Speaker 1: 0:00

okay, here we are another episode shift, that podcast coming to you. I have such a great treat here I have peter gray coming in um to talk about kids, school, school play outdoor, and we're going to do all this in 25 minutes. Peter, thanks so much for joining me today.

Speaker 2: 0:32

Thank you for inviting me.

Speaker 1: 0:35

Peter, I'd love to start just kind of getting a read on the really important moments in your career that brought you to where you are today. Were there some foundational occurrences, meetings, things where your career shifted to bring you closer to where you are today?

Speaker 2: 0:59

Well, the real shift, as I explain in my book Free to Learn at the beginning of the book, occurred when my own son was rebelling at school.

Speaker 2: 1:09

He had been fighting the school system from kindergarten through fourth grade and in fourth grade it really reached a crisis point. He was very clearly, you know, he was coming home every day and saying school is prison, you're sending me to prison. His mother and I were regularly being called in by the teacher. What are we going to do about this child who is very systematically rebelling against the classroom procedures, the classroom procedures? And ultimately you know I won't tell the whole story because people can read it in my book but ultimately it reached the point where his mother and I decided he really had won this argument. We had to be on his side, not against him. He needed us. He was genuine in his hatred, truly hatred and anger about school, public school, and so we found a radical alternative for him the Sudbury Valley School, for him, the Sudbury Valley School. And both his mother and I were really happy that. You know, we kind of had our son back. He was happy again the anger dissipated.

Speaker 2: 2:38

He was, he delighted in this school, and. But this was a school that is so different from what we think of as school that I, like a lot of other parents, was concerned about whether this would be harmful for him in the long run. I was clearly helpful in the short run. Would it be helpful to him in the long run or harmful? So I ended up doing a study of the graduates of this school initially, at least partly to satisfy my own need as a parent to see that the graduates are doing okay, or if they're not doing okay, I wanted to do what I could to find some other form of education for my son. But that study of the graduates really turned my career. The graduates of this very different kind of school were doing very well in life. They had come from all sorts of different kinds of backgrounds but it seemed like, regardless of why were they at this school, they were now out in the world doing well, including going on to higher education.

Speaker 1: 3:44

if that's what they wanted to do, so immediately that school, too, just is a self-directed learning school, right, so the student chooses what they want to pursue, their interests, et cetera. That's right, so I can.

Speaker 2: 3:59

I can describe that school, but basically it's a school. It has school children there from age four on through what we think of as high school age, but they don't segregate the children by age. They don't confine them to any particular part of the building or the school campus. Children are free to play and explore and follow their own interests all day long. There are no rules regarding learning, there are no tests, there aren't even courses offered, although students who are wished to could get together and create a course if they like.

Speaker 2: 4:36

That doesn't happen very often, but it happens. I mean typically in any given year there's two or three courses going on that students themselves have created. The staff members don't call themselves teachers because they don't believe they do any more teaching than anybody else at the school, and so the school is run democratically so that every student and staff member has one vote, regardless of their age, four years old on through the elderly, staff members all have one vote. Of course, there are many, many more students than there are staff members. The school meeting, based on this procedure, makes all the rules of the school, chooses the personnel who will make certain other kinds of decisions, but then checks on those decisions periodically. So the school is truly run by the school meeting so it's democratically, the founders of the school.

Speaker 2: 5:38

The school was founded in 1968, so it's been going on now for about something like 57 years, going full steam ahead, and so this is not a fly-by-night new school. This is something so already by the time, my son started, the school had been in existence for about 13 or 14 years, so there were some students who had some graduates who had done all of what would be their elsewhere called their K through 12 schooling at this school.

Speaker 1: 6:13

Right.

Speaker 2: 6:14

And Peter what, what what in your research?

Speaker 1: 6:17

what surprised you the most about that? That these kids going to this kind of self-directed school would have the capacity to go out and go to higher ed and like? Was that your research foundation of what you were trying to see?

Speaker 2: 6:31

Well, I guess that was certainly one of my concerns.

Speaker 2: 6:33

Could they go on to higher education? I don't believe I'm the kind of parent who would push my child on to higher education, but I would want that to be an option for him, and so I was concerned that, you know well, suppose he were to decide to go on to a career that required college. Could he do that? And I was both pleased and, I have to say, somewhat surprised how easy it was for these graduates to get into college and to do well there.

Speaker 2: 7:04

You know, if there's one thing that we think that school, our school system, prepares you for, is more schooling, and I am convinced even then I was convinced that school has relatively little to do with life that I wasn't surprised that kids could go on to great jobs, that they could do well in the real world, but a little surprised, I have to say, in fact quite surprised, that they could go on to higher education and do apparently as well as, if not better than they would have if they had gone through our traditional schooling system. You know, that's kind of surprising. Most colleges say you've got to take certain required courses, you've got to do this, and that You've got to be good at exams compliance.

Speaker 2: 7:49

And here are kids who have done none of that and now some of them, I have to say, went on to higher education by this route, which is really available to anybody, of going first to a community college. They'll accept anybody. Of going first to a community college, they'll accept anybody. Some of them had taken some community college courses even while they were enrolled at Sudbury Valley. A few of them had maybe 16 or 17 years old, because they were interested in something, but also maybe as a step towards applying to college. But there were.

Speaker 2: 8:21

So you can do that. You can get a transcript from the community college and use that as the foundation for showing I can do college-level work and apply to a four-year college. So that's one route. But I was surprised at how many went directly to a four-year college including in some cases rather elite four-year colleges without satisfying any of the supposed criteria for application, although although they did take, if a school required the sat test, they took the sat test and they prepared themselves for it. They prepared on their own, uh, with me sometimes asking for some help from a staff member on the math, on some of the math.

Speaker 2: 9:04

But they prepared themselves and um, motivation within themselves to yeah, and so the other thing that I think one of the advantages they had for for acceptance is that they would. They stood out. I mean, you know that. Imagine that you are, that you are the admissions officer at an Ivy League school or school of that ilk. You know you must get awful bored of those applicants where everybody is the valedictorian of their school, everybody has straight A's, everybody took all honors classes, everybody did all the correct extracurricular activities and then you've got to make a choice among them right.

Speaker 2: 9:51

So here you come across an application who says, excuse me? You come across an application where you say so, I don't have a transcript. I went to the school. We don't have grades, we don't have courses. But here's some of the things I've done.

Speaker 1: 10:10

Great, here's my portfolio.

Speaker 2: 10:12

Here's some of the things I've done and here's why I'm applying to your school and here's why your school is the school that is really best for me. And they can give a really good reason, because these people, if they're going on to higher education, they're not going on just because it's the expected thing to do. They're going on because they have a real reason to go and they can express that reason. And the other thing is because they're used to an environment where they are in many, many ways regarded as equal to adults. They're used to looking adults in the eye, talking to adults in a straightforward manner. They're used to presenting their case at school meeting. If they're arguing for something, so no surprise. They're arguing for something, so no surprise. They're very good at interviews and a typical thing that happens is the admissions officer would say well, you know, this is interesting, we can't just throw it in the wastebasket. Let's interview this person. And these kids come across as typically very good interviewees. So I think that played a big role.

Speaker 1: 11:25

These kids come across as typically very good interviewees, so I think that played a big role. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's interesting too, peter, that you're that. I love that. That. That's a moment that has you feel foundational in where you've come to now. Author. Lecturer. You know, thinker, I wanted to ask you about where did all this start? Like, I know that you've done a lot of work on the history of schooling and I always assumed that it was kind of industrial era. But you go further back than that. That saying that the foundations of what we do in school have been around like for for a long, long, long time, like this is not something that's just been, you know, a century or so old, it's actually multiple um centuries yeah, I, I think you the.

Speaker 2: 12:17

the common story for people who are sort of critics of our schooling system is to say that it's a relic of the industrial age and there's a certain sense in which it is. It sort of corresponds with the industrial age when we began to have mass government schools. But really the schools as we know them began well before that. Well before that they were during the Protestant Reformation, so way back in the 17th century, especially in Prussia, is where they began. But then they spread everywhere, including to the colonies, the US colonies, american colonies, protestant schools, and in many communities these were required. I mean, protestantism was not a choice. You had to send your kid to school. So in some sense these were compulsory schools for at least certain numbers of people, and the express purpose of the schools was biblical indoctrination and obedience training, and so of course they had to teach reading word of god directly by reading the bible, rather than get it through a hierarchy of uh, pope to bishop, to priest and so on and so forth. And so to get the word of god directly, you had to be able to read. You had to read the bible. So the schools had the purpose of teaching reading, so kids could read the Bible, but the even greater purpose was biblical indoctrination and obedience training.

Speaker 2: 14:06

I mean, the belief on the part of the Protestants at that time was that children are born in sin, children are innately sinful and that you had to basically beat the sinfulness out of them. You had to teach them to obey, and at that time children were truly actually physically beaten if they didn't learn their lessons properly and recite them properly, not just for bad behavior, but also for not learning as they were supposed to. It was a reward, it was a punishment sort of system reward and punishment system for being able to recite the dogma that you were being taught. And so think about that. So the standard format was that the master at that time, what we now call teachers were called masters and most of them were males at that time.

Speaker 2: 15:03

The what we now call teachers were called masters and most of them were males at that time and um, and the master would give you the lesson, basically, and you had to repeat it back. That's, that is a well-designed system for indoctrination. If you get somebody to repeat something over and over, and over, and, over and over again in a mindless manner, they begin to believe this must be true. They begin to think this is and obedience clearly was the message. So this system has. Once schools were taken over by the states instead of the church, the doctrine changed, but initially at least, not quite so much today, although it varies from place to place.

Speaker 2: 15:54

now the doctrine was really kind of nationalist doctrine it was the doctrine of, you know, for Germany, the doctrine of what a wonderful land Germany is and how great the Germans are and how beautiful the German language is and how everybody else is our enemies. Germany was an early adopter. Napoleon was big on schools because they saw it as training ground for new soldiers. Because they saw it as training ground for new soldiers. You know, dictators have always loved public schooling because they see it as ways of forming. Now, in our more liberal societies it's evolved away from that to a considerable degree, but still things are taught as if they're doctrine. In other words, the teacher is presenting what presumably is the truth and you have to present it back. And that's how you're tested. Can you kind of feedback? It may be presented orally in lecture or it may be presented in books and readings, but the basic job is to feedback the information that you are given. It's not to question that information, it's not to deny that information, it's not to argue with it, which is what my son wanted to do and got him into trouble constantly. So it's clearly. You know, teachers who go into the schooling may think you know I'm trying to inculcate a love of learning and critical thinking and creativity, make lifelong learners and like all the jingle comes out is exactly the same, except that instead of beating children physically, we punish them psychologically or reward them for doing what they're supposed to do. But it's still a system of indoctrination, obedience training. You have to act as if you believe the lesson. Whether you believe it or not, your job is to present that information back on the test and secondly, think about it.

Speaker 2: 18:11

The only way you can pass in school is to do what you're told to do. Almost the only way you can fail is to not do what you're supposed to, what you're told to do. The lessons are not hard. It's not hard for anybody. The job is to do what you're told to do, and if you don't do what you're told to do, you're going to fail teacher's best intentions, despite the enlightened views that many of them are taught in education schools and come to the job with. You're faced with 30 kids, 20, 30 kids in the classroom. You've got to get them all to learn the same stuff. At the same time, you, as the teacher, are judged on how they perform on the tasks. What are you going to do?

Speaker 2: 19:03

You've got to make them learn that curriculum and feed it back, and you're going to use whatever systems of reward and punishment you can to do that. So we've still got fundamentally the same system that those early Protestants had for indoctrination and obedience training.

Speaker 1: 19:23

Totally. You know. Another interesting point that you're putting up and I've heard you talk about this before is this preparation. You know, like every grade is the preparation for the next grade, right, and you had mentioned something about preschool and kindergarten where trying to create that compliance or that, you know I've got to teach you all this stuff so that you're ready for grade one. Your book kind of blows that idea to pieces. What are the misconceptions that educators, parents, have about those really early years of when you're becoming a human and figuring stuff out? We tend to kind of like want them to get ready for instead of letting them be human.

Speaker 2: 20:11

Yeah, exactly. Well, first of all, regarding this thing of you know, it is true, I think if you ask a typical teacher at any grade, what is it you're trying to do, the response you'll get usually, if they're being sincere, is that and usually they are they're willing to say this. What I'm doing is preparing them for the next grade In kindergarten. I'm preparing them for first grade First grade. I'm preparing them for second grade, middle school. I'm preparing them for high school, high school, I'm preparing them for college. Nobody's even pretending anymore that we're preparing them for life.

Speaker 2: 20:46

It's too obvious that they're not preparing them for life. The lessons in school have almost nothing to do with life. It all has to do with academia, and this is more true all the time. We've done away with the practical courses largely. We don't have shop, we don't have home ec, we don't have, you know, health classes have been greatly reduced. You know it's all training for the next grade level, and so it becomes sort of this going through one hoop to be able to enter the next hoop. And yet even that turns out to be false. As I've just described here, we've got kids who didn't do anything like that going at Sudbury Valley, and then they enter college.

Speaker 2: 21:29

And lo and behold, they're not behind. Why are they not behind? They're not behind. Why are they not behind? It's partly because every college professor kind of starts from the beginning anyway, because they recognize that nobody remembers much from high school.

Speaker 2: 21:46

They've learned it in a shallow way. They've learned it to pass tests. They haven't learned it deeply and so they've forgotten that. So, and moreover, especially today, we're in an age where you know. If you're in a class and there does seem to be some information being talked about, maybe some terminology, that you don't know what it means. But others know what it means because they have heard this terminology X number of times in a previous course All you have to do is look it up. And now you've got this to look it up on, you can sit there right in class. The biology professor is talking about meiosis. You don't know what meiosis is. A couple of thumb twitches. Now you know what meiosis is and you're not behind Right.

Speaker 2: 22:33

So so I also know of cases where kids who start off at Sudbury Valley, or they start off in homeschooling by the method called unschooling, where they're not learning a typical school curriculum, they're following their own interests, where the kid decides at some stage I want to go to regular school, my friends are there, I want to see what it's like. And the typical story is they go at whatever grade level they would be and they do fine. You know, they've missed first. They've missed kindergarten, first, second, third and fourth grade, and there they are in fifth grade and they're doing fine.

Speaker 2: 23:10

One story I heard was from a mom, unschooling mom whose son told her so I want to go to school next year because my friends are there, I want to see what it's like. And she said well, I don't see how you could, because you don't know how to read and you would be by. Your friends are going to be in third grade. You're old enough, you'd be in third grade. I don't think you want to go there, to go to kindergarten or go to first grade. And so the kid said, all right, I'll learn how to read. And he learned how to read and went to third grade.

Speaker 2: 23:44

You know when somebody really wants to learn something, they can learn it very quickly and very efficiently. It's when you're trying to beat something into some kids heads who aren't interested in learning it, that's when learning becomes difficult.

Speaker 1: 23:59

Right, right and and hence, I think, the student, some students, you know repulsion of school, you know like, or just hatred, as you were mentioning, like as we started this, that you get so adverse to it because of that control over you and that there's that freedom just doesn't exist. If you were to, um, provide advice, like I know that you've done tons of research, your books are like super well known like where do you look at Peter and say here are some small things that we could tweak to our system, that could open up more doors to students feeling like they're a part of and I really love your idea of the Sudbury Valley School. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. What kinds of advice do you offer to educators that they can get there with a couple of little tweaks to what they do?

Speaker 2: 24:58

They can't get there. With a couple of little tweaks they can't really get there. There's no way that the school system is like this huge dinosaur and it cannot evolve in a way that's going to lead it to something like Sudbury Valley School. There's a long history of attempts to bring progressive reforms into public schooling and they all ultimately fail. Because once you try to introduce a little more freedom, a little more choice, a little bit more playfulness, the test scores on the tests tend to go down, because kids are not preparing for those tests as much. They're following their interests. They're learning stuff that may be more important, more valuable, but they're learning different things, and so, as long as the school system is going to evaluate its progress and the progress of students with tests, you can't really have anything like a Sudbury school. So what do I do when I talk with and I do? I give a lot of talks to public educators. I give a lot of talks to groups of teachers, administrators, policymakers in public education, and so the first thing I suggest to them is you know, over the history of public schooling, we keep doing more. We keep adding to the number of days of school, the number of hours, the amount of homework. We keep reducing children's opportunities to play and explore and learn things in the real world because we are more and more confining them to school and even to school-like activities outside of school. Recognize that there's a lot of things children need to learn that they're not going to learn in lessons in the classroom. They're going to learn them in play. They're going to learn them in part-time jobs. They're going to learn them out there in the real world, interacting with people in the real world, and they need time to do that. Children used to have time to do that.

Speaker 2: 27:15

So I was a kid in the 1950s. School was not the big deal then that it is now. It wasn't great, but the large reason it was better is there was less of it. We didn't have homework in elementary school. We had much less homework in secondary school than we have today. Most of us could do that homework during study hall periods and then we were free after school. So I often say that I had two educations as a kid. I had school and there were some things I learned in school that were useful. But the bigger, better, more important part of my education is what I call my hunter-gatherer education, which was the time out of school when I was playing, exploring on my own, doing all kinds of things. That helped me learn who I am, how to make friends, how to keep friends, helped me develop passionate interests in various things, which ultimately helped me decide what I want to do in life. None of that occurred in school. All that occurred outside of school.

Speaker 2: 28:21

But now we're not providing, partly because of the amount of time kids are spending at school and school homework, but partly because we're restraining children's lives. Even when they're not in school. We're putting them in adult-directed activities. Instead of allowing them to play and explore and discover who they are and what they like to do, we're putting them in adult-directed activities. We're also in a world where we're kind of afraid to just let kids go out and play and explore, and so children are more or less and I don't think this is too extreme a statement more or less imprisoned around the clock.

Speaker 2: 28:56

In school they are told exactly what to do, they're micromanaged, and at home they're kind of under home confinement. They have to. They almost if children under about 12 or 13, at least in many communities are really not allowed out of the house without an adult guard with them. So this is a dramatic change from the way children have always grown up in the past. Children need this time to learn how to be independent, to do their own things, to not be constantly judged and monitored by adults, to figure out how to deal with their peers, including when peers aren't necessarily nice to them. How do you deal with that? How do you get along with them? These are really, really important lessons that we're not allowing children to learn because we are constantly they're constantly under surveillance and protection and direction by adults.

Speaker 1: 29:49

Amazing, totally like you're throwing out some big seeds here, peter, to take root, I hope, for listeners, because I mean it rings true what you're saying To me. Anyway, I see this. I want to thank you, peter. This has just been really fascinating your stories, and I love the, the thoughtfulness of your um language and how you um have kind of navigated this crazy world that we deal with. Sometimes you feel like just kind of knocking your head against the wall, um, but I think that your books and your words help inform us better, and maybe there's change coming. We'll see. That dinosaur, though, is big, very big anyway, peter, thanks so much. I hope one day we, uh, we can hop on again. I have so many other things that we I wanted to talk about, but, um, our time is up. So thanks again for this.

Speaker 2: 30:50

I really appreciate it thank you, it's been a pleasure.