It's really the freedom to leave that prevents bullying.
And we can make all the rules and laws we want against bullying in the schools, but until kids are really free to leave it, you're not going to stop bullying.
And this is one of the great tragedies, I think, of...
I mean, I hate to say the world, but I think it is fairly worldwide, which is the idea that we cannot view children as moral agents deserving of at least as much protection as adults.
You know, if we try to run...
And adults' choices, the way that we run children's choices, we would understand that it's totalitarian in its essence.
It's fundamentally fascistic in its essence.
But the idea that there's just been this weird thing where we believe that reforming a non-voluntary institution will make it have the characteristics of voluntarism, which is sort of like going back to the Middle Ages and saying, OK, well, we're not going to get rid of serfdom.
We're going to pass a whole bunch of laws that say the lords should be nice to their serfs.
Or we're not going to get rid of communism.
We're going to pass a whole bunch of laws that say we'd like communism to be politically peaceful and economically productive.
There's no substitute for voluntarism in our relationships.
There's no source, no magic, no law, no God.
Nothing can make what voluntarism brings to a relationship and yet with children, it's It's as incomprehensible for us to allow them to choose their own destinies as it is incomprehensible for us to deny that to adults.
And I just started for the rant, but that's just something I think that in the general extension of voluntarism to marriage, to slavery, to hopefully militarism, to maybe things like taxation, the extension of voluntarism, we're not done yet.
We've got a whole class of people, the most important class of people that we've got to start even having the conversation about.
Yeah.
A lot of people will say, well, going to school is just like an adult going to work.
There are things you have to do that you might not want to do, and it's good training for work to go to school.
But what people don't realize is that We can always leave our jobs.
You can't by law make a person work in any place.
We've done away with slavery.
It's no longer permissible in this country.
At least it's not legal.
And so people are free to leave their job.
If a person's free to leave their job, their employer then has to take some account of their welfare and what their wishes are, because if not, they'll leave.
And we don't give the same opportunity to kids.
It's a basic human characteristic that if you If somebody is not free to leave a relationship with somebody else, then bullying becomes not only possible, but likely.
And there's an enormous amount of bullying in schools, not just of kids towards other kids, but of adults towards kids, too.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think to be fair with the original Prussian intent of the school system, the school does prepare you for really crappy jobs.
I mean, because they wanted them to become soldiers and factory workers to possibly, at least at that time in the 18th century, the worst jobs you could conceivably imagine.
So a school in just sort of training you to be passive and training you to space out and training you to just obey orders, It does make you a good soldier or a factory drone, which is kind of what was important for the militaristic and expansionistic economy.
Yeah, I mean, that's a good point.
I mean, the primary curriculum of school even today is timeliness.
You have to show up on time.
You have to move when the bell tells you to move, and only then.
You have to do what you're told to do in the way you're told to do it.
And if you do all those things, you're likely to be passed along and do okay.
If you have a rebellious spirit and you don't show up in time or you don't move when the bell tells you to move or if, God forbid, you do the assignment in a wholly different way and the teacher doesn't understand it, then you have failed.
So you're right.
I mean, a lot of the curriculum of school is...
Following the clock, following rules, rules that you have no voice in making.
I mean, it's one thing to follow rules that you have a voice in making.
It's another thing to blindly follow rules just because you're told to do it, even if it doesn't make any sense and you had no voice in making it.
So I think that is a lot of the curriculum, and that's the way a lot of the jobs were.
You just had to blindly do this.
You couldn't question the authority and so on.
But those jobs, thank goodness, are We're pretty much going extinct now.
We've got machines who can do all that.
And we don't need to reward them or punish them to do it.
They just do it.
So, we need human beings for more creative things now.
And our schools are not well designed for producing that.
Right.
Now, maybe we can end up...
I mean, literally, I could talk all night, but...
The way forward.
I mean, my goodness.
This seems to be the biggest revolution that human beings have ever faced, which is the extension of full humanity to children.
The recognition, really, that children – we generally believe, tragically, that children are lesser beings and deserve lesser protection, which is why in the United States it's still permissible to hit children.
Why in Canada it's still permissible to hit children?
Which has been denied to all adults for many years.
The way forward is the extension of full humanity to children as we have to minorities, as we have to women and so on.
It just seems really a staggeringly difficult thing for people to do emotionally because it involves your own childhood history and your own childhood trauma and things you probably don't want to go back and remember and deal with.
But also there is, you know, at a very sort of nuts and bolts, pragmatic level, an entire colossal industry and an entire colossal economy and an entire colossal political structure that kind of is dependent on all of this stuff.
I mean, if you even think about giving school vouchers to parents, I mean, public sector unions go insane because if you give choice to children, will they choose the existing system?
Of course not.
Otherwise, we would have given that choice to children because it would make no difference.
So, when you think of the resistance going forward, how do you see this beginning to change?
Yeah, I don't see it changing from within the school system.
I do see it changing by virtue of more and more people leaving the school system.
Now, one thing I have to give credit for here in the United States is at least in most states, it's possible to leave the school system.
You can leave it for homeschooling, unschooling.
You can leave it for Sudbury schools, the kind that I've observed, which really are places where children are free and direct their own learning or in this age-mixed environment.
These things are all legal in this country, at least in most states.
It's not entirely legal in every state.
And more and more people are doing it.
The way I see the change occurring is as there are more people who leave it, at some point everybody will know somebody who grew up without schooling as we know it.
And they will see, hey, that person's okay.
You don't even have to see that that person is happier or more productive or more creative and so on than other people.
All they have to do is see that that person is okay.
And if they can see that you can grow up okay without going through school and having a happy childhood in the process, why wouldn't you choose that for your kids?
But you've got to be convinced that it's possible.
Most parents believe, and they're constantly hearing the rhetoric.
They hear it from the leaders of both major parties in the United States.
They hear it from everybody.
And school does a very good job of Indoctrinating people in the belief that you need school so they're constantly being indoctrinated with this but as soon as they begin to hear the arguments on the other side and actually listen to them and even more than that when they begin to see people Who educated themselves outside of the school system and who are doing okay,
then they're going to say, why should I make my child, who's clearly suffering in school, why should I force my child through that?
I think that one thing we can see, the history of humanity over the past X number of centuries has been Generally, one of progress towards more freedom.
I mean, we went through a terrible stage of history where most people were slaves or servants of one sort or another, not free, and these feudalism, you know, systems of slavery.
We began to develop democracies.
We gradually applied the idea of freedom to Not just in America, not just to white landowning men, but then all white men, and then we began to include black men, and then we finally decided women are human too.
You know, the progress has been towards more and more freedom.
And once people are free, they don't want to go back.
And so I think that...
I think that it's inevitable.
I can't predict how long it'll take, but I think that it's inevitable that we're going to recognize that children too need freedom to make their own choices, especially about education.
That's what they're designed to do.
They come into the world burning to learn about the world, understand it, and they have their own ways to do it.
We deliberately deprive them of the opportunity to do it in our schools because we want to control what they learn rather than let them learn on their own way.
But I think that when we see that it works, when we see that we have, if anything, an even more productive economy and that people are happier when this results, I think it'll happen.
I have a lot of faith in human beings.
I also have seen enormous social changes just in the course of my life.
I mean, it wasn't That long ago that homosexuality was either a sin or a disease, depending on whether you were looking at it from the religious or the secular point of view.
And now, you know, everybody under 30, and most of us over 30, have come to accept Homosexuality is a normal variation.
It's perfectly compatible with a good life, with mental health and being a productive citizen.
How did that come about?
It didn't come about really from theorizing.
It really came about when some brave homosexuals came out, proudly announced that they were gay or lesbian, took all the abuse it took for doing that, And then, lo and behold, everybody discovered that they've got some uncle or cousin or brother or child or a friend down the street or there's a movie star or a great athlete, homosexual.
Well, how can you, after that, condemn it?
And I think that there's going to be something similar happening as we see more and more people who are brave enough to educate their children outside of the system and in this case when people see that hey you can grow up this way and be perfectly normal Then there's going to be a lot of people opting for that route.
In this sense, it's different from the homosexuality analogy doesn't apply here.
People aren't going to change their sexuality because they see it's okay, but people are going to change their way of schooling because they see it's okay because it's also a much more pleasant and normal, natural way for everybody to do it.
Well, yeah, and I agree with you, but I think there's a difference that we can maybe just spend a minute or two exploring.
So, I mean, the blacks were freed by the whites, and the whites had not been slaves when they freed the blacks.
The women were freed by the men.
The men had not been women, we can assume, and so on, right?
And most of the people who are tolerant of homosexuality were not themselves gay beforehand and so on, right?
Whereas we all were children.
And I think that's, you know, for me, just when I was reading the book, there's times I'm actually in tears in this book.
Hearing the description of the schooling that the kids had available to them in the Sudbury Valley School and even in some of the Democratic, though not quite as...
And the reason, I mean, I went to boarding school in England when I was six where you got camed for doing bad things and you had to line up in rows.
It was particularly Dickensian.
Now, I mean, I've gone through years of therapy.
I've really tried to work on all that kind of stuff.
But looking, it's very painful to...
To free the chains of people where you were in that situation, if that makes sense.
Because you really have to deal with your own pain and you have to recognize how much opportunity and possibility was denied to you by granting it to others.
And I think that's a big difference from all of the prior revolutions or extensions of humanity in the past.
And that it went to a group that was kind of, you know, what the postmodernists call the other.
You know, as somebody who was different, you could grant them freedom and it was a freedom that you had not generally had denied to you.
In the past, but I think that's one of the challenges, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, no, I think that does make sense.
And we also kind of think of it, you know, a child is not a different category of human being, lifelong.
A child is a stage that all human beings go through, as you've just pointed out.
And so, you know, we have kind of this view that children are Children when they're young are not ready for freedom and so they have to be directed and controlled and then at some point they become ready for freedom.
That's a little bit different than believing that blacks or women are never ready for freedom.
So there is that difference and it does make it a little bit harder to think about it.
What I like to suggest in talking about your own childhood, one of the things that I find that helps people think about this is think back when you were eight years old and try to remember what you were thinking about.
What was the level?
I bet you will recognize that you were thinking about pretty sophisticated ideas.
You had a pretty good understanding of the world around you.
You were not all that different at eight years old in your ability to make reasonable judgments, your ability to philosophize about things than you are today.
You know, we have, you know, Piaget developed all these stages of reasoning.
They've been pretty much, you know, research, one thing I kind of point out in the book, I don't go into detail about it, I actually do in my textbook.
The researchers have pretty much shown that's simply not true.
We don't go through these stages of cognitive development.
We pretty much are all concrete operational thinkers from the age of four on through adulthood, thinking the same terms.
We do We learn more, we acquire more knowledge and hopefully more wisdom as we go along, but we're not fundamentally different in our ability to understand things and reason about things when we're kids and to make reasonable choices.
But if you deprive kids of the opportunity to make choices, then they may act irrational on those rare occasions when they're allowed to make choices.
And of course they're going to make mistakes.
Everybody makes mistakes.
That's how we learn, you know?
So you see a kid who's free, who makes a mistake, does something dumb, and you say, oh, see, you know, you let him free and you make something dumb.
So I guess we've got to control his life.
But that's part of the learning process.
And we all, you know, we never, I do at least one dumb thing every day, too.
But that doesn't lead people to think, oh, they have to take control of my life.
Yeah.
Right, right.
That's an excellent point.
An excellent point.
Well, I am going to put a link to the book in the low bar of the video and on the podcast.
And as always, I want to tell you I hugely appreciate the work that you're doing.
The writing style is really wonderful.
This is something that – I mean I'm a big fan of fiction and poetry and so on.
But prose – It's a real challenge.
Non-fiction prose is a real challenge.
I struggle with it, and I think that it's an elegant pen that went across your page, and I really appreciate the way in which you communicate these ideas.
I can sense the enthusiasm behind what it is that you're trying to communicate.
I think it's an incredibly essential thing to communicate, so I really wanted to appreciate that and hope that I could drive some sales your way, because if we can convince parents that there are options, you know, I don't think of jumping to the moon, because I don't think it's an option.
If somebody told me I could, I'd be there in a jiffy, right?
So I hope that we Giving a choice where choice before did not exist because there's been such an absolutism around the way we thought of education for so long.
And, you know, the last time we thought creatively about education, we couldn't even leave the ground in an airplane.
So I hope that this drives some books.
Thank you so much for your work.
It's always a pleasure and I hope we get to chat again sometime.
Well, thank you very much.
I really do appreciate it a great deal and I'm really hoping that My fondest hope is that the book plays some small role in what I see as the inevitable revolution in education.
Thank you very much, Dr.
Peter Gray.
We'll talk again.
Thank you so much.
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