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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:58
'School Is A Prison!' - Dr Peter Gray Interviewed on Freedomain Radio
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing very well.
I have on the line Dr. Peter Gray.
He is a research professor of psychology at Boston College.
He has conducted and published research in comparative evolutionary developmental and educational psychology.
He has also published articles on innovative teaching methods and alternative approaches to education.
is the author of Psychology, an Introductory College Textbook, now in its sixth edition.
He did his undergraduate study at Columbia.
He has a PhD in Biological Sciences from Rockefeller University.
His current research and writing focuses primarily on children's natural ways of learning and the lifelong value of play.
His own play includes not only his research and writing, but also long-distance bicycling, kayaking, backwards skiing, and vegetable gardening.
Thank you so much, Dr. Gray, for taking the time today.
I'm glad to do so.
Well, I've been reading Devouring Your Blog which was sent to me by a listener and the blog is called Freedom to Learn and it's available at Psychology Today.
And I'd like to start with the topic that created a significant discomfort for you and some of your listeners because let's start with the uncomfortable which is where you repeated that school is prison which is
Perhaps not as inflammatory to my audience as it is to some of your those more general audiences But I wonder if you could step through the ways in which you think this is not even just an analogy But it's rather in fact more of a direct comparison Yeah, I guess let me just step back a little bit and say where that particular how that particular post arose in my mind I had been reading a book with the intriguing title.
Why don't children like school and I Never once in the entire book, which is a acclaimed book written by a well-known cognitive scientist, never once did he say, well, just maybe children don't like school because their freedom is restricted in school.
He was saying everything about children don't like school because we don't use the most advanced cognitive methods of teaching them.
And there's a long line of books like that, a long line of so-called educational reformers who think that if only teachers were smarter or if only they would use the most recent techniques that psychologists or cognitive scientists have developed, then children would love school and they would love learning in school and so on.
All of this just ignores what is obvious to every child.
Whether the child says it or not, it's obvious to the child.
What is really obvious to all of us, and that is that children are not free in school.
People crave freedom, and that's as true of children as it is of people at any age.
And when you restrict them in these severe ways, they're not happy.
And this is not the kinds of conditions conducive to learning.
It really led me to say it out loud, you know, and in writing.
School is prison.
It is prison.
It is prison by the definition of prison being a place where, A, you are compelled to be.
You don't have a choice to be there.
Now, granted, some children don't have to be there because their parents have the wherewithal to figure out some means to convince the school system that they can teach their children at home.
Or have the wherewithal to find and afford some kind of private school where at least there is some sense of choice about the choice of the school.
But for the great majority of people, the assumption is, by law, you have to be in school.
So you have no choice about it.
And while you're in school, you have very, very little control of what you're doing.
You're being directed Pretty much every minute of the day, except between classes and even then, the rules are very strict about what you can and cannot do.
And school is becoming ever more prison-like as we go along, as no longer recesses in many schools, lunch periods are restrained, no longer can you go off I think that's a powerful perspective.
So quite, you know, some people have said that I've used prison as an analogy to school.
I would go further.
I mean, by a reasonable definition of prison, school is not just like prison, it is prison.
That's I think that's a powerful perspective.
One of the things that has struck me in looking at the school system is that if you try to impose the kind of quasi totalitarianism on adults, that is considered perfectly acceptable to impose upon children, nobody would have any question as to why the adults would be unhappy.
So if you looked at the amount of regimentation that occurred in Soviet Russia, of course the people would be unhappy, because they couldn't choose their occupations, because they couldn't choose how to spend their days, because They weren't at liberty to pursue their own interests.
They were constantly being shuffled from one party meeting to another to a sort of government assigned job.
Of course, they're going to be unhappy.
And of course, what happened in the Soviet Union was a lot of drugging of quote dissidents, which were just people who found the system unbearable.
And that's something I think you've touched on as well.
Yeah, the ADHD debate is quite a complex one.
But one of the things I think that you've asked some of your listeners to talk about is the degree to which children who have received either formal or informal diagnoses within the school system seem to flourish quite well once outside the school system.
Yeah, yes, that's right.
I mean a lot of, you know, this epidemic we have of childhood disorders, especially ADHD is perhaps the most obvious of them, can really be considered to be localized school disorders.
I mean the The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Description of ADHD lists behaviors that are pretty clearly school behavior.
It doesn't sit in seat, speaks out of turn, and so on and so forth.
These are things that get you a diagnosis of ADHD.
These are things that don't show up because they're not regarded as problems until the child begins school.
So school, my argument is school is an abnormal environment for children.
Human beings are extraordinarily plastic, extraordinarily adaptable.
Most children, more or less, they don't adapt well, but they more or less adapt to the school situation.
But not everybody does.
I mean, there's a normal distribution of personalities and Hardly anybody adapts well to it, but some are so the fit between their personality and the school requirements is so great that they really are big disturbances in that environment.
And so what are you going to do?
In the past, we had somewhat more flexible ways of dealing with this.
First of all, it was acceptable to drop out of school.
Vocational schools and that where people could train for trade and and this was not regarded as a lesser You know a lesser direction when training to be a scholar but now we expect everybody to be a scholar regardless of their personality and Scholar in a very narrow definition of the term scholar and people who don't adapt to that who don't fit that regardless of their age are
Often given a diagnosis and encouraged if not required in the few places required to take these very powerful drugs that have unknown effects on the development of the brain.
So this is a very serious situation.
It is a tragedy of I think every society that when a system is broken it is the least powerful in that system who are forever required to adapt to whatever is broken in and I think that's very much happening with children.
One of the things that struck me is that the improvements in parenting, I mean, if you sort of look at public school cementing in its sort of Prussian way from the mid-19th century onwards, it's remained remarkably static, as so often happens when the state or the government or some sort of bureaucracy takes over an institution.
It tends to remain very static.
I mean, we still have months off in the summer to help with farming that hasn't been a necessity for decades, if not generations.
But parenting has improved and the degree of entertainment and stimulus available to children outside of school through various forms of media and entertainment have improved remarkably.
And I think that's even widened the gap between when parenting was much harsher and more brutal than I think you would get kids who would sit in a row.
And when they didn't have the same kind of stimulation outside of school compared to what they have inside of school, they think they'd be even less depressed.
And I think that's what one of the tragedies that's occurring is this disparity between how children experience life outside of school versus inside Well that that is to some degree true I think but at the same time their school has not been static there has been There have been changes over time In some ways for the worse in that school that children are expected to spend more hours in school than ever before You know, there's been a continuous
increase in the length of the school year.
You know, when schools were first instituted in this country, in Massachusetts, the school year was 12 weeks long, and the required period of being in school was from age 8 until 14.
And that was it, you know.
If you did any more schooling than that, it was your choice.
Or you may not even have had that choice because it may not have been available to you.
So that was what was regarded as the amount of schooling necessary to produce an educated citizen.
Now, of course, it's way, way more than that.
So it's one thing to expect a child to spend a certain amount of time in school.
It's another thing to expect school to be essentially the equivalent of a full-time job.
adult job, which it now is.
And we even talk about it in those terms.
School is the child's job.
But it's a job that they don't get to choose, unlike the adults who can choose our jobs and walk away from them and choose another job if it doesn't work out for us and complain to our bosses with some expectation of there being some accommodation of our needs and can refer unlike the adults who can choose our jobs and walk away from them and choose another job if it doesn't work out for us and complain to our bosses with being some accommodation of our needs, and can refer to some legal system that protects our rights, which is not there to protect the rights of children in school.
So, in some ways, school has gotten worse.
We don't have the same kind of corporal punishment that we did then, but instead we have punishment by humiliation, as every bit as strong as it ever was, which in many ways is, I think, worse than beating.
The child feels humiliated by being compared and shamed in relation to other people.
You're not doing as well as so-and-so.
And we have a system in which children themselves begin to feel like the whole purpose of life is to outperform others in school.
And you're a failure if you are only average, let's say.
So that's So that's what's happening in schools.
In homes, I partly agree with you about enlightened parenting, but then on the other hand, you know, when I compare the typical parent when I was a child in the 1950s and the typical parent today, I had a lot more freedom at home.
And the typical kid in this country had a lot more freedom at home in the 1950s than the typical kid does today.
We were free all summer long, all the time after school, to do what we wanted.
We played with other kids.
We explored.
We could go any place we wanted.
By the age of six, I could go on my bicycle anywhere in town, by myself or with friends.
What six-year-old is allowed to do that today?
Today we have the concept that children more or less need constant adult guidance.
It's as if the schooling mentality has become a property of all of society.
So parents see themselves as teachers and guides rather than just parents.
And instead of letting kids just go out and play because we're afraid that they would get into some trouble or that there are dangers lurking around every corner outside, We insist that they join some organized sports group or some other adult-led activity where they're not free, really, where they are doing what the adult tells them to do, where they're not learning to solve their own problems, where they're not learning to take control of their own lives.
So I would argue that the school mentality has grown to such an extent that it has left the walls of school.
and affects the way parents and all of society thinks about children.
We no longer think of children as free entities who are reasonable and can figure things out for themselves and who explore and learn on their own.
Back in the 1950s, parents had a lot more trust and confidence in their kids than parents do today.
That is an excellent point.
I was just thinking while you were talking about my own childhood, I guess in the 70s, when There was, yeah, I could go on my bike and roll all around the estate that I grew up in.
I walked to school, which I went to boarding school when I was very young, but then I walked to a public school, which was quite a journey back and forth.
Yeah, these things, I think it's actually not even legal to allow kids to do that anymore, but what do you think has driven that?
You could really argue that in many ways kids are a lot safer now.
I mean, we have helmets, laws for bicycles and things like that and child safety.
Yeah, I think that there's a number of things.
You don't get lawn darts piercing people's scalps anymore.
I mean, you could argue that children are a lot safer, but the perception seems to be quite the opposite.
What do you think is driving that?
Yeah, I think that there's a number of things.
One, of course, is the media that, you know, some child gets molested somewhere in the world and we all hear about it, you know.
This happens with less frequency today than it did in the 1950s, but when it happens we hear about it.
So even though statistically this is like getting struck by lightning, in our minds this is something that happens all the time.
We believe it happens all the time.
You know, we've had this period of Now, fortunately, I think we're overcoming this, but we had this period of teaching children about stranger danger, as if every person that you don't know out there on the street is a potential danger to you.
When, of course, what we should be teaching our children is to trust people, because it's really, you need to be able to trust people.
And, you know, 999.9 children out of a thousand, adults out of a thousand, are going to be helpful and kindly to a child.
And that weird adult who's not, most children can spot that adult, you know, and have the sense to stay away.
But if we teach children that all adults are potential dangers, that all people that you don't know are potential dangers, then they lose that ability to discriminate, which leads them to be even in more danger than they would if we weren't trying to do that.
So this perception of danger is part of it, is a big part of it.
Another part of it is, just as I said before, I think that over time school has become an increasingly big factor in our social lives and our ways of thinking about children.
So the school mentality, the view that children need more or less constant guidance and direction because their own behavior is just wasted time or is likely to get them into trouble, that mentality has taken over so that parents now believe that, and they didn't used to believe that.
It used to be that parents thought it was enough to feed your child, to comfort your child, to meet your child's emotional needs, you know, in natural ways.
And that the child grew by himself.
And, you know, maybe whether or not the child had some schooling, the child was going to learn things on his or her own.
There was an understanding that children learn through play and their own explanation.
It might have been almost an intuitive understanding.
It wasn't necessarily articulated.
Of course, this is what children do.
They play.
Go out and play.
That was the refrain of parents.
Get out of my hair.
Go out and play.
That might not be a statement of children's freedom, but the effect of that is that children were free.
And this is how children have always grown up.
This is how, you know, hunter-gatherers expect.
They don't teach children.
They expect children are going to learn through their own play and self-directed exploration.
But somehow we have developed the notion, and I think we've developed because we pay too much attention to the experts who keep telling us this, That we adults are responsible for every bit of our children's development and therefore we have to more or less constantly guide them, supervise them, teach them, and this is part of what has led to less freedom for kids.
Some of the work that you've done on your blog, I try to challenge myself, I try to overcome whatever cultural ideas I've got.
It seems that there's better reason and evidence elsewhere.
Something that I bump up against is things like the Sudbury School and unschooling.
And I know that you've got some great examples of research that have been done in what we call primitive societies and also among primates about the way in which children are allowed to teach themselves with some guidance or at least some access to more experienced adults.
But I think you said your son also teaches at a Sudbury school.
Could you talk a little bit about the idea of self-teaching among children and the effect that it has on their intellectual growth?
My son was a student at the school and then a staff member at the school later on.
They don't call them teachers because they don't see it as the staff's responsibility to teach children.
But rather the staff are the adult members of the school community who do what you would expect adults to do, be responsible, especially responsible members of the community.
But the way this school works is that children are of all ages from four on through high school age, but they're not divided into grades.
They're not assigned to classes.
They're there, and they do what they please, as long as they don't violate the rules of the school.
And the rules in school are all made in a democratic fashion by the school community as a whole and through the school meeting in which every school meeting member, whether they're a four-year-old student or a 60-year-old staff member, has the same vote as every other member.
So all the rules which have to do with the kinds of rules that any society needs, you can't hurt other people, you can't disrupt the activities of other people, you can't use coercive means to make other people do what you want them to do, you can't litter, you can't destroy the property.
There's a whole set of rules all democratically made and enforced through a judicial committee that includes the students.
So that it's a trial by your peers.
So the school is basically a democratic community and it's also a community which represents much of what we value in our culture.
There are the tools that are important to our culture.
Computers, books, sports equipment of various kinds.
There's a photography laboratory.
There's a well-equipped kitchen.
There's a woodworking shop and so on.
So there are the tools that are required for developing skills in various areas that have turned out to be of interest to students over the years.
And there are staff members who are knowledgeable in a wide variety of areas.
The staff members, incidentally, are hired and fired by the school meetings.
So they are themselves chosen by the students.
Every year, no staff member has more than one year contract.
There's no such thing as tenure at the school.
So every staff member, including the founders of the school, who have A couple of the founders of the school who have now been there for 43 years have to be re-elected to staff every year.
So this really totally violates our conception of a school.
This is a school really run by the kids.
Because the kids always would out-vote the staff if there were really any philosophical or political differences between the staff and the students.
So that's the way the school is formulated.
Within this context, there's no curriculum.
There are no tests.
There are no rules that have to do with children's learning.
Children do what they want to do, and mostly, if you look at it, you wouldn't be surprised to see what they're primarily doing.
Little kids are primarily playing.
Bigger kids are also playing in somewhat more sophisticated ways.
Bigger kids also are spending a lot of time just hanging out, talking with one another.
But if you look at the play, and if you look at what they're doing closely, as I have in some of my research, and one of my graduate students even more so in his research, And listen to the conversation as another graduate student at another Sudbury school has did for a dissertation that she wrote.
What you see is very sophisticated activity.
You know, people, the play is complex.
It's exercising higher mental functions all the time.
Within the context of play, children are learning how to read, and they're learning how to write, and they're learning how to present ideas in convincing ways.
They're learning how to negotiate differences.
They're learning how to influence their friends in ways that don't violate school rules because they're not coercive ways of influencing their friends.
They're learning the skills that are really critical to our society.
They're also exercising their bodies in physical play and becoming healthy through this means.
They're exercising their minds continuously.
They do a lot of computer play, but they also do a lot of outdoor play.
When you look at, you know, they're developing sophisticated codes in some of their play.
They're reasoning at the highest level, not because anybody is forcing them to, but because they're free to do so, and it's fun to do so, and it's human to do so.
So that's the environment in which children are learning.
They learn to read because the written word is all around them.
Little kids see bigger kids reading and they want to do it.
And they pick it up.
They pick it up partly through playing with older kids.
You'll see little kids playing at a computer game with older kids and their words on the screen.
And the kids who can read read the words out loud to the ones who can't read and lo and behold After not long of that, the kids who can read are also recognizing these words.
And once they've got a few words in command this way, then they're well on their way to knowing how to read.
At some point they figure out the code and they can read.
So many kids learn to read without any formal instruction at all.
Some ask for a little help and somebody explains to them the phonetic code and, oh yeah, that's fascinating.
I've got it now.
We're learning to read a huge, big deal in our conventional schools, as if it takes years to really learn how to read, and it's a very gradual process.
It's not true that it necessarily is.
At Sudbury Valley, some kids don't learn to read until somewhat later.
Most of them tend to learn to read anywhere between four and about six, but some of them don't learn to read until later.
But whenever they learn to read, they learn to read quickly.
They're doing it on their own scheme, they're doing it because they really want to be able to read and whatever they're reading is meaningful to them.
You can make the same argument for numbers and for basic arithmetic and the kind of math that all of us use in everyday life, but this also comes simply through the children's Games and play and through their realistic activities cutting recipes in half if they're interested in cooking and so on and so forth.
You can't help but learn to use numbers if you're in this rich intellectual environment of the school.
So that's the way the school works.
And at first it seems absolutely surprising to people that children would learn in an environment in which nobody's forcing them to learn.
It doesn't take long of observing in this environment and being in it, if you've got your eyes open, to say, oh yeah, you know, it's really not so surprising after all.
You know, look what the kids are doing.
Look what play really is.
Play is not wasted time.
Play is really kind of generally involves very high level activity, whether it's physical activity or whether it's mental activity.
So my study of Sudbury Valley really is what, you know, my first study, I started to say this a while ago, my first study was motivated by my own concerns.
My son started the school when he was 10.
He was convinced that this was the right place for him, but I wasn't fully convinced.
I mean, I was convinced that he had really been rebelling in public school.
To him, it was very clear, it was no mystery to him that public school was a prison, and he simply wasn't going to stand for it.
He absolutely wasn't going to stand for it, and he fought it every minute, and finally he won the fight.
And then we found Sudbury Valley for him.
But I wasn't totally convinced.
I went through the conventional schooling system.
I'm a professor.
I've gone through the steps.
I wasn't fully convinced that you can successfully grow into adulthood in our culture without schooling as we traditionally conceive it.
I at least was afraid that he might be cutting his options short.
And so that led me Right from the beginning, when we started the school, to begin to want to interview graduates of the school, see what they were doing, to see if they had any regrets about going to such an unusual school, once they were out in real life.
And eventually I did a formal study of the graduates, which absolutely convinced me that the school works as an educational institution.
Nobody had regrets about going to such an unusual school, no matter how far out in life they were.
People went on to college with no problems if they wanted to go on to college.
Many went into excellent careers in business and the arts and the crafts that don't require college and they're perfectly well-developed intellectually.
They don't feel that they need the formality of college in order to learn.
There's so many ways to learn.
There's so many ways to get into fascinating discussions in this day and age especially.
that one doesn't need college for education.
You only really need college if you need it to get a certain diploma because the society requires it.
So, for example, those graduates of Sudbury Valley who decide that they want to become doctors know that they need to go to medical school, and although it may be possible, it's very difficult to get into medical school without first going to a four-year college.
So they prepare themselves to go to a four-year college, and they do that, and they do well, and then they go to medical school.
So what Sudbury Valley allows children to do is to play and explore, develop the basic abilities, the basic kinds of physical and social emotional abilities that are necessary to all of us to live a good life in society, but also beyond that, to discover what really interests them, what fascinates them, where their heart is, and then to figure out a way to turn that into where their heart is, and then to figure out a way to
And we've seen that over and over again in Sudbury Valley.
I think that's just fascinating.
And it really is, I don't often come across ideas that really challenge me as much emotionally as it is intellectually, because when you look at the potential of that kind of education, at least for me, and I compare it with my own dismal trudge through the experience, The incarcerated halls of public and private school education, it's almost painful emotionally to think of how much could have been achieved at a personal level with much, much more freedom.
And I sense, you know, not to sort of extrapolate my feelings to everyone, but I have a sense that that is one of the things that blocks us from this fundamental extension of personhood, right?
So my way of looking at it is the extension of personhood is always the great challenge of the moral progress of mankind to extend personhood.
to blacks to to women and and now of course to children is one of the great challenges to say that children have all the full rights of personhood and therefore can't be subject to a fundamentally opposed and hierarchical totalitarian system relative to the Freedom that adults both lust for and have achieved for the most part in adult society.
Why do you think it's so hard for people to look at this?
If you watch these documentaries, I watched one the other day, Waiting for Superman, it's heartbreaking to see the loss of human capital, which is a cold way of putting it, I know, but to see the loss of human vitality, to see the degree to which souls are just squeezed out and evaporated by this dismal system and that it happens The worst for those who need the most help, who have the most challenges intellectually.
It also happens to those who have the most to offer intellectually that they get ground into dust so often by the system.
It's painful.
How do you think people are going to or how do you think we're going to be able to confront this and look at children as full human beings subject to the same rights as everyone else, as the Sudbury School does, as unschooling does?
Why is it so hard for us to extend this personhood to children?
Yeah, I mean it's a very good question and, you know, historically, at least from an evolutionary perspective, this non-extension of personhood to children is new.
You know, for the great bulk of our existence we human beings were hunter-gatherers.
We lived in very small communities and
What's remarkable about these banned hunter-gatherer societies, which have been, as you know, some of them have continued to exist into modern times, apparently relatively unchanged from pre-agricultural times, and what anthropologists have found in basically every single one of these banned societies that they have studied, is that there is not, there is
There is the belief that every individual is a free and separate individual.
People, by choice, want to be in the band.
But if they're not happy in the band, they move to another band.
Even kids will.
If somebody feels oppressed in a band, they'll just go to another band.
It's like a playgroup, in a way.
If you don't like the kids you're playing with, you go join another group.
Nobody feels coerced.
That's the magic of the hunter-gatherer culture.
And they apply the same principles to children.
There's no belief that children are owned by their parents or by any of the adults in the band.
There's no belief that it's any more proper to tell a child what to do than to tell an adult what to do.
And there's a real prohibition.
You never in a hunter-gatherer band directly tell another person what to do.
That's just There's an understanding that that violates the other person's sense of freedom.
That each individual needs, there's almost nothing more central to being a person than feeling free, feeling in control of your own behavior.
Now, you may control your own behavior very much in accordance with what you have learned by observing others, with what you understand to be the norms of your culture and so on and so forth.
But still, it's your decision.
It's your control.
You are doing it.
And unless you are behaving in some way that really violates the rights of others, if you're killing other people, if you're beating other people, then of course the society, whether it's a hunter-gatherer band or anybody else, is going to in some way clamp down on you and hunter gatherers have their ways of doing that.
But nobody, for example, nobody tells an adult hunter gatherer to go out and hunt that day or tells them how to hunt.
There's just the expectation, of course, we need to hunt.
But if so-and-so wants to take a month off from hunting or two months off and go visit friends and relatives or just sit around camp gossiping, That's all right.
You know, there are plenty of people who will do the hunting and gathering and they share everything.
So, you know, there's no immediate... So the result of that is the whole... the activity of everybody is play-like.
And so just as you don't tell adults what to do, you don't tell children what to do.
You know, of course, if a child is hitting you or biting you, you stop that, because then the child is interfering.
You don't tolerate, you know, hurtful behavior.
That would be silly.
But you don't try to control the child for the child's own good.
You believe, you have faith, that the child knows what to do for its own good.
And in fact, that only the child can know that.
And I think that, to get back to your question, I think that the idea of control came about, first of all, with agriculture.
With agriculture, human beings began to control their environment.
We began to raise, we, instead of thinking of plants as something that grow themselves freely and of animals as something that grow themselves freely and choose to do what they're going to do, we began to think of plants and animals as under our control.
We can shape the plant and we can train the animal.
And then we began to think of children in those same terms.
Just as we can raise crops, we can raise children.
Just as we can train dogs and horses, we can train children.
So we began to use... it's not surprising to me that we use agricultural metaphors to describe the educational process.
Of course, hunter-gatherers didn't have agricultural metaphors.
They didn't have an agricultural way of thinking about Now, the fact is, we have been agriculturalists only for about 10,000 years.
That seems like a long time from our usual view of history, but from a biological view of history, that's just a speck of time.
That hasn't been enough time for any meaningful biological evolution to occur, so we evolved our brains and our basic being under conditions in which we were free.
And including in which children are free.
So children evolve mechanisms to, on their own, learn what they need to learn to become effective, valued members of the society in which they were growing.
That's the basic biological foundation for education.
Now for a variety of reasons, we have forgotten all that.
And one of the reasons is that Once we began to move into larger societies, once we began to have larger societies, societies became hierarchical.
Once we began to have agriculture, we had ownership of land.
And once we had ownership of land, we began to have status differences between people.
So there were those who had land and those who didn't have land.
And those who didn't have land were, of course, dependent upon those who did have land.
Ultimately what this leads to is a system of masters and servants.
It leads to those who have become the lords over those who don't have.
And of course this culminated in feudalism where the great majority of people were serfs, essentially slaves, you could say, under the rule of a few lords and masters.
A great deal of our Western religions, our Western philosophy, came about during that period of feudalism and the following of feudalism, you know, the years following, in which the whole purpose of education, the whole purpose of parenting at that time, was to train children to be obedient to lords and masters, because if they weren't obedient to lords and masters, they could be killed.
I mean a child who behaved according to his own free will and talked back to the master might well be killed.
Certainly he wasn't going to be able to continue supporting himself where his support depended upon that lord and master.
So parents became lords and masters as a way of training children how to live in a hierarchical feudal society.
The biblical injunctions about beating your child if your child talks back to you, or even killing your child if your child talks back to you.
I think it's horrid what you read in the Old Testament and even to some degree in the New Testament.
These all were adaptations to feudalism.
So we evolved biologically in a system of egalitarianism, of individual freedom, of non-hierarchical small societies.
And then we move culturally into these highly hierarchical societies where our survival depended upon our ability to suppress our willfulness, to suppress our own desires, and to do what we are told to do.
We're never very good at that.
Never very good at that.
And that's why it was always a battle.
I mean, nobody is a happy slave.
No child is happy at being forced to be obedient.
So it was a constant battle.
Now, we haven't overcome.
Society has evolved in some ways towards more democracy, but nothing close to the democracy with a small b of of hunter-gatherer societies, but we've evolved it, you know, at least in our country and in some other countries, towards more democracy, towards a view of equality of human beings, towards views that emphasize freedom.
We tend to value free will in children and so on and so forth.
But we're still at the same time stuck in this other mode of thinking that we don't always acknowledge but plays a big role in our thinking about the idea that children, as do everybody else, need direction.
Of course schools originated, and you've already mentioned the Prussian origin of compulsory state-directed education, but education originated really in religious schools, education as we know it today, originated in religious schools even before that.
Particularly with the Protestant Revolution, where there was the belief that to go to heaven people need to be able to read the Bible.
So it became important for everybody to know how to read, but even more important for everybody to accept the statements in the Bible.
So the early schools very clearly had an agenda of inculcating the religious dogma of the time into children.
There was no sense that schools were a place for intellectual development.
It was a sense that schools were a place for inculcating a particular set of beliefs and especially for convincing children that they needed to obey.
This sense of obedience, the need for children to obey Yeah, I guess that's more teaching children what to think rather than how to think.
Teaching children what to think rather than how to think and teaching and the primary lesson being to obey your elders.
So, you know, doing whatever the teacher says and not questioning it, even if it doesn't make any sense to you, you know, that's still the lesson of schools.
So that history of schools led to a certain type of school which we have You know, which we have been unable to shake, and actually haven't had, there hasn't actually been a lot of movement to shaking out of it.
Right, yeah, and of course we can layer into that the, I guess, the Marxist critique, which I have some sympathy for, which is that when you have to turn workers into machines, You can't really teach them that they're full people.
You've got the owners of the capital, of the factory managers, and then you have the people who are sort of destined, and this really comes out of the British class system as well, destined to move the levers, not design the goods.
And it's not very helpful for that system if workers are allowed to do the kind of self-exploratory knowledge gaining that goes on in unschooling and the Sudbury Valley model.
Well, I think that was a, first of all, I just want to say that was a fantastic speech.
I wish I could be that coherent for that long, but I guess you've had some practice, so I really appreciate that.
And I really want to make sure that people can, I'll put links to your blog, which I highly recommend.
I wish we could have gone into more subjects because every, at least for me, everything that you've written there is really, really fascinating and there's lots of empirical evidence that you've cited there as well to back up some of the stuff, particularly around the hunter-gatherer stuff, but I really, really do.
I mean, I could talk all afternoon, but I recognize that you probably have a few other things to do with your life, but I really want to thank you so, so much for taking the time.
It was really, really fascinating.
Well, thank you.
I've enjoyed it.
All right.
Take care.
All the best.
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