This is the second recording and transcript from a pair of events I hosted with Dr. Peter Gray in June of 2021. The first recording and transcript, as well as some context and commentary, are in this other post.
Where the first event focused on content pointing out that forcing kids into coercive schooling institutions isn’t necessarily the good it’s commonly assumed to be and offering reassurance that kids who aren’t forced through such schools can and do create fulfilling lives for themselves as competent members of their societies, this event focused on what conditions support learning and what education can look like if we take those conditions as our starting point. Additionally, this session features contributions from Paikea Melcher, the illustrator of Mother Nature’s Pedagogy as well as an upcoming children’s book from Jenni Mahnaz and Tipping Points Press.
The moments that gave me pause during the first session were mostly moments where information from other fields or perspectives from folks with different lived experiences were missing when they would have changed the conversation. That happened less in this session, though I still advocate spending time with the work of disabled and Indigenous storytellers when reading work that’s about those communities but from an outsider’s perspective. My hesitations while processing this recording and transcript were more personal. I had just lost a family member, and I felt good preparing for the event but a wave of grief snuck up on me just as we were starting. My mind went blank and I couldn’t make sense of my notecards, briefly, and I facilitated the moment as I do when such things happen around kids: I took a breath, narrated the situation, and then came back to the task at hand. When editing recordings, I’m used to having to decide about taking out long pauses, placeholder sounds like “ummm” and “like,” interruptions, and other moments that are true to life but don’t necessarily make for an easy listening experience. In this case, I had to decide whether to leave in my narration of my mini grief blackout as real and potentially validating for a grieving listener who feels alone, or to take it out as an unrelated distraction and moment of being less than professional. I left it in. Additionally, as someone who does sincerely have a love of learning, who has preserved a strong curiosity and desire to play with ideas and skill-building, who finds learning to be satisfying even when it isn’t fun (though it’s also often fun!), I’m unsure about Peter’s suggestion that there’s no role for the concept of a “love of learning” in self-directed education, even while appreciating that his underlying point is that people should get to choose the content that they engage with in order to get the most enjoyment and fulfillment from their learning, which I do agree with. It just feels like a leap to deem the two mutually exclusive.
White people, especially men and especially those with institutional power in places like the US, advocating for morality and moral education always makes me want to pause and check: who do they expect to be defining and policing morality? Who benefits from that arrangement, and who suffers? Am I sure they’re not about to try to say it’s immoral for me to wear clothing that shows my knees or to manage my own finances? History makes me suspicious. Similarly, when those same people — again, usually men — devote a lot of energy to a detail like how capitalization differentiates “self-directed education” from “Self-Directed Education” in their version of things, I can appreciate their academic philosophizing but want to stop them and check: do they realize other languages have different capitalization conventions and are as important to consider as English? Have they checked with practitioners and other folks with lived experience who are outside the academy? Why do they think pushing this distinction merits more energy than, say, working to counter the over-representation of the of white US and European writers…maybe by valuing works not in English and from, for example, the global south, enough to seek them out and translate them for wider sharing? Again…suspicious. But that’s less about this session than the conversation that’s part of the context it came out of.
Some of the quotes from this session should be on shirts and stickers — “curiosity is disruptive!” — and the Q+A portion is worth engaging with on its own. Peter’s dismissal of the concept of “learning loss” and “summer slide” is both evergreen and highly relevant for this pandemic moment. Paikea explains what kinds of adult presence and resources have been supportive to her self-directed education journey. And we end with a list of suggested readings and authors, which is always one of my personal favorite topics to close a conversation with. Hopefully folks will be inspired to start their own reading groups, to play at thinking and learning together, from all their different contexts.
Abby:
Hi. Welcome, everybody. I’m Abby Oulton. I use she/her pronouns. I’m located on Lenape land, in New York City. And I’m here hosting, on behalf of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education. Super excited to be hosting this event, part two of our book launch for these beautiful books [holds up books] published through Tipping Points Press. My hands are over the titles, sorry! And um… And I have grief brain; I’m a little spacey, I’m sorry. Um, so I get to introduce Dr. Peter Gray, the author of these books and the blog posts they’re based off of, as well as “Free to Learn,” which is a book I’m sure many of you are familiar with, and an introductory psychology textbook. And he’s done some cool work with other nonprofits and co-founded the Alliance for Self-Directed Education, which has the mission of increasing awareness and accessibility of self-directed education for young people and families around the world. Which is pretty cool.
And this week we also have Paikea contributing to our session. And she’s the illustrator of the gorgeous cover for “Mother Nature’s Pedagogy.” So we’re going to start. I’m going to turn it over to her to start, and then Peter is going to share some and talk about the books. And then we’ll have time at the end for questions. And so, please have — have questions for us.
Paikea:
Hi everyone I’m Paikea, the illustrator for the cover of Peter Gray’s book, “Mother Nature’s Pedagogy.” Since this illustration is based on my life and my memories, I want to start off by telling you my unconventional educational story. I have been a self directed learner my whole life. My mom went to a Montessori school when she was a kid and believes in self-directed learning, and that it’s good for kids. But people around me kept asking me when I was going to go to kindergarten when I was little. And I have always loved learning. So when my mom explained to me that preschool is school for babies, I immediately asked to go. Because I thought the goal of school was to learn. My mom never found a preschool that would work, but when it came time I happily jumped into kindergarten class. After a few weeks in the Spanish Immersion program at my local elementary school, they gave a hand out of the Spanish vocabulary words we were supposed to know by the end of the year. I already knew all of them. Not only that, but I would put all my energy and enthusiasm into the mindless activities they use to keep us busy. My mom looked at the older kids at the school and saw that eventually, I would realize it was all pointless, and I would lose my natural curiosity and spark. When she asked if I wanted to leave school, I told her I wanted to leave after Macaroni and Cheese Day, the very next week. So that’s what we did. I was always raised as if my opinions mattered. I was always raised as if my opinions mattered. And as someone who could think for myself. For the next six years, I was happily homeschooled. I played soccer, did four very different kinds of dance, gymnastics, I wrote musicals, wrote stories, played games, went to “Math Circle” and “Scratch Game Programming” class. I did nature journaling, took improv classes, all with my wonderful friends. I was very busy. At least once a week, I would go to park day, a bunch of homeschool families getting together in a park. We kids would all run off and organize our own games and activities and be happily playing in the park for hours. Our parents were there when we needed them, for snacks, perhaps, but mainly we were free to do as we liked. Playing mafia or ninja or Nerf gun wars or whatever, weird kind of tag someone thought up that day. When we finished whatever we were doing someone always had another idea of what to do. When we couldn’t agree on a game I, with the help of my friends, organized a blind vote. I’m a fan of democracy. It was, in short, really fun. Through my math club, Berkley Math Circle, we heard about this new place called Proof School. I thought, “School? I would never go there. School is dumb. It’s for — boring, and kids don’t really learn anything and they hate it there. Not for me, thanks.” But that didn’t stop me from going to their free talks and events and having a great time. Even when I started the application process, I thought it was just to be able to spend a little more time there, visit for a day, not actually go to school. But I really loved it there. They had modular origami, paint murals on the walls, kids running around and having — having fun. To my surprise, I wanted to go to the school. So I did for a few years and it was great. I had a few problems: teachers I didn’t think were teaching me anything. Needing accommodations for my dyslexia. But they always did a good job making changes for me. I made great friends, learned a ton, and had a lot of fun. But as time passed, the school wanted us to focus more on college prep, doing everything we could to shape ourselves into people colleges would want. Even though colleges want kids who shaped themselves. Meanwhile, my friends from park day were already going to community college. I knew colleges loved homeschoolers, their drive, initiative, and creativity. My homeschool friends were getting into UC Berkeley, without 10 AP tests and top SAT scores. So, when the school suddenly said they wouldn’t [inaudible] and when they said I couldn’t take advanced computer science because I wasn’t the “right type” of person, I decided it was time to leave. Back when I started school, I promised myself I would only go as long as I wanted to be there. If I didn’t want to go, I knew there was another life waiting to welcome me back. Leaving was hard. Leaving my friends, my choir, the teachers that I loved, but I had promised myself I would not fall into the norm of school drudgery. And I clearly remember thinking, I wish my friends knew there was this world of freedom out here. And then I was back, welcomed by friends old and new, back home to my world of freedom. I took community college classes, started dance again, drawing classes, park day. Quickly I built a new life. I started reading John Taylor Gatto, Blake Boles, and Peter Gray, trying to find the words to explain how I felt about school, show what was wrong. I know that some of my friends would have joined me leaving school if they and their parents knew what I knew about the world outside. In the research paper I had to write for my college freshman English class, I argued that people should homeschool their kids. Now, of course, I would advocate for self-directed learning, but I didn’t have that vocabulary at the time. I use many of Peter Gray’s articles and cited studies in that paper. So when the Alliance for Self-Directed Education sent out a call for illustrations for his book, I was immediately excited and start thinking about what to draw. I thought it would be really cool to be a book cover illustrator, and I knew that I had a lot to show about the topic. This is the final drawing I did. I drew park day: lots of busy happy children with parents nowhere to be seen. Each of these groups of kids is based on a common activity I did or saw others do at park day and inspiration I drew from listening to Peter Gray’s talks on YouTube. This kid in the lower left is inspecting the flowers. They represent natural curiosity. In the lower right is a kid nature journaling, drawing things around them and writing observations and questions they have. Nature journaling is how I learned to draw, and so I wanted to represent it in my own drawing. Just above, it’s a girl in a tree talking to a younger kid, helping them climb up, too. The last thing I want to mention before I go is my continuing work with Tipping Points Press. Sometime last year, the editor of Tipping Points Press, Alex Khost, told me Tipping Points was planning to publish a children’s picture book. I did a sample illustration for one of the pages, and he and the author, Jenni, loved it and agreed to work with me. So that’s a super cool project I’ve been working on this year. And it’s all thanks to this work I did on the book cover. So thank you Peter Gray and ASDE for this opportunity. I hope all of you will spread the word about Self-Directed Education, maybe by giving someone this book, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week. I’m happy to answer any questions you have about homeschooling or my experiences. Thank you for listening.
Peter:
Wow, thank you, Paikea. It’s great to finally meet you. I’m so — I love the drawing, and it’s nice to now know more about you. You know we held — when we decided to publish these little books of my blog posts, we thought about how to illustrate them. And we got the idea, well let’s, let’s have young people who are involved in self-directed education submit drawings, and submit paintings and drawings, and we’ll select from them. And we ended up selecting — you… When you see the whole four — if you have these books, you’ll see they’re all entirely different. They’re drawn by people of quite different ages. And, but I think in every one they’re just absolutely charming. So, so I’m going to take it over from here for a while, and then we’ll go back to questions and and discussion then. And if Paikea is still on then, she’s volunteered to be somebody to be addressed with such questions when we get there.
So I’m… Let me start by just saying a little bit about the point of these little books that… I’ve been writing a blog called Freedom to Learn for 13 years now. There are… I do the blog for Psychology Today magazine, and the topics… The posts have mostly to do with how children learn, the role of play in children’s lives, and to some degree the role of play in adults’ lives. The, the problems that are caused by our coercive schooling system, some of the changes that have occurred over history as we have been increasingly depriving children of the opportunity to play and explore and learn on their own, as we’re spending — they’re spending more and more of their time in forced schooling and in school-like activities after school. And I’ve documented a lot of this psychological consequences of that, increased anxiety and depression and so on and so forth. So, so people at various times have suggested to me that it would be nice if we could bring together the essays into little books arranged by topic. There are something like 194 different essays, and if you go through the whole, whole table of contents of my blog posts you could find them all, but it would be very difficult if you said, okay I want to look at all the, all the blog posts that have to do with the biological underpinnings of self-directed education. You’d have to go through all 194 and be — and make inferences from the titles as to which ones would pertain to that. So what we’ve done is we’ve drawn out, by topics, the essays that are relevant to that topic and put them together in these little books. Our ultimate plan has been to create more books. There’s… We’ve got eight planned. But we thought we’d start with four. And last week on Thursday at this time, I gave a talk, a little bit of a talk, on two of those books, the one called “The Harm of Coercive Schooling” and the other “Evidence- ” This is “The Harm of Coercive Schooling” and “Evidence that Self-Directed Education Works.” I talked about those last time. And today I’m going to talk about this one, with this wonderful cover, “Mother Nature’s Pedagogy” subtitled “Biological Foundations for Children’s Self-Directed Education,” and talk about this one, “How Children Acquire Academic Skills Without Formal Instruction.” There was also… So one purpose of the books was to make these blog posts available ordered by, organized by topic. And a second purpose was to help support the Alliance for Self-Directed Education. So these little books are published by the publishing company of the Alliance, called Tipping Points Press, and all of the profits from the book goes to help support the Alliance. The Alliance does a lot of very good work in promoting self-directed education and in providing resources, resource information to people, organizing and helping to organize local groups of people who are involved in self-directed education and so on. So — So for people who are, who recognize the value of self- of this option for people, for children, the Alliance for Self-Directed Education is well worth supporting. There are many ways you can support it. You can support it by joining. You can support it by volunteering. You can support it by donating. And you can support it now also by buying these little books. Buy them for your friends and relatives, not just for you.
So, I’m going to — the — For the rest of this time that- I’m going to sort of divide the rest of the time into three parts. I’m going to start off with a little bit of a lecture on the biological foundation of self-directed education that really kind of covers what the first couple of essays in this book are about. And then the second part I’m going to go through the two books that we’re talking about today and give you kind of a bird’s eye view of what’s in them, what are some of the ideas that are presented there. And then finally, we’ll go to questions or discussion. I’ll try to keep this brief enough that, that we can pretty much go through at least those first two parts by 9 o’clock and then for people who would like to stay for questions and discussion we would have maybe another 20 minutes or so, have time for that. So let me talk a little bit about the biological foundations for self-directed education. This is the thesis that, that, that runs through, through this, this first book. And in some sense, it’s part of the underpinnings of all of the books, as part of the underpinnings of all of my own research. I’m a biologically-oriented psychologist and evolutionary psychologist. I think like a biologist. And so when I think about education, I actually think about education as a biological phenomenon that is part of human nature. And what is that human nature, that makes us the — what I would call the educative animal? That’s kind of what what a focus of a lot of my research is about. So a thesis of my work and this first book, especially, is that children come into the world biologically designed to educate themselves. And what I want to do is, here is, talk about what that biological design is. So we’ve been calling this “self-directed education.” You know… The Alliance for Self-Directed Education. I write about self-directed education. We talk about schools for self-directed education. And so on.
So I want to start just by addressing the question, well what actually is self-directed education? What do we mean by that? And then I want to talk about the biological foundation for it. So, to talk about what self-directed education is we first have to have an understanding of what education is. So, most people think of education as schooling, as simply a synonym for schooling. That if you ask how much education a person has, you kind of would expect them to answer in how many years of school they have, what degrees they’ve had — they’ve got, and so on and so forth. Schooling — and we also use the term education in a — in a… Even, you know, in a linguistic sense, that it’s something that is active on the part of the educator and passive on the part of the learner. The educator gives an education to the student. The student receives an education from the, from the educator. So that’s clearly not self-directed education. In self-directed education, we think of education as something done by the person who’s doing the learning. So that’s the first characteristic of self-directed education. But what do we actually mean by education, then? It obviously — it can’t, from the point of view of self-directed education, we can’t define it as schooling. It doesn’t doesn’t make any sense. So here’s the definition of education that I really like… This came out of a lot of discussions early on, meetings of the board of ASDE, that education is “the sum of everything that a person learns that enables that person to live a satisfying, meaningful, productive, and moral life.” You know, that’s the kind of life we want for our kids, right? That’s the kind of life I think that most people would want for themselves. And if the purpose of education, then, is to get the kind of life that you would want — A good life. A happy life. A life that is meaningful to you. A life that brings you pleasure, but also not just a selfish life; a life that’s also benefiting society… And that’s why I say productive, doing something that’s good for the world. And that’s also why I say a moral life, to live a moral life. I think that — I think that if you, if you talk to most people, including people who are in charge of our, our coercive schools, and you said, “Wouldn’t this be a good definition of education?” And I’ve tried this on a lot of such people… I think they would, they agree, “Yeah this is a good definition of education. This is what we would want.” So let’s think of education as that.
Now, if you think of education as that, and if you reflect on that definition and you think of your own life experiences, I think you’re quite likely to conclude that most of your education, no matter how much schooling you had, was not in school. Most of your education came simply from the process of living. And from the process of learning those things, in whatever way you wanted to learn them, that were important for you to learn in the process of living, important for you to learn to do the things that you want to do in life. Well that’s what self-directed education is, and so the point to be made here is no much matter how much schooling people have, their real education has been mostly self-directed education. Now that’s self-directed education with small letters, but at ASDE you see Self-Directed Education written with capital letters. Capital S, capital D, capital E. SDE. So what do we mean by that? What that means — that refers to the deliberate decision to avoid coercive schooling for the children. So when a family decides, we’re not going to send the child to a forced school. We’re not going to make the child go to a school where the child is going to be forced to learn a curriculum whether or not the child is interested in it. We’re going to avoid that. There are basically two ways that families can avoid it legally in the United States. One way is through homeschooling using the method, typically called unschooling — not a very good term because it says what it isn’t rather than what it is, but — the method of unschooling means that you’re, you’re legally registered as homeschoolers but you’re not doing schooling at home. You’re not giving a curriculum. You’re not testing your child. You’re not — you’re allowing your child to pursue their own interests in their own ways, and you’re facilitating that in one way or another. So that’s unschooling and that’s one way, one legal way of doing Self-Directed Education. Another legal way, which sometimes is simply an adjunct to unschooling and another — in other cases is much more than that, is to enroll your child in an institution, a “school” or a learning center that is designed for self-directed education, where there’s no imposed curriculum, where there’s no testing, where children can pursue their own interests in their own chosen way, and they’re free to learn whatever they want and anytime they want and there — and, and in fact, you know, one of the things… We use this term learning but kids rarely think of themselves as learning. They think of themselves as doing things, so it’s better to say where they’re free to do what they want to do. And in the process of doing, of course you’re always learning. You’re learning what it is you need to learn in order to do the things you want to do. I think it’s a — I’ve always disliked the phrase “love of learning.” I don’t really have a love of learning. It doesn’t make any sense to have a love of learning. Learning what? I would love to learn this in relationship to what it is that I want to do, but I’m not that interested in learning that. So this kind of abstract notion of a love of learning doesn’t really fit with the idea of self-directed education. That’s a digression… So the… So at any rate, that’s what self-directed education is. Yeah, so that’s what — that’s — that’s in some sense where all of these books in one way or another are about.
And in the process of doing, of course you’re always learning. You’re learning what it is you need to learn in order to do the things you want to do.
So now I want to talk about, when I say the children come into the world biologically designed for self-directed education, what do I actually mean? What is that design? And it’s really no mystery. It really is — kind of anybody who’s observed children recognizes that children have certain instinctive drives. All children have these drives unless they’ve had some kind of very serious brain damage or had these drives washed out of them in one way or another. By the time they can move… Why are they moving? They’re moving in order to explore their environment. This is why you have to baby proof your house, because your child, your little baby, wants to get into everything to see what it is. What can I do with this? What would happen if I dropped it on the floor? What would happen if I stuck my fingers in this electric outlet? In…Babies are fascinated by everything. They want to try everything out. They want to see how things work. This is human curiosity, and sometimes it gets killed later on, unfortunately, but if we don’t kill it this curiosity continues on through life. It becomes more sophisticated in some ways and exploration be- takes on different, different processes. But we’re all curious, and we end up being curious as we get older about different things and, and, and that’s wonderful. Because we want people have different kinds of knowledges, different kinds of skills, and so on and so forth. That makes for a more interesting, interesting and diverse society than if we all were — knew the same things. So that’s curiosity then. Curiosity is how children learn about the world, how they develop an understanding of what’s around them.
Complementing curiosity is playfulness. So there’s two parts to education: there’s acquiring knowledge — curiosity is how you acquire knowledge — and there is learning skills, being able to do things. Play is how children learn how to do things. Play is the drive to practice new skills, and use those skills creatively.. Children don’t think of it that way. They’re just having fun. But in the process of playing they are practicing skills that are very important for human beings everywhere to learn. Anthropologists who studied play throughout the world report that everywhere that children are free to play, free to play hours a day, not the little tiny bit of play that some many children are allowed today but free to play hours per day. Many hours per day. They play in all of these ways…They play in physical ways, and that’s how they develop strong bodies and graceful movements. They play at risky activities, climbing trees and diving off of cliffs and all kinds of things that their moms would not want them to do if the moms were watching. And why do they do that? Because that’s how they develop courage. Turns out other young mammals also play in risky ways, and that’s an extraordinarily important and valuable way of playing for learning how to, how to manage fear. They play with language. Nobody teaches children their native language. Oh my goodness… At some point we’re probably going to have a curriculum for teaching children how to talk and then they’ll never learn how to talk right. Children learn how to talk on their own. It’s always self-directed. They learn how to talk, and, and it’s always playful. The first cooing and babbling of infants is always playful. They’re playing with the sounds that they hear around them. And as when they begin to use their first words, they’re using — in all, in every case that’s… Researchers who study this say the first words are used in a playful context. They’re just used in play. They’re not used to ask for anything. They’re just used in play. And as children get older they continue to play in more sophisticated ways with language and develop and develop a real, a real ability to use the, the structure of the language that they’re growing up with. They play games with, with rules, with implicit or explicit rules. We’re the animal that has to follow rules. We can’t just behave in accordance with instinct. And when and how do children learn to follow rules? They learn to follow rules by playing games that involve rules. They also learn how to create rules, because when children play together, they make the rules for what they’re playing very often. So, this, this, this human requirement that we have to follow rules to live in a human society, whether they’re explicit or implicit rules, is something that children everywhere throughout the world practice in play. They, they… We are the animal that’s capable of hypothetical thinking, and hypothetical thinking is basically imagination. Imagine that this is true. And then what else has to be true. Children are playing that with that kind of thinking all the time, even little children in their fantasy play. You know, let’s pretend that there’s a troll under the bridge. This is imagination. And oh if there’s a troll under the bridge we better not go under the bridge. That’s hypothetical deductive reasoning. Piaget said that children can’t do this until they’re 11 or 12 years old, but we see little children who are 3, 4, or 5 years old doing all of this, this… All the time, in the context of play. They can think hypothetically, at least when they’re playing. And this is how they practice this kind of sophisticated thinking. They play at building things. We’re the animal that constructs our environment. Children all over the world play at building things. They build different things depending on the society that they’re in. And they play with the tools of the culture. Anthropologists find that children are drawn to the tools of the culture. In our culture today, what are children drawn to? Computers, of course. You can’t help, if you’re growing up in our society, but realize if there’s one tool that I better learn how to master it’s the computer. Because no matter what I’m going to do in this world, I better — I’m going to have to know how to use computers. Children in a farming society are drawn to farming instruments. Children in a hunter gatherer society are drawn to bows and arrows and digging sticks and so on and so forth. And no matter how else children are playing, they want most of all to play socially with other children, because the most important skill that human beings have to learn is how to get along with other people. How to compromise. How to make friends. How to, how to cooperate, how to negotiate. How to assert yourself when you need to assert yourself but also how to, how to be protective of the other person. Other — how to, how to, how to be attuned to the needs of the other person, because all of these are required in social play. If you can’t do this, nobody’s going to play with you. And so the fact that in play children are free to quit — they’ll stop playing with you if you don’t do these kinds of things — that’s high motivation for children to learn these social skills, and they do learn them in play. So that’s playfulness.
The third characteristic, I’ll try to be a little quicker on the rest of these, is sociability. So we are — We come into the world curious. We come into the world playful. We also come into the world drawn to other people. And part of our being drawn to other people has to do with wanting to know what other people know. So children are curious about everything, but they’re especially curious about other people. They’re curious about what they do. What are the — What do the people in my world do? And what are they like? What are they thinking? What do they know? What do they know that they could tell me? So this is sort of natural teaching. Children, first of all, they learn probably more not by being taught in an indirect way, but by overhearing what older people are talking about and by watching what they’re doing. But at some point as they acquire language and if they feel comfortable enough, they begin to ask questions of older people and engage in dialogue. And this is the way that people naturally learn from one another. Nobody wants to be force fed some knowledge from somebody else, but we all want knowledge from other people at the time and place that we want it. And so self-directed education doesn’t mean you’re not learning from other people, but you’re just learning from other people in a natural way. Through conversations. Through asking questions. Through engaging and back and forth dialogue. And so you’re always — your acquisition of knowledge is always in some ways in the context of critical thinking. You’re thinking about it, because this is something you want to know. It’s something you’ve asked, and you got a dialogue about it. It’s not The Truth being handed down to you, what you’re going to get right or wrong on a multiple choice test at some point. It is an idea that somebody is presenting and you’re interested in. Then you talk about it. That’s the way that that learning occurs socially, if you are involved in self-directed education.
And then a fourth drive that is part of the educative instincts of children, and human beings general, is the one that I call willfulness. Children are willful. And it used to be that was regarded as sinful. It used to be that was regarded as sinful. That had to be beaten out of children. They had to learn how to obey and and not talk back to their parents and not talk back to — certainly not talk back to teachers. So the — and it’s still the case that willfulness… All these drives get you into trouble in school, by the way, but willfulness especially does. But willfulness is an extraordinarily valuable drive. It is the drive to take control of your own life. Children at some deep level in their DNA know that, even though they’re highly social, even though in some sense they’re always going to be dependent on interactions with other people, that dependence has to be on their own terms. That dependence they have to have, they have — at the same time that they’re in some sense dependent on other people — they also have to be independent. They have to be able to be in charge of their own life. They don’t want to be servants to somebody else or slaves to somebody else. They want to be in charge of their own life. That’s human nature. We all want that. And so when children, when little two year olds start using the word no — “No I’m not going to do that. No.” — You know they are already asserting their willfulness. Or when you start to help a little child and the child doesn’t want your help; the child wants to do it himself. Or maybe the child asks for a little help, but you want to, you start giving more help than the child wants. No, the child doesn’t want that extra help. The child wants to do everything that he or she can do for for themselves. So that’s willfulness. That’s part of taking charge of your own life. Now I could go on with other drives. I sometimes talk about planfullness and so on and so forth. I sometimes talk about simply the drive to be an adult. Peter Pan, the child wanting to always be a child, that’s an adult fantasy. No child wants to always be a child. Children imagine themselves as adults. They see themselves as becoming adults. And they… And that’s part of the educative drive. They want to do the kinds of things that will lead, will allow them to become adults. And they pay attention to adults, because part of paying attention to adults is to get an idea of what it’s like to be an adult. What are the… They see there are different ways of being an adult. And what’s the right way for me? And so on and so forth.
Everybody’s on a different trajectory, if they’re following their own curiosity. So curiosity is disruptive. The teacher is trying to teach this; the child who’s curious about that is disrupting the class. And so curiosity has to be quashed.
So those are the drives. That’s what I mean when I say children come into the world biologically designed for self-directed education. And what I want to point out here is that all of these drives are quashed at school. You can’t pursue your own curiosity at school. There’s no way that this could happen with all the different kids in the class; everybody’s going to be curious about different things. You’d have to have an entirely different kind of school, it would have to be a school that — like the schools that are designed for self-directed education — would have to be a school that doesn’t test the children. Because you’d have to — otherwise you’d have to give a different test for everybody. And why do that? Why even bother with it? Everybody’s on a different trajectory, if they’re following their own curiosity. So curiosity is disruptive. The teacher is trying to teach this; the child who’s curious about that is disrupting the class. And so curiosity has to be quashed. Play, of course, is, if it occurs at school at all, is regarded as recess. A break from learning, not learning itself. You know? There’s learning, which is work. Right? Work. And then there’s play, which is a separate thing. Which is really just the idea… Well, kids have to play so that they refresh themselves so they can come back to the serious task of their schoolwork. Sociability is cheating, at school. You know, kids want… By nature they’re cooperative. They want to help one another. They want to get help from one another. But if you do that, that’s cheating. It’s all about, you’re supposed to do this yourself. You’re supposed to learn all this stuff and remember it yourself. And you’re supposed to write your own essay. And so on and so forth. And it’s all… It’s also in a very competitive mode. Who can get the highest grade, and so on. Children are not naturally competitive that way. They naturally kind of want to cooperate and help one another, rather than compete, but we turned school into one grand competition. So, you can see why people who understand the natural drives for education would not want to send their children to a coercive school. Because it suppresses those drives. It can even cause those drives to atrophy. It can even cause people to lose a lot of their curiosity. So that they’ve even lost it for when they’re done school. To lose their playfulness. To lose some of their sociability. To lose some of their willfulness, so they become followers of other people. They look for gurus or leaders and so on and so forth, because they don’t feel confident about making — running their own lives. And so this is why people choose Self-Directed Education, with capital letters, and avoid coercive schooling.
I’m looking at the time, and I am going to go on now to the second part — I’m going to try to do this fairly quickly — of what I said I would do. And that’s to go through these two books, and give you an idea of what’s in them. So the first one, this… You’ve already seen the beautiful cover of it. “Mother Nature’s Pedagogy.” And the very first of all, there are — there are 17 essays, or articles in this, in this book. I should say that almost all of my blog posts are articles that have some kind of a theme. And that theme is always also supported with research evidence, and there are usually references to the document, to the documents, to the original articles that in some cases are research that I’ve done, more often research other people have done, that I’m bringing to bear in presenting the theme that I’m presenting in that article. So the first one in this book is “The Biological Foundations for Self-Directed Education.” And I just gave you a talk on that. That’s what the first of the essays in this book is.
Then the second one is called “Minimally Invasive Education Lessons from India.” Some of you may recall from some years ago — it’s actually now more than two decades ago, hard to believe — that Sugata Mitra in India did these, this study in which he made computers publicly available to children who had never seen computers before. This is in the 1990s, before computers on computers were, were everywhere. And to street children, children who weren’t going to school, children who were in some cases illiterate, and so on and so forth. And in one of the worst slums in, in New Delhi. And, and what he found is when he made these… All he did was make the computers available. And he would say, “You can play with them.” That’s all he said. And what he found out is that within weeks the kids had taught themselves pretty much everything there is to know about the computer. And he argued that for every computer he made publicly available an average of 300 kids became computer literate, with nobody teaching them anything. This… It would… The kids would make these discoveries and then share them with one another. The reason I present that essay here is because it illustrates how the first three of those educative instincts that I described in the first essay come together. The children are drawn to this computer because of curiosity. They explore it to find out what it can do because of curiosity. Once they’ve explored it, they play with it. They play with its various functions, they become good at using it, they become skilled at using the computer. And the reason that 300 people, kids, become computer literate is because they share their knowledge. The kids are not there all by themselves. There might be 6 or 7 or 12 kids all hanging around. They’re all friends. They’re all working on this computer. Playing, playing with this computer together. And some of them have friends in another group, and they let the other group know, hey there’s this computer and let me show you what is, what we can do with this computer. And so they are spreading it, because of sociability. So it — that, that example of Mitra’s work shows how, in a setting where children are capable of using their own resources for learning, playfulness — curiosity, playfulness, and sociability come together, such that, yes, an amazing capacity for learning is exposed. Nothing like that ever happens in school.
The… The third one is called “The Natural Environment for Self-Directed Education,” and in this I talked about, so, what is it that adults need to do to facilitate Self-Directed Education? When, when adults do — adults don’t — adults don’t educate, but what adults do is they provide the environment. They have the power and ability, one would hope, to provide an environment in which children can educate themselves. And what is that environment? What do children need? And just to summarize very very quickly, I go in some detail here. I make the case, based on observing of successful unschooling families, based on observing successful centers and schools for Self-Directed Education, and also based on research on hunter gatherer bands where all children are educated in a self-directed manner… What are the conditions that facilitate…? And I argue that they need a lot of free time. They need access to a number of adults, a variety of adults, who have different kinds of skills and and care about them and aren’t going to intervene but are happy to answer questions and be helpful. They need to be in a safe environment where there’s — they’re… They aren’t worried constantly about their physical well being. They need to be in an environment where there are a lot of other kids, because so much of self-directed education occurs through interaction with other kids. And ideally an environment in which there are kids who are older and younger than yourself, as well as your own age, because those are the ones that you have the most to learn from. An environment where the tools of the culture are available and you can use them in your own creative ways, not just in some prescribed way of using them. And ideally, in a community setting. Immersion in a setting that is a caring and moral social environment, that you are an intrinsic part of. That could be family or extended family. That could be an unschooling — the broader community of unschooling that you’re involved in. At, at a center for, center for Self-Directed Education. A school like a, like an Agile Learning Center or a Sudbury model school or a Liberated Learners… These are three different categories of such centers for Self-Directed Education. It is the community of people in that place that you get to know, you get to care for, you are in some sense responsible… Very often, in some of these settings, the rules are made democratically. And so on and so forth. So you’re learning not just for yourself. You’re learning for, you’re learning that you, that you are also responsible for other people. You are responsible for the community. You are, you are responsible. You grew up with a sense, it’s not just all about me. It’s, it is also about, how can I contribute? What roles can I play in supporting my community? And then the idea is that this broadens out into the larger community. Once you become an adult and a citizen in the larger community.
So you’re learning not just for yourself. You’re learning for, you’re learning that you, that you are also responsible for other people. You are responsible for the community. You are, you are responsible. You grew up with a sense, it’s not just all about me. It’s, it is also about, how can I contribute? What roles can I play in supporting my community?
Then I go into actually a set of three articles on the value of age mixing. This is a focus of a lot of my own research, and I not — I’m not going to go into it here, but I am absolutely convinced that this is a key element for a successful setting for self- But I am absolutely convinced that this is a key element for a successful setting for Self-Directed Education. Children are really attuned to what elder older children can do. They want to play with older children, because when they’re playing with older children they’re being boosted up to higher level of play. And believe it or not, older children like to play with younger children. I’ve done a lot of research on this. Older children also… Some people worry that older children will bully younger children, but my observations — and there’s actually other research showing the same thing — that older children actually become nicer when younger children are around than they are when there aren’t younger children around. And they become nicer, not only to the younger children but to one another. There’s something about younger children that tends to bring out the nurturing instinct. And so that’s part of what this is about. But it’s also about how older children serve as models for younger children. How in some ways younger children serve as models for older ones, because younger ones might — younger children often have this high energy and creativity. That helps the older children maintain their high energy and creativity. So that’s — so it’s, so it goes both ways. Older children are learning to, to maintain. To do, create, are being motivated to do creative things, at an age when the rest of the world at that age may feel like, oh I’m too old to paint or to play with clay or to play fantasy games. And so on and so forth. But because our younger children are around, older children are doing these things. And they’re continuing to learn in very important ways by doing that. So there’s a lot of advantages to age-mixing. Enough that I’ve devoted 3 essays to that topic. Actually 4 essays, now that I’m looking at it.
I have a chapter, an article on teaching and natural teaching, and I’ve already commented a little bit about that. And so I’m not going to say more about it right now. Then I have an article called “The Joy and Sorrow of Rereading Holt’s ‘How Children Learn.’” Many of you probably know who John Holt is. He died prematurely, died at a young age in 1985. But he wrote some wonderful books about education and children. He’s the one who coined the term unschooling, for better or worse. In my mind, the best of his books was “How Children Learn.” And I reread that when it came out in the new edition fairly recently, and… And this is an essay on some of my thoughts about, really John Holt, his brilliance, and, and the insights that he had about children’s learning. One of which, by the way, is something that I already said. I’ve kind of stole this from Holt, and that’s that children don’t set out to learn, they set out to do. And learning is a side effect. Don’t ask a child “What did you learn today?” Don’t ask children that. That’s, to me, kind of a nasty question. Ask them, “What did you do today?” You may or may not get an answer. They may not want to tell you, and that’s fine. But you’re more likely to get an answer if you asked that question then if you ask “What did you learn today?”
So, the… Then I have a couple of essays, several essays really, on young children. One of them is titled “Toddlers Want to Help and We Should Let Them.” That you know, there’s actually research showing that toddlers, little toddlers, naturally want to be helpful. But in our society we do- usually don’t allow them to, because we think they’re just going to slow us down. They’re not going to really be helpful to us. But in some other societies, they accept that help, because they realize that this is how the children learn how to actually be helpful. And then by the time they’re older, they really are helpful, at everything from helping to clean the house to doing some, doing some of the tasks related to maybe your actual work. And so on and so forth. Children want to do this. That’s part of how children’s natural ways of learning. They want to join into adult activities, including adult work. And if we don’t allow them to do that, then by the time we might want them to help us they don’t see that as anything interesting to do. We might have to bribe them to do it, if we’re going to get them to do it at all. And then they may do it reluctantly. We have a — there’s an essay here on how children learn bravery in an age of overprotection, and this is really about how important it is that children be allowed to play in risky ways, what might look to us to be dangerous ways, because that’s how they learn bravery. That’s how they develop courage. There’s an article here on the culture of childhood. I’ll leave that to you, but I’ll just say that the culture of childhood is something that sociologists used to write about. Because you could go into any neighborhood in the United States or Europe and other places people were doing this, these studies, and you could find a culture of childhood. You would find the children, independently of adults, had their own culture. Children were outdoors. They were interacting with one another, developing cultural… They were developing their own culture, which was in some sense parallel to the adult culture. This also occurs in hunter gatherer bands, and my argument is that this is a natural way for children to learn which we have kind of destroyed in our world. Because we don’t allow children out to play extensively anymore without adult interference. And the adult- culture of childhood requires that adults not be there. To the degree that we have a culture of childhood at all today in the United States, it occurs online. Children can escape, to some degree, adult surveillance, when they are online with other kids. And thank goodness for that. Because without that we would, we would not have this independent culture in which children are trying out ways of being and in which they are, which they are learning how to be within a cultural context, as a way of preparing themselves. Ultimately, this is not how they think of it, but they are preparing themselves, ultimately, for entry into the adult culture.
And then, I’m, and I’m going to, I’m not going to not go through the rest of these. I think I’ve given — given you enough of a hint of what’s in this book. And I’m going to be much more quick about this other book, “How Children Acquire Academic Skills Through- Without Formal Instruction.” I am just going to — I’m not going to go into the detail I just did now, because I want to leave time for questions and discussion. But this is really a book about how children learn to read when they’re not formally taught to read. How children learn mathematical concepts, get interested in those concepts. How they acquire mathematical concepts, without being deliberately taught. I also have some articles in here showing how deliberate teaching can actually interfere with the actual understanding of mathematical concepts. There’s a number of essays related to that. So for example, you know, one of my essays is described — describes a research study that was done in the 1930s by the superintendent of schools in Manchester, New Hampshire. He had been touring the elementary schools and quizzing the kids with fairly simple story problems that involve numbers. And he was appalled by how bad they were, coming up with the answers to them. And he came to the conclusion that the teaching of arithmetic was not only not teaching them how to use numbers in a reasonable way, but was interfering with their common sense about numbers. Because a lot of the questions he was asking could be answered by common sense, if you just knew what numbers were. And most of the kids did know what numbers were, but somehow they couldn’t use common sense in relation to numbers. So he, he argued that, that the teaching of math and arithmetic in the early grades was, in his words, “chloroforming” the children’s minds. And so he got this idea, let’s stop teaching it. Can you imagine somebody saying that today within the context of school? No, they’re not learning it. Why teach it? Now we say, “Oh they’re not learning it. We’ve got to start teaching it younger.” You know? They’re not learning it in first grade. Oh, we’ve got to teach it in kindergarten. Oh, they’re not learning it in kindergarten. Got to teach it in preschool. He said they’re not learning it. Let’s not teach it until sixth grade. Maybe they’ll learn it better then. And so he actually did an experiment in which — he only did this in the poor schools where the, where the parents didn’t feel so entitled to argue, because he didn’t think he could get away with it in the richer schools. The parents would rebel, if you weren’t teaching arithmetic to their little children, to their children in the early grades. So he did it in the poor schools. And with half the classes, he, he insisted that the teachers not teach any — no adding, no subtracting, no dividing, no division. Until sixth grade. And he had a… He had a graduate student from Boston University come up and test all the children at various times, both with story problems which are kind of involved mathematical reasoning, and with just adding and subtracting and multiplying, dividing numbers in the usual school-like way, where it’s kind of all set up for you. And what he found was that those children, before when he, when they were tested before sixth grade and any of the grades up to sixth grade, those children who were not being taught any arithmetic were better at the story problems than those who were being taught arithmetic. Not only were they better than the kids in the poor schools, but they were even better than the kids in the rich school on story problems. Why were they better? Because they weren’t being taught arithmetic, which was interfering with their thinking in a logical manner. Then in sixth grade, they started teaching arithmetic. The kids learned it all very quickly. By the end of sixth grade, they were every bit as good as the other sixth graders in doing standard school arithmetic, and they were still better at story problems. Well, I’m elaborating on this, but this is… I love this experiment, because it’s — it illustrates so many things that are relevant to Self-Directed Education and also relevant to the harm we do in schools. You know, we have this idea that children only learn by being taught. And, and because it’s so important that they pass these tests, we teach it in such an artif- in such a superficial way. And this is still true with teaching. We’re not teaching arithmetic any any better now than we did then. In fact in some ways it’s worse. And we’re still “chloroforming” children’s minds when we teach them… I taught, I used to teach Statistics for Psychologists at Boston College. And these are, this is a pretty high level school. And the kids presumably got all A’s and — for the most part, in their arithmetic and mathematical classes. They didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t remember any of it, because they never really understood it. They learned to memorize procedures, and they weren’t any good at story problems. I would test them at it even then. And so we’re just really kind of wasting people’s time with all of this. And, and they would, they would be better off if we taught it later on, or didn’t teach it all and allowed people to learn it in their own ways at the time they want it, if they do want it, and if they need it.
That’s the only one I’m going to elaborate on, but there are also essays in here, based on surveys that I and other people have done, on how children in self-directed learning learn to read. You know, just a hint: they learned to read at a whole range of different ages. Some learn to read at age four. Which is true for everybody; there are always kids who learn to read before they start school. There are some kids who don’t learn to read until they’re young teenagers and, and yet, by the time they’re older teenagers you wouldn’t be able to know the difference between those who learn to read early and those who learn to read late. The kids who learn to read late, for the most part, just aren’t interested in reading. They’ve got plenty of other things to do. Their minds are being occupied. They’re into this, they’re into that. But at some point, everybody finds the need to learn to read in our, in our society. Which is a literate society. And everybody learns to read. Well, I’ve even more recently done research on kids diagnosed with dyslexia, who are then taken out of school. And then they learn to read, once they’re out of school. And why do they learn to read? According to the parents’ reports, it’s largely because the anxiety has been reduced. What the parents realize is that much of what’s called dyslexia — I don’t want to say all of it for everybody, but — much of what gets diagnosed as dyslexia is really a learning block that’s been created by school. That is, really an anxiety situation about learning to read. You can’t learn anything well if you’re anxious about it, and school makes you anxious. And it makes some people more anxious than others in relation to learn- If you’re a little slower than the others and you have to read out loud in front of other people, that’s the kind of situation that creates learning blocks.
So I’m going to bring that to a close, and… And now we’ve still got some time, for people who would like to stay at least, but of course some people may need to leave. That would be, of course, fine. But let’s open it up to questions and comments and discussion.
Abby:
Thank you, Peter. Real quickly, while I set all the settings so people can start asking their questions, would you be willing to say a few words about the “Facts and Fictions of Summer Slide”?
Peter:
Oh yeah.
Abby:
That’s a very live conversation right now.
Peter:
Yeah, well, this also pertains to, to the point I was just making about math, too, and it is certainly pretend to the issue of what’s happened with covid also, because we’ve had some people kind of away from school for a period of time. So you know, everybody’s probably heard of this phrase, “the summer slide,” which is the supposed to be a drop in academic skills over the course of the summer. So teachers sometimes talk about how the, how when the kids come back to school in the fall, they’ve forgotten a lot of what they learned the previous year. And so time is wasted training them back to acquire those skills they got the previous year. When I first got interested in this issue was a time when — and believe it or not — in Boston, there was a group of people who were arguing, a group of high level people with some, some authority, arguing that schools should go through the summer. So that you wouldn’t get “the summer slide.” People wouldn’t forget all that stuff if school went through the summer. To which my first reaction was, well, you know if… If they’re going to… If the learning is so shallow that you forget it in the summer, or it’s so unimportant that you forget it in the summer, aren’t you going to forget it when you finish school anyway? And maybe the implication should be that everybody has to stay in school their whole lives so they don’t forget the stuff that they learned in school. You know? There are these kind of observed conclusions from it. But it also led me to ask the question, because I’m a researcher, I’m a scientist. I want to know, what’s the evidence? So people talk about the summer slide. Is this just anecdotal? Is there really a summer slide? Has it been documented? In what in what subjects does it occur? So it turns out there’s not a whole lot of actual controlled research on it, but there’s some. And most of it was done a fair number of years ago, and almost all of it pertained to two kinds of skills: reading and arithmetic, or math. And the — and every study that I could find on reading showed either no drop or, more often, an increase in reading skill. And in some of the studies, reading skill actually increased more in the summer than it did during the school year. And again, to me that’s not all that surprising, because a lot of kids read and this is the opportunity to actually read and read what you enjoy reading. And reading improves when you read what you want to read, as opposed to what somebody else is making you read. The, the — where the drop occurs, that people have documented, is in arithmetic. And, and that — and it, and it can be a fairly significant drop. But it turns out that every study that showed a drop in arithmetic was testing arithmetic in the usual standard school-like way, where you have to use the algorithm that was taught to you by your teacher in order to add a column of numbers or multiply numbers by one another or do long division or multiply one fraction by another. You had to follow the procedure and, and get the right answer kind of as it was taught in school. So, I found, if I remember correctly, 3 studies. You will, you’ll — it’s… The essay will correct me if I’m, if it was, it was more or less than 3 studies, but I seem to remember 3 studies that actually tested arithmetic in 2 ways, just like the superintendent tested arithmetic in two ways. One way was the standard school way. The other way was more like story problems. Do you understand what you’re doing? So it’d be questions like, if you need to paint a room, and the room is such as such dimensions, and a gallon of paint covers so many square feet, how many gallons of paint do you need to buy? Things like that. Those are the, those are the kinds of questions that require mathematical understanding. You have to understand why you would multiply and when you would multiply and why. You know, it turned out on every, every study that tested that, that improved over the summer at a rate faster than it improved during the school year. So I ended up concluding, well, maybe we should cut out school in order to drop this, in order to prevent the school year slide in mathematical reasoning. Right? So, again, it’s not surprising to me. When children — and the children in the summer are doing real things, and some of those real things that they’re doing involve numbers. And when you’re doing real things that involve numbers, that’s when you learn what numbers are. What it really is to add, what really it is… Even if you’re playing games, even simple games like Candy Land, you’re learning the concept of numbers or an order or later on, you’re learning games that involve adding up scores. Or if you’re cooking, you’re cutting recipes by a half or a third, you’re getting a real sense of what of what a fraction is, what it means to multiply, what it means to add up. So in real life, children learn mathematical skills in a way that sticks, because it’s meaningful. It’s related to the real world. When they’re learning school math, they’re learning in a way that doesn’t stick, because it doesn’t pertain to the real world. And they’re being taught it and learning it in a way that they don’t really understand what it is. And very often — there’s actually research showing this — very often the teachers don’t understand. They know the procedure, let’s say for long division. They don’t know why that works. They know the procedure for multiplying two fractions by, by one another, but they don’t know why you would ever do that, or why that procedure works. There are actually studies of teachers showing they don’t know that. Large numbers. Most of them don’t know that, who are teaching it in elementary school. Some… Maybe the teachers in high school, I would hope, know that, but teachers, they’re not mathematicians. They don’t know math any better than the typical person in our environment. And they learned math in school in this artificial memorize way, just like most other people did.
Abby:
Wonderful, thank you. And there’s… You’ve got three questions on stack already. So the first one is about how adults can contribute to creating the best environment for self-directed kids and be minimally invasive. And I feel like actually you could both speak to that.
Peter:
Sure. Also let me say something about and then, Paikea, I’d be very interested in your thoughts about that. But, so I kind of talked about that briefly. That, that, there’s an optimal, you know, there are set of conditions that I think optimize self-directed education. And those conditions don’t always naturally occur. I mean that, it used to be that you could just send kids outdoors and there were other kids to play with. People were — people knew their neighbors. You were likely to know a number of adults who were likely to be able to be integrated into the larger community. That’s not so true in our world today. We’re kind of a group of isolated people. Isolation is not good for self-directed education. You need to get out of that isolated world. And there’s various ways to do it. One is to — one is if you have the opportunity to — not everybody — I’m sorry. I don’t see what’s happening here. So are people hearing me? I don’t… So, so one of the ways to do this is to find a Learning Center, where… And that is a setting. There’s all the kinds of, all the conditions that you really need for Self-Directed Education. There’s other kids. There’s tools. There’s a variety of adults to go to. The things that you need are there. It would be nice if everybody had that. It would be nice if these were publicly supported. Unfortunately they’re not publicly supported. There are many learning centers and schools that do have excellent scholarships and some sliding scales all the way down to nothing for people who can’t afford it. So, for example, the Philly Free School in Philadelphia and their variety. And there are a number of other such places. But, but that’s not available to everybody. I think it’s going to become available to more and more people. There’s a trend now, as there are more and more homeschoolers and more and more unschooling as part of that. There’s a trend for people who are homeschooling families to get together and form learning centers, which are a little bit like a Sudbury school or an Agile Learning Center. Where the kids can be there during the day. It gets them out of it, you know? I think kids really need to get away from their parents a good part of the time. I think that’s really important. That’s part of learning, is how to deal without your parents. And so that’s, that’s, and, and, and so that’s a way to do that. But if you don’t have that, then I think it’s really important that the parents know how to connect their child to other people. So that it’s not just, you know… Homeschooling is a misnomer. Homeschooling doesn’t occur just in the home. That would be kind of a narrow education, if it just occurred in the home. No matter how wonderful one’s parents are. You want to learn about other people, too. And no matter how brilliant your parents are and how wonderful ideas they have, you want to learn about other people’s ideas. Also, it’s not a full education if you’re just learning from your parents. So I think that is very important that parents figure out ways to get out of the picture. You know, figure out ways that — at least, not be in the picture all the time. So that kids are learning to be independent. Kids are being exposed to other ideas. Kids are being exposed to, to opportunities for learning that may not exist within your home. I’m going to turn it over to Paikea here, who has experienced this in some more direct ways than I have.
Paikea:
Yeah, you talked about most things. But like, all of those activities I mentioned earlier? My mom found them for me, and she brought me there. Like they were all things I wanted to do, but like, parents can help find opportunities for kids, and help them by giving them rides when you can’t drive or things like that. And doing research when I’m not old enough to use a computer and stuff like that. That’s the main thing I can think of.
Abby:
Right. There… I’m going to skip to a more recent question and then backtrack a little, because this one kind of ties in with that one. There is a parent asking about — the question specifically is about a 10 year old who doesn’t demonstrate curiosity in a way that’s super recognizable to the adults. And so, if you have any insight or input on what does curiosity look like in, like, neurodivergent and neurodiverse learners? Or if it’s not recognizable from outside of them, is there researcher or things we should know that would help us, like, have more faith that it’s still part of who they are?
Peter:
Yeah, you know that’s — that’s a question that I’m asked very regularly. And I have to always begin by saying I am definitely not an expert about autism. I know something about it, but in that — but I’m by no means an expert, nor have I interacted over significant periods of time with people who have been diagnosed with autism. I, I… There’s a little story I can tell that may be useful. I was observing in a Sudbury model school. And, and I think it was one of the schools in Texas. But I don’t remember for sure. And it…Prior to my observing, parents of two different boys who were at the school told me that their boys were on the autism spectrum. And I was interested in that, because I, I… My hunch would have been, well, maybe it wouldn’t work out well. Because maybe they would really need a lot of extra help that such a school isn’t prepared to provide. And I am aware of situations where a child who’s very far out on the autism spectrum, so that they really have no interest at all in other people and they really don’t explore play at all, that are — where I’ve seen parents try to put their child in such a school and it hasn’t worked. But these boys were not so far out on the autism spectrum. But they were in the category. They had a very narrow range of interests. Both of them were really into computer play. And that’s pretty much all they did. But, but, as I was watching them at the school, they were on their computers, as they would be, and what I observed was — and they weren’t paying attention to other kids, so as… Part of autism is that you’re not, whether it’s fear or whether it’s, you know, I’m not an expert enough to know exactly what it is, but I’ve heard people with autism talk about panic in relationship to other people. So, being in the computer is kind of a safe way to be there with other people around. They’re doing what they feel comfortable doing and what they do well. But what I observed was that other kids would come over and look over their shoulder and start asking them, asking these kids what they’re doing. And they were, the other kids were really impressed by the sophisticated things that these that these two boys were doing on their computers. And they began talking about it. And interestingly, the kids diagnosed with autism began answering. And now you had conversation going on. You had social experience going on in a way that is safe, relatively safe, and comfortable for the person with autism. So that person is being drawn out. I don’t think it’s deliberately being drawn out by the kids who are trying to draw them out. I think that the kids were genuinely attracted to these kids because they were so good on the computer. So, whether or not that story is helpful or not, I don’t know. But this is my observation of one instance, one school with two kids on the autism spectrum. Where according to the parents, it was working out well. According to the staff members, it seemed to be working out well. And by my observation on that one day, I could see a mechanism by which it might be working out well. I would be interested to know, by now, over time — this was 2 or three 3 or 4 years ago — where those kids are. Have they been drawn out? Have they — are they more social now than they were then? Are they…have, have, has– Have their interests broadened because of their experiences the at school? I don’t know the answers to that.
Abby:
Yeah. And I’ll just add that Crystal Byrd Farmer at Gastonia Freedom School — I’ll put her name in the chat — she’s an autistic woman and a mother and facilitator and runs a self-directed center in Gastonia, North Carolina. So she would be a person to talk to. And so next question is, do you have favorite materials for inspiring young folks in a SDE space?
Peter:
I’m not sure I understand the question.
Abby:
This person specifically says that they’ve got, like, a game cabinet and rock and mineral and set- center with microscopes. And they’re wondering about other inspiration or other fun things…
Peter:
Okay. Well. Let me tell you, so I have been most in of…The kinds of centers for self-directed education I’ve been most involved with are Sudbury model schools. And the way it works there is the school never buys anything unless the students asked for it. So, they don’t — they don’t assume that, oh if we buy microscopes, people are going to be interested in microscopes. They don’t assume that if we have this and that, everybody will be interested in that. They, they respond to interest. They do have — There are some things I have to say that they had right from the beginning. They have a lot of books on the shelf. People donated books. There are books everywhere at the school. And there’s a play room. There’s toys. And there’s some sporting equipment. But they didn’t get anything like a computer, like microscopes or those kinds of things. Microscopes came when there were kids who really began to want to look at pond water or to do those kinds of things. It came when — it came after the interest and the demand for it. And then — so the way it works at Sudbury school is kids have to make the case that it’s worthwhile spending some of the school’s money to buy this equipment that we would really like to school to have. We have to make the case, and sometimes even have to play some role and, maybe even just selling cookies or something like that. So that’s the way a Sudbury school works. I can tell you a story, for example, because I first began observing the Sudbury Valley School way back before the era when the home computer was common. And I can tell you how computers first came into the school. There was a kid who came to school at age 13. He, by his own account, had flunked out of public school. I’m not sure if it’s possible to actually flunk out of public school, but he claimed he had flunked out. And he came to Sudbury Valley, and somehow he had an interest in computers. And nobody at the school knew anything about computers. They didn’t have a computer, and the way the Sudbury Valley School works is they have what are called corporations, which are, which are interest groups. So, for example, there’s a sports corporation, which is the kids who are really interested in sports, and they lobby the school meeting to buy, you know, basketballs. And improve the basketball court, and to get other kinds of sporting equipment. There’s a, there was at the time when I was involved, a photography — this would be before iPhones — a photography corporation. And they lobbied for darkroom. And so on and so forth. Well, this kid, by talking to some other kids, he formed at the age of 13, the computer corporation. Before they ever had any computers. And then he lobbied at the school meeting to try to get them to buy a computer. And he couldn’t convince the school meeting that it was worth buying a computer. Nobody thought a computer was going to be worth it. Nobody would be using this thing, to make, to make it worthwhile. This was, this was a dead end kind of thing. Right? The computer. So, but this kid… He thought computers were the up and coming thing. And so he, on his own initiative, he might have been 14 by this time, he started calling local computer companies. Introducing himself as the president of the computer corporation at the Sudbury Valley School, and explaining that, we at the Sudbury Valley School are very interested in your model computer, and we’re wondering if you could donate us one so that there would be now a generation students who would grow up with your computer. Right? So you know who — this kid was — turns out was not only interested in computers, but he was a natural salesman. He got several computers donated. He learned how to use them. He taught other people how to use them. He taught the staff how to use them. At the time that I met him, he was 22 years old. I met him when he when I was doing a study of the graduates of the school. At 22 years old. He was the president of his own software company, which at that point was make doing multimillion dollar business. And he told me that this — one of his clients was the school district that flunked him out. So you know that’s a, that’s a long story from a short question and probably veered off from the initial question. But the point I’m trying to make really is that I think it’s generally a mistake to anticipate what children will be interested in. It’s better to find out what they’re interested in, and then get what they need to pursue their interests.
Paikea:
I have a few things to say, too. I just… When I was little I made a lot of crafts out of, you know, out of the things I already had. Like instead of buying art supplies, I would make things out of scratch paper and tape. And things out of, you know, things from nature. And built little houses out of sticks and stuff. And also when we did buy things, it was when, like, when I asked for it. Or if, you know, if I showed an interest and — I went to origami classes, then you know, my family or — would notice that I was interested in that and get me paper. So it was always after I showed an interest in something, or… But mostly I tried to make stuff out of things I already had, and it made me more excited, too. Because I felt like I was creating something new and not just being a consumer. And, you know, if I make something out of something we had to buy then what am I adding to the world? We already had to buy it. So, just being creative about things you already have around the house is something I always like to do.
Abby:
Thank you. We’re at 9:31. Do you have energy for one more?
Peter:
I have the energy for it and the time for it. I don’t want people to feel that they have to stay. But anybody who has another question or two, I’m happy to stay a little longer.
Abby:
Great. Ok. We have two different questions both asking for good introductory resources. So if you have favorite books or videos for folks who are, new parents specifically, who are new to the concept of Self-Directed Education? Other than, of course, the two from tonight. The two from last week…
Peter:
Yeah, you know. I’d also very immodestly suggest Free to Learn as well. But more modestly suggest, you know, any of John Holt’s books. I, which are really classics, which lay these things out. But there’s now many books. There’s lots of books, and I’m even hesitant to, to suggest one over the other. So for example, Akilah…
Abby:
Yeah, Akilah Richards.
Peter:
Akilah Richards, of course, has written a wonderful book on liberation, on liberation, the liberation movement and talking about, about unschooling, and Self-Directed Education, at least partly, from the point of view of somebody who’s Black in America. [And it’s called Raising Free People.] And there’s a large movement of such people. So depending on your particular interest… In particular… You know there’s a lot of the — there’s, there’s a lot of different books being written. I would say the best resource for finding out about these books is the, is the resource directory at the Alliance for Self-Directed Education. The… You can find the, you can find lists of such books there. You can look online. Once you see the titles of the books to see which ones to read. But, so for example, if you are interested in possibly joining a democratic school, there are several books written by people have founded democratic schools. Jim Reitmulder has written a wonderful book called When, When, “When Kids Rule the School,” about the school that he’s involved with. And there are numerous books written by homeschooling moms and people who have studied homeschooling. So I — so there’s really a lot of resources out there.
Abby:
Paikea, do you have any favorite SDE books or videos or resources?
Paikea:
You know, Peter’s stuff is pretty great. Peter Gray’s stuff. Like to say… Yeah, there’s lots of… I like Akilah’s stuff, too. I just listened to a whole bunch of different things whenever I’m drawing for this cover or for my children’s book. But those are definitely two things I like, too.
Abby:
The question was not for me, but I will add that Akilah’s book is about to be available in Spanish, and will be available in both print and ebook format. There’s a question in the chat about, Peter, your books being available on the, in the Apple bookstore; I’m going to look into that. I’ll ask the publisher, because I — my understanding is that, is that Alex would know about that.
Peter:
So let me — do please buy the books from, from the Alliance. Because that way that — you’re helping to support the Alliance for Self-Directed Education more than if you buy it elsewhere. I mean, you could buy it from Amazon, but not so much of the profit goes to the Alliance for Self-Directed Education if you buy it there. If you buy the books there. My understanding also, I haven’t checked recently, but my understanding also is the Tipping Points Press, which is the publishing company of the Alliance, if you buy all four books, there’s a little bit of a discount. So, so think of yourself, if you buy those books,
think of yourself as doing it… You’re not only doing yourself a favor by getting the books if, if you turn out to enjoy them or to be able to use them to help persuade other people about these things. But you’re also helping to support the Alliance for Self-Directed Education.
Abby:
Just a couple quick books — I’ll put that discount code and the link to the bookstore and some of these resources all in the follow up email to this. But — Trina Greene Brown has a great book that’s solid for intro- introductory stuff. Mia Birdsong and China Martins have good books for new parents and, and they talk, too, about, like, calling, finding your other people to be doing SDE with. So you can build that social age-mix community that Peter was talking about, whatever your resource situation is. And then, the kind of research that he talks about in “How Children Acquire Academic Skills,” the, like, stuff about how really young children are, have mathematical thinking and statistical thinking and all that, and there’s also a bunch more of that in Alison Gopnik’s “Philosophical Baby.” And she’s not an SDE person, but the stuff in here is pretty cool.
Peter:
Alison Gopnik, by the way, is a, is a, is a renowned researcher into child development and particularly how children develop an understanding of the world. She also has a book called — a more recent book called “The Gardener and The Carpenter,” which is advice to parents, which I think is very sound. It doesn’t go quite as far as Self-Directed Education and she unfortunately doesn’t talk much about schooling and, and how schooling violates the basic principles she’s talking about in that book. But in terms of advice to parents about how to think about being a parent, I think it’s actually quite a wonderful book. The idea of thinking, so, you know, she says the common approach, the mistaken approach of, of parenting today is to sort of think of yourself as a carpenter. You’re shaping your child. You’re creating your child in the form that you want the child to be. And it’s better to think of yourself as, like a gardener. You’re, you’re planting the seed, you know? And you’re providing kind of an environment, and then it grows. You can’t make it grow this way or that way. It grows, and… and you, and if it’s your child, you love the consequences regardless of how it grows. And so that’s kind of her thesis, is that — it’s much more well presented then I just did now. She also points out by the way — I just used the word parenting. She points out that the word parenting came into being kind of only in about the 1970s or 80s. Before that nobody ever talked about parenting. And she talks about parenting as a terrible — that to parent is a terrible verb. She says it’s a great noun but a terrible verb. A parent is a, is a person. To parent is a person in relationship to somebody else, just like a wife is a person in relationship to somebody else. Or a husband is. But we don’t talk about wife-ing our husbands or husband-ing our wives. And we shouldn’t talk about parenting our children, either. That’s a, I think that’s really such a great point. It’s a relationship. We’re in a relationship with our child, and our, our job as a parent is to get to know that child, to be in a good relationship with that child, to learn from that child, to provide situations where the child might learn from us as we go along. But what we’ve done is we’ve created, we’ve created this concept that being a parent is a job. Parenting is a job. And she says that’s a big mistake. It’s not a job, it’s a relationship. That’s an idea worth thinking about.
It’s a relationship. We’re in a relationship with our child, and our, our job as a parent is to get to know that child, to be in a good relationship with that child, to learn from that child, to provide situations where the child might learn from us as we go along.
Abby:
Thank you. So there’s questions about exposure and questions about jobs, but we’re at time.
Peter:
Yeah, we probably ought to draw to a close now. But this is… These have been great questions. And wonderful to meet you, Paikea, and thank you, Abby, for doing such a good job of organizing this. And thank you all for coming.
Abby:
And if you have been missing continuing these conversations by commenting on Peters blog posts, he mentioned — I learned recently that those conversations have moved into the comments on his Facebook page for now. And he’s looking for other options. So check out his Facebook page, send him other suggestions,
join the Alliance, and hopefully we’ll see you all in the future. Thank you so much.
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