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Freedom to Learn
essential selection of posts from blog by

Peter Gray

Children come into the world with instinctive drives to educate themselves. These
include the drives to play and explore. This blog is primarily about these drives and ways
by which we could create learning environments that optimize rather than repress them.
1 Learning Requires Freedom ................................................................................................... 3

2 Children Educate Themselves ................................................................................................ 6

2.1 Outline of Some of the Evidence ................................................................................................. 6
2.2 We All Know That’s True for Little Kids ....................................................................................... 8
2.3 The Wisdom of Hunter-Gatherers ............................................................................................ 12
2.4 Lessons from Sudbury Valley .................................................................................................... 16
2.5 The Natural Environment for Children’s Self-Education ........................................................... 20
2.6 Minimally Invasive Education: Lessons from India ................................................................... 23

3 Why We Should Stop Segregating Children by Age ............................................................... 28

3.1 The Value of Play in the Zone of Proximal Development .......................................................... 28
3.2 The Unique Educative Qualities of Age-Mixed Play .................................................................. 31
3.3 Older Children Are Excellent Models, Helpers, and Teachers ................................................... 35

4 Why Schools Are What They Are.......................................................................................... 40

4.1 A Brief History of Education ...................................................................................................... 40
4.2 Forces Against Fundamental Change ....................................................................................... 46
4.3 “Why Don’t Students Like School?” Well, Duhhhh…................................................................. 50
4.4 Seven Sins of Our System of Forced Education ......................................................................... 53
4.5 Is Real Educational Reform Possible? If So, How? .................................................................... 57

5 What Einstein, Twain, and Forty Eight Other Creative People Had to Say About Schooling .... 62

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1 Learning Requires Freedom: Introduction to a New
Blog about Play, Curiosity, and Education
More time in school is not the answer.

July 9, 2008

Everywhere we turn these days we find pundits and politicians arguing for more
restrictive schooling. Of course they don’t use the word “restrictive,” but that’s what it
amounts to. They want more standardized tests, more homework, more supervision, longer
school days, longer school years, more sanctions against children’s taking a day or two off
for a family vacation. This is one realm in which politicians from both of the major parties, at
every level of government, seem to agree. More schooling or more rigorous schooling is
better than less schooling or less rigorous schooling.

“Schooling” and “education” (which in today’s usage is usually a synonym for

“schooling”) are terms with halos around them. They are a priori good; by the logic we
commonly hear, nothing counts as evidence against the value of more schooling. If children
learn, we thank the schools. If children don’t seem to learn much, that means they need
more schooling. If the economy isn’t doing well, it must be because we aren’t putting
enough effort into schooling. If the economy is doing well, that confirms the value of
schooling and suggests we could do even better with more of it. If knowledge is expanding at
an ever-growing pace, then we must require students to study more subjects. If today’s
world requires critical thinking, then we must add critical thinking to the long list of what we
teach and test. If we believe that human beings have “multiple intelligences,” then we must
enumerate them and teach to each of those intelligences in every person. If we value
equality, then we must believe that everyone should study the same curriculum and take the
same tests, so we can make them equal (forget the idea of our democracy's founders that
people can be different yet equal in worth).

Whatever happened to the idea that children learn through their own free play and
exploration? Every serious psychological theory of learning, from Piaget’s on, posits that
learning is an active process controlled by the learner, motivated by curiosity. Educators
everywhere give lip service to those theories, but then go ahead and create schools that
prevent self-guided play and exploration. Every one of us knows, if we stop to think about it,
that the most valuable lessons we have learned are not what we “learned in kindergarten,”
nor what we learned in courses later on. They are, instead, the lessons that we learned when
we allowed ourselves the luxury of following through on our own interests and our own
drives to play, fully and deeply. Through those means we acquired skills, values, ideas, and
information that will stay with us for life, not just for the next test. And, perhaps most
important, we discovered what we most enjoy, which is the first step in finding a satisfying
career.

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 Every time we add another hour to the time that children must spend in school or at
homework, and every time we coerce or coax them into yet another adult-directed
extracurricular activity, we deprive them further of opportunities to play, explore, reflect,
and experience the joys and frustrations of self-direction. With each new restriction we drive
a wedge further into the school system, pushing away more and more young people who
cannot or will not accept such restrictions. Boys in particular are increasingly unwilling to
accept the confinements of schooling, and boys are increasingly, in various ways, dropping
out.

I have been teaching for a long time at a selective university. Students come to my
classes with A averages in high school. But they don’t come knowing very much about the
subjects they studied. They achieved high grades because they are bright and are motivated
to get ahead through the standard procedures. They figured out what they needed to do to
get high grades and then they did it. They figured how to do well on tests without learning
much about the subject. They learned how to hold information, in the form that the teacher
wanted, just long enough for the test.

I have no objection to students’ entering my classes not knowing much. Information is

easy to find and easy to supply. If students discover that they need to know something as
background to what I am saying or what they are reading, they can ask or look it up. I’m only
sorry that they wasted so much time in school, when they would have been better off
playing and following through on their own interests. If they had done that, then those who
decided to go to college and to take my course would have good reasons for doing so; and
others would have good reasons for choosing other routes. Students who have explored and
are pursuing their own interests in their college studies are rare and delightful; they don’t
treat their first year there as 13th grade.

I also know teenagers who are presently in high school. Some are “good students” and
some are not. What I have observed is that both groups are equally cynical about school. The
“good students” may not quite recognize their cynicism or identify it as such, but it is clearly
there. It manifests itself with every shortcut they take to a good grade. It manifests itself
when, in asking for help, they say, “But I don’t really need to understand it; all I need is the
right answer.”

We could make life better for children and improve learning, at much less expense
than our current schools cost, if we developed environments in which children can play
safely, interact freely with a wide range of others, and pursue their own interests. I know
that, because I have seen it; and I will tell you about some of those observations in future
installments.

I have begun this new blog, Freedom to Learn, because I am seriously concerned about
the state of education and the declining opportunities of children to play and explore. I am a
professor of evolutionary and developmental psychology. My special interest is children’s

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and adults’ natural ways of learning. In this first installment I have set out an opinion. In
future installments I intend to support that opinion with essays dealing with questions such
as the following:

• Why are human beings the most playful of all animals?

• What does it mean to say that the playful mind is a mind poised for learning?

• Is play the opposite of work? (In what sense is it, and in what sense isn’t it?)

• What is the evolutionary purpose of curiosity?

• What happens to curiosity as children grow older?

• What do children and adolescents mean when they say, “I’m bored”?

• What is the value of free age mixing in children’s learning?

• Do children “need structure”? (Of course they do, but what kind of structure?)

• In what conditions will young people naturally educate themselves, without coercion or
coaxing?

• What should it mean to say that someone is “well educated”?

• What is the proper role of adults in the education of children?

• What are the risks inherent in trying to protect children from risks?

• Why do we feel so much need to control children’s learning?

• Why do schools operate the way they do? (The answer lies in history.)

• Why do liberalizing reforms in education usually fail?

• What kind of discipline is needed for work and careers, and how is such discipline
acquired?

• What is the meaning of freedom, and why do we seek it?

Keep tuned, and join the discussion. I’ll post a new installment every Wednesday, and
I’ll take your questions, comments, and arguments into account. I hope to convince you that
what I’m talking about is not pie-in-the-sky idealism. We’ll talk about real people, real
schools, and findings from systematic empirical research.

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2 Children Educate Themselves

2.1 Outline of Some of the Evidence

Children are designed by nature to educate themselves.

July 16, 2008

As adults we do have certain responsibilities toward our children and the world's
children. It is our responsibility to create safe, health-promoting, respectful environments in
which children can develop. It is our responsibility to be sure that children have proper
foods, fresh air, non-toxic places to play, and lots of opportunities to interact freely with
other people across the whole spectrum of ages. It is our responsibility to be models of
human decency. But one thing we do not have to worry about is how to educate children.

We do not have to worry about curricula, lesson plans, motivating children to learn,
testing them, and all the rest that comes under the rubric of pedagogy. Lets turn that
energy, instead, toward creating decent environments in which children can play. Children's
education is children's responsibility, not ours. Only they can do it. They are built to do it.
Our task regarding education is just to stand back and let it happen. The more we try to
control it, the more we interfere.

When I say that education is children's responsibility and that they are by nature
designed to assume that responsibility, I do not expect you to take that assertion on faith.
We live in a world in which that assertion is not the self-evident truth that it once was. We
live in a world in which almost all children and adolescents are sent to school, beginning at
ever-younger ages and ending at ever-older ages, and in which "school" has a certain
standard meaning. We measure education in terms of scores on tests and success in
advancing through the school system from one level to the next. Naturally, then, we come
almost automatically to think of education as something that is done at schools by specialists
trained in the art and science of pedagogy, who know how to put children through the paces
that will turn their raw potential into an educated product.

So, I take it as my task to present evidence to support my claim. The most direct lines
of evidence come from settings where we can see children educating themselves without
anything like what we think of as schooling. Here are three such settings, which I will
elaborate on in the next three installments of this weekly blog.

1. A huge amount of children's education occurs before they start school.

The most obvious evidence of children's capacity for self-education, available to any of
us who opens our eyes, comes from watching kids in their first four or five years of life,
before anyone tries in any systematic way to teach them anything. Think of all they learn in
that period. They learn to walk, run, jump, climb. They learn about the physical properties
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of, and how to manipulate, all of the objects that are within their reach. They learn their
native language, which is surely one of the most cognitively complex tasks that any human
being ever masters. They learn the basic psychology of other people--how to please others,
how to annoy them, how to get what they need or want from them. They learn all this not
through lessons provided by anyone, but through their own free play, their insatiable
curiosity, and their natural attentiveness to the behavior of other people. We can't stop
them from learning all this and more unless we lock them up alone in closets.

2. Children in hunter-gatherer cultures become successful adults without anything like

schooling.
During most of human existence we lived in relatively small nomadic, foraging bands.
Our basic human nature--including our playfulness, curiosity, and all of our other biological
adaptations for learning--evolved in the context of that way of life. Some groups of hunter-
gatherers managed to survive, with their cultures intact, into recent times. Anthropologist
who have studied such groups--in Africa, Asia, New Zealand, South America, and elsewhere--
have found a remarkable consistency across them in their attitudes toward children. In all of
these cultures children and adolescents are permitted to play and follow their own interests,
without adult interference, essentially from dawn to dusk every day. The belief of these
people, borne out by millennia of experience, is that young people teach themselves
through play and exploration and then, when ready to do so, begin naturally to put what
they have learned to purposes that benefit the group as a whole. Through their own efforts
hunter-gatherer children acquire the enormous sets of skills and knowledge they need to be
successful adults in their culture.

3. Children at certain "non-school schools" in our culture become successful adults without
anything like conventional schooling.
I have for many years been an observer of children and adolescents at the Sudbury
Valley School, in Framingham, Massachusetts. The school was founded forty years ago by
people whose beliefs about education are remarkably similar to those of hunter-gatherers.
The school is for young people aged four on through high school age, and it is nothing at all
like a typical school. It is a democratic setting in which children truly have equal power to the
adults and in which students learn entirely through their own self-directed activities. It is,
essentially, a safe environment in which young people can play, explore, assume
responsibility, and interact freely with others across the whole range of ages. There are no
tests, no gold stars or other such rewards, no passing or failing, no required courses or
coursework, no coercion or coaxing of children to learn, no expectations that the staff are
responsible for children's learning. By now, many hundreds of young people have educated
themselves in this environment. And, no, they don't become hunters and gatherers. They
become artisans, artists, chefs, doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, musicians,
scientists, social workers, and software designers. They can be found in the whole range of
careers that we value in our culture.

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 In my next three weekly installments I will elaborate, one by one, on these three
sources of evidence about young people's capacities for self-education. Now, please respond
below with your own comments, arguments, and experiences. Your thoughts will help form
my next installments and will contribute to the dialogue that we so much need if we are
going to do anything to affect the way the world thinks about childhood and learning. If you
think this dialogue is worthwhile, please email this installment to others and link to the blog
from other relevant sites that you are involved with.

2.2 We All Know That’s True for Little Kids

Watching young children learn can revolutionize our views on education.

July 23, 2008

Have you ever stopped to think about how much children learn in their first few years
of life, before they start school, before anyone tries in any systematic way to teach them
anything? Their learning comes naturally; it results from their instincts to play, explore, and
observe others around them. But to say that it comes naturally is not to say that it comes
effortlessly. Infants and young children put enormous energy into their learning. Their
capacities for sustained attention, for physical and mental effort, and for overcoming
frustrations and barriers are extraordinary. Next time you are in viewing range of a child
under the age of about five years old, sit back and watch for awhile. Try to imagine what is
going on in the child's mind each moment in his or her interactions with the world. If you
allow yourself that luxury, you are in for a treat. The experience might lead you to think
about education in a whole new light--a light that shines from within the child rather than on
the child.

Here I will sketch out a tiny bit of what developmental psychologists have learned
about young children's learning. To help relate this knowledge to thoughts about education,
I'll organize the sketch into categories of physical, linguistic, scientific, and social-moral
education.

Physical Education
Let’s begin with learning to walk. Walking on two legs is a species-typical trait of
human beings. In some sense we are born for it. But even so it doesn't come easily. Every
human being who comes into the world puts enormous effort into learning to walk.

I remember one spring day long ago when my son, somewhere near his first birthday,
was at the stage where he could walk by holding onto something but could not take steps
alone. We happened to be traveling that day on a large tourist boat, and my son insisted on
spending the entire ride walking up and down the deck while holding my hand. We spent
many hours walking the length of the boat, with me uncomfortably stooped over so my hand
could reach his. The motivation, of course, was entirely his. I was just a convenient tool, a
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human walking stick. I kept trying to convince him to take a rest because I needed one; but
he was a master at manipulating me back into walking whenever we did stop for a moment.

Researchers have found that toddlers at the peak of learning to walk spend, on
average, 6 hours per day walking, during which time they take an average of 9,000 steps and
travel the length of 29 football fields.1 They aren't trying to get anywhere in particular; they
are just walking for the sake of walking. They become especially interested in walking when
they are exposed to a new kind of surface. I suspect that my son on our boat ride was
stimulated to walk partly because the boat's motion made walking difficult and added a new
and exciting challenge.

Early in the stage of walking alone, children often fall and sometimes hurt themselves;
but then they pull themselves right back up and try again--and again, and again, and again.
After walking comes running, jumping, climbing, swinging, and all sorts of new ways of
moving. We don't have to teach children any of this, and we certainly don't have to motivate
them. All we have to do is provide appropriate safe places for them to practice.

Language Education
If you have ever tried to learn a new language as an adult, you know how difficult it is.
There are thousands of words to learn and countless grammatical rules. Yet children more or
less master their native language by the age of four. By that age, in conversations, they
exhibit a sophisticated knowledge of word meanings and grammatical rules. In fact, children
growing up in bilingual homes acquire two languages by the age of four and somehow
manage to keep them distinct.

Four-year-olds can't describe the grammatical rules of their language (nor can most
adults), but their implicit knowledge of the rules is clear in their speech and understanding.
They add s to brand new nouns to make them plural, add ed to brand new verbs to put them
into the past tense, and manifest an understanding of grammatical categories--nouns, verbs,
adjectives, adverbs, and so on--in their construction of novel sentences. Infants may come
into the world with some innate understanding of language, as Noam Chomsky long ago
suggested, but the specific words and rules of every language are different and clearly have
to be learned.

Infants and young children continuously educate themselves about language. Early in
infancy they begin babbling language-like sounds, practicing the motor acts of articulation.
With time they restrict their babbling more and more to the sounds of the specific language
that they hear around them. By a few months of age they can be observed to pay close
attention to the speech of others and to engage in activities that seem to be designed to
help them figure out what others are saying. For example, they regularly follow the eyes of
older children or adults, to see what the others are looking at, which helps them guess what

1
Adolph et al., 2003, Child Development, 74, 475-497
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they are talking about. With this strategy, a toddler in the garden who hears someone say,
"What a pretty chrysanthemum," has a good chance of identifying what object is being
referred to. Between the ages of two and 17, young people learn an average of about 60,000
words;2 that works out to nearly one new word for every hour that they are awake.

Language learning, like learning to walk, is play. It is absorbing, intense, done for its
own sake. Young children go around naming things just for the fun of naming them, not for
any other reward. And as children grow older their word play becomes ever more
sophisticated, taking such forms as riddles, puns, and rhymes. We can't teach children
language; all we can do is provide a normal human environment within which they can learn
it and practice it, that is, an environment in which they can engage themselves with people
who speak.

Science Education
Young children are enormously curious about all aspects of the world around them.
Even within their first few days of life, infants spend more time looking at new objects than
at those they have seen before. By the age at which they have enough eye-hand
coordination to reach out and manipulate objects, they do just that--constantly. Six-month-
olds examine every new object they can reach, in ways that are well designed to learn about
its physical properties. They squeeze it, pass it from hand to hand, look at it from all sides,
shake it, drop it, watch to see what happens; and whenever something interesting happens
they try to repeat it, as if to prove that it wasn't a fluke. Watch a six-month-old in action and
see a scientist.

The primary goal of young people's exploration is to learn how to control their
environment. Many experiments have shown that infants and young children are far more
interested in objects whose actions they can control than in those they cannot control. For
instance, an audio player that they can turn on and off through some effort of their own is
far more fascinating to them than one that comes on and off by itself or is controlled by an
adult. They are especially drawn to such objects during the period when they are learning
how to control them. Once they have learned how to control an object and have exhausted
all the possibilities for action on it, they tend to lose interest in it. That's why the cardboard
carton that a fancy but uncontrollable toy comes in may sustain a child's interest for a longer
time than does the toy.

The drive to figure out how objects work and how to control them does not end with
early childhood; it continues on as long as children and adults are free to follow their own
paths. This drive is the foundation of science. Nothing destroys it more quickly than an
environment in which everyone is told what they must do with new objects and how to do it.
The fun of science lies in the discovery, not in the knowledge that results. That is true for all
of us, whether we are 6-month-olds exploring a mobile, two-year-olds exploring a cardboard

2
Bloom, 2001, Behavior & Brain Sciences, 24, 1095-1103
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box, or adult scientists exploring the properties of a physical particle or an enzyme. Nobody
goes into science because they like to be told the answers to someone else's questions; they
go into science because they like to discover the answers to their own questions. That's why
our standard method of training people in science never turns them into scientists. Those
who become scientists do so despite such training.

Social and Moral Education

Even more fascinating to young children than the physical environment is the social
environment. Children are naturally drawn to others, especially to those others who are a
little older than themselves and a little more competent. They want to do what those others
do. They also want to play with others. Social play is the primary natural means of every
child's social and moral education.

It is through play that children learn to get along with others. In play they must take
into account the other children's needs, learn to see from others' points of view, learn to
compromise, learn to negotiate differences, learn to control their own impulses, learn to
please others so as to keep them as playmates. These are all hard lessons, and they are
among the most important lessons that all of us must learn if we are to live happy lives. We
can't possibly teach these lessons to children; all we can do is let them play with others and
let them experience themselves the consequences of their social failures and successes. The
strong innate drive to play with others is what motivates every normal child to work hard at
getting along with others in play. Failure to get along ends the game, and that natural
consequence is a powerful learning experience. No lectures or words of advice that we can
provide can substitute for such experience. I'll not elaborate further on this now; it will be
the topic of future installments.

What Happens to Motivation at Age Five or Six?

Once, when my son was about seven years old and in public school, I mentioned to his
teacher that he seemed to have been far more interested in learning before he started
school than he was now. Her response was something like this: "Well, I'm sure you know, as
a psychologist, that this is a natural developmental change. Children by nature are
spontaneous learners when they are little, but then they become more task oriented."

I can understand where she got that idea. I've seen developmental psychology
textbooks that divide the units according to age and refer to the preschool years as "the play
years." All the discussion of play occurs in those first chapters. It is as if play stops at age five
or six. The remaining chapters largely have to do with studies of how children perform on
tasks that adults give them to perform. I imagine that the teacher had read such a book
when she was taking education courses. But such books present a distorted view of what is
natural. In the next two installments I will present evidence that when young people beyond
the age of five or six are permitted the freedom and opportunities to follow their own

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interests, their drives to play and explore continue to motivate them, as strongly as ever,
toward ever more sophisticated forms of learning.

2.3 The Wisdom of Hunter-Gatherers

How hunter-gatherer children learn without schools.

August 2, 2008

For hundreds of thousands of years, up until the time when agriculture was invented (a
mere 10,000 years ago), we were all hunter-gatherers. Our human instincts, including all of
the instinctive means by which we learn, came about in the context of that way of life. And
so it is natural that in this series on children's instinctive ways of educating themselves I
should ask: How do hunter-gatherer children learn what they need to know to become
effective adults within their culture?

In the last half of the 20th century, anthropologists located and observed many groups
of people—in remote parts Africa, Asia, Australia, New Guinea, South America, and
elsewhere—who had maintained a hunting-and-gathering life, almost unaffected by modern
ways. Although each group studied had its own language and other cultural traditions, the
various groups were found to be similar in many basic ways, which allows us to speak of "the
hunter-gatherer way of life" in the singular. Wherever they were found, hunter-gatherers
lived in small nomadic bands (of about 25 to 50 people per band), made decisions
democratically, had ethical systems that centered on egalitarian values and sharing, and had
rich cultural traditions that included music, art, games, dances, and time-honored stories.

To supplement what we could find in the anthropological literature, several years ago
Jonathan Ogas (then a graduate student) and I contacted a number of anthropologists who
had lived among hunter-gatherers and asked them to respond to a written questionnaire
about their observations of children's lives. Nine such scholars kindly responded to our
questionnaire. Among them, they had studied six different hunter-gatherer cultures—three
in Africa, one in Malaysia, one in the Philippines, and one in New Guinea.

What I learned from my reading and our questionnaire was startling for its consistency
from culture. Here I will summarize four conclusions, which I think are most relevant to the
issue of self-education. Because I would like you to picture these practices as occurring now,
I will use the present tense in describing them, even though the practices and the cultures
themselves have been largely destroyed in recent years by intrusions from the more
"developed" world around them.

1. Hunter-gatherer children must learn an enormous amount to become successful adults.

It would be a mistake to think that education is not a big issue for hunter-gatherers
because they don't have to learn much. In fact, they have to learn an enormous amount.

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 To become effective hunters, boys must learn the habits of the two or three hundred
different species of mammals and birds that the band hunts; must know how to track such
game using the slightest clues; must be able to craft perfectly the tools of hunting, such as
bows and arrows, blowguns and darts, snares or nets; and must be extraordinarily skilled at
using those tools.

To become effective gatherers, girls must learn which of the countless varieties of
roots, tubers, nuts, seeds, fruits, and greens in their area are edible and nutritious, when and
where to find them, how to dig them (in the case of roots and tubers), how to extract the
edible portions efficiently (in the case of grains, nuts, and certain plant fibers), and in some
cases how to process them to make them edible or increase their nutritional value. These
abilities include physical skills, honed by years of practice, as well as the capacity to
remember, use, add to, and modify an enormous store of culturally shared verbal knowledge
about the food materials.

In addition, hunter-gatherer children must learn how to navigate their huge foraging
territory, build huts, make fires, cook, fend off predators, predict weather changes, treat
wounds and diseases, assist births, care for infants, maintain harmony within their group,
negotiate with neighboring groups, tell stories, make music, and engage in various dances
and rituals of their culture. Since there is little specialization beyond that of men as hunters
and women as gatherers, each person must acquire a large fraction of the total knowledge
and skills of the culture.

2. The children learn all this without being taught.

Although hunter-gatherer children must learn an enormous amount, hunter-gatherers
have nothing like school. Adults do not establish a curriculum, or attempt to motivate
children to learn, or give lessons, or monitor children's progress. When asked how children
learn what they need to know, hunter-gatherer adults invariably answer with words that
mean essentially: "They teach themselves through their observations, play, and exploration."
Occasionally an adult might offer a word of advice or demonstrate how to do something
better, such as how to shape an arrowhead, but such help is given only when the child
clearly desires it. Adults to not initiate, direct, or interfere with children's activities. Adults do
not show any evidence of worry about their children's education; millennia of experience
have proven to them that children are experts at educating themselves.3

3. The children are afforded enormous amounts of time to play and explore.
In response to our question about how much time children had for play, the
anthropologists we surveyed were unanimous in indicating that the hunter-gatherer children
they observed were free to play most if not all of the day, every day. Typical responses are
the following:

3
See, for example, Y. Gosso et al. (2005), "Play in hunter-gatherer societies." In A. D. Pellegrini & P. K.
Smith (Eds.), The nature of play: great apes and humans. New York: Guilford.
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 • "[Batek] children were free to play nearly all the time; no one expected children to
do serious work until they were in their late teens." (Karen Endicott.)

• "Both girls and boys [among the Nharo] had almost all day every day free to play."
(Alan Barnard.)

• "[Efé] boys were free to play nearly all the time until age 15-17; for girls most of the
day, in between a few errands and some babysitting, was spent in play." (Robert Bailey.)

• "[!Kung] children played from dawn to dusk. " (Nancy Howell.)

The freedom that hunter-gatherer children enjoy to pursue their own interests comes
partly from the adults' understanding that such pursuits are the surest path to education. It
also comes from the general spirit of egalitarianism and personal autonomy that pervades
hunter-gatherer cultures and applies as much to children as to adults.4 Hunter-gatherer
adults view children as complete individuals, with rights comparable to those of adults. Their
assumption is that children will, of their own accord, begin contributing to the economy of
the band when they are developmentally ready to do so. There is no need to make children
or anyone else do what they don't want to do. It is remarkable to think that our instincts to
learn and to contribute to the community evolved in a world in which our instincts were
trusted!

4. Children observe adults' activities and incorporate those activities into their play.
Hunter-gatherer children are never isolated from adult activities. They observe directly
all that occurs in camp—the preparations to move, the building of huts, the making and
mending of tools and other artifacts, the food preparation and cooking, the nursing and care
of infants, the precautions taken against predators and diseases, the gossip and discussions,
the arguments and politics, the dances and festivities. They sometimes accompany adults on
food gathering trips, and by age 10 or so boys sometimes accompany men on hunting trips.

The children not only observe all of these activities, but they also incorporate them
into their play, and through that play they become skilled at the activities. As they grow
older, their play turns gradually into the real thing. There is no sharp division between
playful participation and real participation in the valued activities of the group.

For example boys who one day are playfully hunting butterflies with their little bows
and arrows are, on a later day, playfully hunting small mammals and bringing some of them
home to eat, and on yet a later day are joining men on real hunting trips, still in the spirit of
play. As another example, both boys and girls commonly build play huts, modeled after the
real huts that their parents build. In her response to our questionnaire, Nancy Howell
pointed out that !Kung children commonly build a whole village of play huts a few hundred

4
See, for example, S. Kent (1996), "Cultural diversity among African foragers: causes and implications."
In S. Kent (Ed.), Cultural diversity among twentieth-century foragers: an African perspective. Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press.
14
yards from the real village. The play village then becomes a playground where they act out
many of the kinds of scenes that they observe among adults.

The respondents to our survey referred also to many other examples of valued adult
activities that were emulated regularly by children in play. Digging up roots, fishing, smoking
porcupines out of holes, cooking, caring for infants, climbing trees, building vine ladders,
using knives and other tools, making tools, carrying heavy loads, building rafts, making fires,
defending against attacks from predators, imitating animals (a means of identifying animals
and learning their habits), making music, dancing, storytelling, and arguing were all
mentioned by one or more respondents. Because all this play occurs in an age-mixed
environment, the smaller children are constantly learning from the older ones.

Nobody has to tell or encourage the children to do all this. They do it naturally
because, like children everywhere, there is nothing that they desire more than to grow up
and to be like the successful adults that they see around them. The desire to grow up is a
powerful motive that blends with the drives to play and explore and ensures that children, if
given a chance, will practice endlessly the skills that they need to develop to become
effective adults.

What relevance might these observations have for education in our culture?
Our culture, of course, is very different from hunter-gatherer cultures. You might well
doubt that the lessons about education that we learn from hunter-gatherers can be applied
effectively in our culture today. For starters, hunter-gatherers do not have reading, writing,
or arithmetic; maybe the natural, self-motivated means of learning don't work for learning
the three R's. In our culture, unlike in hunter-gatherer cultures, there are countless different
ways of making a living, countless different sets of skills and knowledge that children might
acquire, and it is impossible for children in their daily lives to observe all those adult skills
directly. In our culture, unlike in hunter-gatherer cultures, children are largely segregated
from the adult work world, which reduces their opportunities to see what adults do and
incorporate those activities into their play.

Yet, in the next installment, I am going to argue that the same natural means of
learning that work so well for hunter-gatherers indeed do work equally well for our children,
when we provide an educational setting that allows those means to work. My next
installment, which I expect to post on Wednesday, August 13, will be about a school in
Framingham, Massachusetts, where, for the past 40 years, children and teenagers have been
educating themselves with extraordinary success through their self-directed play and
exploration.

15
2.4 Lessons from Sudbury Valley

For forty years children have educated themselves at this school.

August 13, 2008

The Sudbury Valley School has, for the past forty years, been the best-kept secret in
American education. Most students of education have never heard of it. Professors of
education ignore it, not out of malice but because they cannot absorb it into their
framework of educational thought. The Sudbury Valley model of education is not a variation
of standard education. It is not a progressive version of traditional schooling. It is not a
Montessori school or a Dewey school or a Piagetian constructivist school. It is something
entirely different. To understand the school one has to begin with a completely different
mindset from that which dominates current educational thinking. One has to begin with the
thought: Adults do not control children's education; children educate themselves.

But the secret is getting out, spread largely by students and others who have
experienced the Sudbury Valley School directly. Today at least two dozen schools
throughout the world are modeled after Sudbury Valley. I predict that fifty years from now,
if not sooner, the Sudbury Valley model will be featured in every standard textbook of
education and will be adopted by many public school systems. In fifty years, I predict, today's
approach to education will be seen by many if not most educators as a barbaric remnant of
the past. People will wonder why the world took so long to come to grips with such a simple
and self-evident idea as that upon which the Sudbury Valley School is founded: Children
educate themselves; we don't have to do it for them.

In the last posting I summarized evidence that hunter-gatherer children learn the
extraordinary amount that they must to become effective adults through their own self-
directed play and exploration. In the posting before that, I pointed out that children in our
culture learn many of the most difficult lessons they will ever learn before they start school,
entirely on their own initiatives, without adult direction or prodding. And now, based on the
experiences of the Sudbury Valley School, I contend that self-education works just as well for
school-aged children and adolescents in our culture as it does for preschoolers and for
hunter-gatherers.

For many years I have had the opportunity to observe the Sudbury Valley School, both
as the father of a student who went there and as an academician using the school as a
resource to study play and self-directed learning. Here I'll tell you a little about the school.

First, a few mundane facts. The school was founded 40 years ago and has been in
continuous operation since then. It is a private day school, in Framingham, Massachusetts,
open to students age four on through high-school age. The school is not in any sense elitist.
It admits students without regard to any measures of academic performance, and it
operates at a per pupil cost that is about half that of the surrounding public schools. The
16
school currently has about 200 students and ten adult staff members. It is housed in a
Victorian mansion and a remodeled barn, which sit on ten acres of land in a part of town
that was largely rural when the school began operating. Now, the more remarkable facts
concerning the school's mode of operation:

The school operates as a participatory democracy

The Sudbury Valley School is first and foremost a community in which children and
adolescents experience directly the privileges and responsibilities of democratic
government. The primary administrative body is the School Meeting, which consists of all
students and staff members. In one-person-one-vote fashion, the School Meeting, which
meets once a week, creates all of the school's rules, makes decisions about school
purchases, establishes committees to oversee the school's day-to-day operation, and hires
and fires staff members. Four-year-olds at the school have the same vote as do older
students and adult staff members in all of this.

No staff members at the school have tenure. All are on one-year contracts, which must
be renewed each year through a secret-ballot election. As the student voters outnumber the
staff by a factor of 20 to 1, the staff who survive this process and are re-elected year after
year are those who are admired by the students. They are people who are kind, ethical, and
competent, and who contribute significantly and positively to the school's environment.
They are adults that the students may wish in some ways to emulate.

The school's rules are enforced by the Judicial Committee, which changes regularly in
membership but always includes a staff member and students representing the full range of
ages at the school. When a student or staff member is charged by another school member
with violating a rule, the accuser and the accused must appear before the Judicial
Committee, which determines innocence or guilt and, in the latter case, decides on an
appropriate sentence. In all of this, staff members are treated in the same way as students.
Nobody is above the law.

The school does not interfere with students' activities

Students are free, all day, every day, to do what they wish at the school, as long as
they don't violate any of the school's rules. The rules, all made by the School Meeting, have
to do with protecting the school and protecting students' opportunities to pursue their own
interests unhindered by others. School members must not make noise in designated "quiet
rooms," misuse equipment or fail to put it away when finished, deface school property, use
illegal drugs on campus, or behave in any way toward another person that makes that
person feel harassed. Behaviors of those sorts are the fodder of Judicial Committee
complaints.

17
 None of the school's rules have to do with learning. The school gives no tests. It does
not evaluate or grade students' progress.5 There is no curriculum and no attempt to
motivate students to learn. Courses occur only when students take the initiative to organize
them, and they last only as long as the students want them. Many students at the school
never join a course, and the school sees no problem with that. The staff members at the
school do not consider themselves to be teachers. They are, instead, adult members of the
community who provide a wide variety of services, including some teaching. Most of their
"teaching" is of the same variety as can be found in any human setting; it involves answering
sincere questions and presenting ideas in the context of real conversations.

The school is a rich environment for play and exploration, and therefore for learning
Learning at Sudbury Valley is largely incidental. It occurs as a side effect of students'
self-directed play and exploration. The school is a wonderful place to play and explore. It
provides space and time for such activities. It also provides equipment--including computers,
a fully equipped kitchen, a woodworking shop, an art room, playground equipment, toys and
games of various sorts, and many books. Students also have access to a pond, a field, and a
nearby forest for outdoor play and exploration. Those who develop a special interest, which
needs some new piece of equipment, might convince the School Meeting to buy it, or they
might raise the money and buy it themselves by some means such as selling cookies in the
school.

The most important resource at the school, for most students, is other students, who
among them manifest an enormous range of interests and abilities. Because of the free age
mixing at the school, students are exposed regularly to the activities and ideas of others who
are older and younger than themselves. Age-mixed play offers younger children continuous
opportunities to learn from older ones. For example, many students at the school have
learned to read as a side effect of playing games that involve written words (including
computer games) with students who already know how to read. They learn to read without
even being aware that they are doing so.

Much of the students' exploration at the school, especially that of the adolescents,
takes place through conversations. Students talk about everything imaginable, with each
other and with staff members, and through such talk they are exposed to a huge range of
ideas and arguments. Because nobody is an official authority, everything that is said and
heard in conversation is understood as something to think about, not as dogma to memorize
or feed back on a test. Conversation, unlike memorizing material for a test, stimulates the
intellect. The great Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky argued, long ago, that conversation is
the foundation for higher thought; and my observations of students at Sudbury Valley

5
There is one exception to the statement that the school does not evaluate students. Students who
wish to graduate with a high school diploma must prepare a written thesis defending the statement that they
have prepared themselves for responsible adult life. That thesis is defended orally and evaluated by a panel of
adults who are staff members at other Sudbury-model schools.
18
convince me that he was right. Thought is internalized conversation; external conversation,
with other people, gets it started.

Hundreds of graduates attest to the school's educational effectiveness

My own first study of the Sudbury Valley School, many years ago, was a follow-up
study of the graduates. Since that time, the school itself has conducted several studies of
graduates, which have been published as books.6 All of these studies have shown that the
school works well as an educational institution.

Graduates of Sudbury Valley can be found today in the whole range of careers that are
valued by our society. They are skilled craftsmen, entrepreneurs, artists, musicians,
scientists, social workers, nurses, doctors, and so on. Those who chose to pursue higher
education had no particular difficulties getting into colleges and universities, including highly
selective ones, or performing well there once admitted. Many others have become
successful in careers without going to college. More important, former students report that
they are happy with their lives. They are almost unanimous in reporting that they are glad
that they attended Sudbury Valley and in believing that the school prepared them better
than a traditional school would have for the realities of adult existence. To a considerable
degree they maintain, in adulthood, the playful (and that means focused and intense as well
as joyful) attitude to careers and life that they developed and refined while at the school.
----------
If you are interested in learning more about the Sudbury Valley School, a good place to start
is with the school's website. The leading philosopher of the school, and also one of the
school's founders, is Daniel Greenberg. His books, and other books about the school, can be
found at the school's website. Greenberg's most recent book, which I recommend, is
"Turning Learning Right Side Up," co-authored with the noted business professor and
innovator Russell Ackoff.

My own interest in this and future postings is not to promote Sudbury Valley as an
institution, but to help create a dialogue about play, curiosity, human nature, and education
that is informed, in part, by the experiences of the school. So far I have only scratched the
surface. I'm sure that for most readers what I have said here raises many more questions
than it answers. Ask away, and don't hesitate to include your doubts and objections.

6
My study of the graduates, co-authored with David Chanoff, was published in the American Journal of
Education, Volume 94, pp 182-213. The school's more recent studies of the graduates have been published by
the Sudbury Valley School Press and can be found at the school's website.
19
2.5 The Natural Environment for Children’s Self-Education:
How The Sudbury Valley School is Like a Hunter-Gatherer Band

What do children need in order to educate themselves?

September 3, 2008

A major theme of this blog is that we come into the world with instincts that are well
designed to promote our education. We have instincts to observe, explore, play, and
converse with others in ways that endow us with the skills, knowledge, and values needed to
live and thrive in the physical and social world into which we are born. We do this with great
intensity and joy. These educational instincts were shaped by natural selection during the
hundreds of thousands of years in which our ancestors survived as hunter-gatherers. We
might expect, therefore, that these instincts would operate best in the social environment of
a hunter-gatherer band, or in a modern environment that replicates certain aspects of a
hunter-gatherer band.

For the past forty years, the Sudbury Valley School has been proving that the human
instincts for self-education can provide the foundation for education in our modern society.
At this school, children and adolescents explore, play, and converse as they please--without
adult direction or prodding--and then graduate and go out into the world as successful
adults. I have spent a good deal of time observing Sudbury Valley to understand how
students learn there, and I have also surveyed the anthropological literature to understand
how hunter-gatherer children and adolescents learn. This research has convinced me that
Sudbury Valley works so beautifully as an educational institution because it replicates those
elements of a hunter-gatherer band that are most essential to self-education.

Here I offer a list of what seem to me to be the most crucial ingredients of the natural
environment for self-directed learning. Anthropologists report that these ingredients exist in
the hunter-gather bands they have studied7, and I have seen that all of these ingredients
exist at the Sudbury Valley School.

Time and space for play and exploration

Self-education through play and exploration requires enormous amounts of
unscheduled time--time to do whatever one wants to do, without pressure, judgment, or
intrusion from authority figures. That time is needed to make friends, play with ideas and
materials, sort things out, experience and overcome boredom, and develop passions. In
hunter-gatherer bands adults place few demands on children and adolescents, because they
recognize that young people need to explore and play on their own to become competent
adults. The same is true at Sudbury Valley.

7
A good source for anthropologists' reports about hunter-gatherer childhoods is Barry S. Hewlett &
Michael Lamb (Eds.), Hunter-gatherer childhoods: Evolutionary, developmental, and cultural perspectives.
Transaction Publishers, 2005.
20
 Self-education also requires space--space to roam, to get away, to explore. That space
should, ideally, encompass the full range of terrains relevant to the culture in which one is
developing. Hunter-gatherer adults trust their children to use good judgment in deciding
how far they should venture away from others into possibly dangerous areas. At Sudbury
Valley, children are likewise trusted, within the limits set by prudence in our modern,
litigious society. They can explore the surrounding woods, fields, and nearby stream, and by
signing out to let others know where they are going, they can venture as far off campus as
they choose.

Free age mixing

An enormous amount of learning occurs in interactions with others. When we
segregate children by age, in schools, we deprive them of the opportunity to interact with
those others from whom they have the most to learn. In hunter-gatherer tribes, and at
Sudbury Valley, children and adolescents regularly, on their own initiative, play and explore
in widely age-mixed groups.

In age-mixed groups, younger children acquire skills, information, ideas, and

inspiration from older ones. In such groups, younger children can do things that would be
too dangerous, or too complicated, for them to do alone or just with others their own age.
Older children also benefit from age-mixed interactions. They learn how to be leaders and
nurturers. They develop a sense of responsibility for others. They also consolidate and
extend their own knowledge through explaining things to younger children. Free age mixing
is so crucial to self-directed learning that I plan to devote two or three future postings
specifically to that topic.

Access to knowledgeable and caring adults

In hunter-gatherer bands, the adult world is not segregated from the children's world.
Children see what adults do and incorporate that into their play. They also hear the adults'
stories, discussions, and debates, and they learn from what they hear. When they need adult
help, or have questions that cannot be answered by other children, they can go to any of the
adults in the band. All of the adults care for them. Most of the adults, in fact, are their aunts
and uncles.

At Sudbury Valley, too, adults and children mingle freely (there are 10 full-time staff
members and roughly 200 students, between the ages of 4 and 19). There is no place in the
school where staff members can go but students cannot. Students can listen into any adult
discussions and observe whatever the adults are doing, and they can join in if they wish.
Students who need help of any kind can go to any of the staff members. A child who needs a
lap to sit on, or a shoulder to cry on, or personal advice, or the answer to some technical
question that he hasn't been able to find on his own, knows just which adult will best satisfy
his need. The adults are not literally aunts and uncles, but they are much like aunts and
uncles. They know all of the students over the entire span of time that they are students at

21
the school (unlike teachers in a conventional school who know each set of kids for just one
year) and take pride in watching them develop. Since the staff members must be re-elected
each year by vote of all of the students in the school, they are necessarily people who like
kids and are liked by kids.

Access to equipment
To learn to use the tools of a culture, people need access to those tools. Hunter-
gatherer children play with knives, digging sticks, bows and arrows, snares, musical
instruments, dugout canoes, and all of the other items of equipment that are crucial to their
culture. At Sudbury Valley, children have access to a wide range of the equipment that is of
most general use to people in our culture, including computers, woodworking equipment,
cooking equipment, art materials, sporting equipment of various types, and many walls filled
with books.

Free exchange of ideas

Intellectual development occurs best in a setting where people can share ideas freely,
without censorship or fear of being ostracized. According to anthropologists' reports,
hunter-gatherers are non-dogmatic in their beliefs, even in their religious beliefs. People can
say what they please, without fear, and ideas that have any consequence to the group are
debated endlessly. The same is true at Sudbury Valley. The school has deliberately refrained
from becoming aligned with any particular religious or political ideology. All ideas are on the
table. In this kind of environment an idea is something to think about and debate, not
something to memorize and feed back on a test. Daniel Greenberg, the school's leading
philosopher, has described the school as "a free marketplace of ideas." Children who may
not hear much discussion of politics or religion at home hear it at school, and they hear
every side of every issue.

Freedom from bullying

To feel free to explore and play a person must feel safe, free from harassment and
bullying. Such freedom occurs to a remarkable extent both in hunter-gatherer bands and at
Sudbury Valley. According to anthropologists, the close-knit personal relationships, the age
mixing, and the non-competitive, egalitarian ethos of hunter-gatherer cultures work
effectively to prevent serious bullying. If an older or bigger child appears to be picking on a
younger or smaller one, others will step in and quickly stop it. The same occurs at Sudbury
Valley. Moreover, at Sudbury Valley the school's democratically created rules and judicial
system, in which children of all ages are involved, prevent serious bullying. Students who
feel harassed or bullied can "bring up" the offender, to appear before the Judicial
Committee, comprised of school members of all ages. This contrasts sharply with the case in
many conventional schools, where bullying is a way of life. Students there who report
bullying are snitches or tattle-tales, and teachers can get away with bullying because they
make the rules and are not subject to them.

22
Immersion in democratic processes
Hunter-gatherer bands and the Sudbury Valley School are, in quite different ways,
democracies. Hunter-gatherer bands do not have chiefs or "big men" who make decisions
for the group. Instead, all group decisions are made through long discussions, until a clear
majority of those who care have come to agreement. Anybody, including children, can take
part in these discussions. Sudbury Valley is administered through a formal democratic
process, involving discussions and votes of the School Meeting, where each student and staff
member who chooses to attend has an equal vote. Immersion in the democratic process
endows each person with a sense of responsibility that helps to motivate education. If my
voice counts, if I have a real say in what the group does and how it operates, then I'd better
think things through carefully and speak wisely. I'm responsible not just for myself, but also
for my community, so that is a good reason for me to educate myself in the things that
matter to my community.

--------
In sum, my contention is that the natural environment for learning--which existed during our
long history as hunter-gatherers and is replicated at the Sudbury Valley School--is one in
which people (a) have much free time and space in which to play and explore; (b) can mix
freely with others of all ages; (c) have access to culturally relevant tools and equipment and
are free to play and explore with those items; (d) are free to express and debate any ideas
that they wish to express and debate; (e) are free from bullying (which includes freedom
from being ordered around arbitrarily by adults); and (f) have a voice that is heard in the
group's decision-making process.

How different this is from the environment of conventional schools. How ironic: In
conventional schools we deprive children of all of the elements of their natural environment
for learning, and then we try to teach them something!

2.6 Minimally Invasive Education: Lessons from India

How thousands of impoverished children in India became computer literate.

January 28, 2009

Ten years ago, on January 29, 1999, Sugata Mitra--who then was science director of
NIIT, an information technology firm with headquarters in New Delhi--initiated a fascinating
set of studies of children's self-directed learning.

On that day, Mitra turned on a computer that he had installed in an outside wall of the
NIIT building, a wall that faced one of the poorest slums in New Delhi, a community where
most children do not go to school, are illiterate, and had never previously seen a computer.
He simply turned the computer on, left it there, told the crowd of children that they could
play with it, and used a video camera to monitor activity around it.
23
 Children--mostly in the age range of 6 to 13--immediately approached and began to
explore this odd installment, which looked to them like some kind of television set. They
touched some of the parts and, apparently by accident, discovered that they could move a
pointer on the screen by moving their finger across the touch pad. This led to a series of
further exciting discoveries. The pointer turned to a hand when it was moved to certain
parts of the screen. By pushing (clicking) on the touch pad when the pointer was a hand,
they could get the screen to change. They eagerly sought out their friends to tell them about
this fascinating machine. Each new discovery, made by one child or a group, was shared with
others. Within days, dozens of children were surfing the Web, downloading music and
games, painting with Microsoft Paint, and doing many of the other things that children
everywhere do with computers when they have access to them.

Subsequently, Mitra and his colleagues repeated the experiment in 26 other places in
India, rural as well as urban, always with the same general results. Similar findings occurred
in other nations where outdoor computers were set up--in Cambodia, Egypt, and South
Africa. Even now, as I write, new outdoor computers are being installed in various
impoverished parts of the world.

Wherever a computer kiosk was set up, children quickly gathered, explored the
apparatus, and, with no help except that which they provided to each other, discovered
exciting ways to use it. The children made up names to refer to the computer, its parts, the
various icons that appeared on the screen, and the activities they could perform with the
computer. For example, one group referred (in their native Hindi language) to the pointer as
a "needle" and to folders as "cupboards." Those who did not know English learned many
English words through their interactions with the computer and their talk with others about
it. Children who could read sometimes found and downloaded articles that interested them,
in the language in which they were literate (typically Hindi or Marathi).

Mitra and his colleagues describe the kind of education they were experimenting with
as minimally invasive education, a descriptor borrowed from the medical world of surgery. It
is education with the minimal amount of intrusion into children's lives. The experiments
demonstrated that children learned at an amazingly rapid rate with no adult teachers. All
that the educators had to do was to provide the tool, the computer. The children's natural
curiosity, playfulness, and sociability took over from there.

Mitra and his colleagues estimate that for each outdoor computer they set up, an
average of 300 children became computer literate within three months of the computer's
becoming available. That's 30,000 computer-literate children for 100 computers, within a
three-month period. By computer literate, Mitra means that they can "do most or all of the
following tasks:"

• Use all Windows operational functions, such as click, drag, open, close, resize, minimize,
menus, navigation, etc.

24
• Draw and paint with the computer.

• Load and save files.

• Play games.

• Run educational and other programs.

• Browse and surf the Internet, if a connection is available.

• Set up email accounts.

• Send and receive email.

• Chat on the Internet.

• Do simple troubleshooting, for example, if the speakers are not working.

• Download and play streaming media.

• Download games.

On the basis of various tests given to randomly chosen children who used the outdoor
computers, Mitra concluded that the children's abilities to learn in this setting "seem to be
independent of their educational background, literacy levels in English or any other
language, social or economic level, ethnicity and place of origin (city, town, or village),
gender, genetic background, geographic location, and intelligence."

Mitra's observations illustrate beautifully many of the ideas that I have been discussing
in this blog. My major theme is that children educate themselves. Mitra observed that
children taught themselves to use the computer, and then used the computer to teach
themselves much more. They did so because they have, within them, a set of powerful
instincts for self-education--the instincts of curiosity, playfulness, and sociability.

Curiosity: All mammals are curious, but we humans are the most curious, especially in
childhood. Because we are tool-using animals, our curiosity leads us not just to explore new
objects with our senses, but also to explore them with our muscles. When we see something
new, we want to know what we can do with it. Children, from infancy on, explore new
objects by manipulating them--pushing them, shaking them, squeezing them, dropping
them, throwing them, bouncing them--to see what interesting effects might be produced. In
Mitra's experiments, curiosity drew children to the outdoor computer and motivated them
to manipulate it in various ways to learn about its properties. The manipulations led to
exciting discoveries, each of which led to new questions and new discoveries. For example,
the discovery that clicking on one icon caused the screen to change led children to click on
all of the other available icons, just to see what would happen.

25
 Playfulness: The young of all mammals are playful, but human children are the most
playful of all. The primary evolutionary function of playfulness, in children as in the young of
other mammals, is skill development. Play involves repetitive but varied actions aimed at
producing effects that the player has in mind. The actions--both physical and mental--are
performed for the pure pleasure of doing them, but the consequence is skill at those actions.
In Mitra's experiments, playfulness led children to become highly skilled at using the
computer's functions. For example, children who had already explored the Paint program
and knew how to use it were motivated to play with that program, that is, to use it to paint
many pictures. Through such play those children became skilled at computer painting.
Through play the children consolidated knowledge already acquired and developed skill in
using that knowledge. Often play led inadvertently to new discoveries, which renewed
curiosity and led to new bouts of exploration. Play and exploration are inseparably mixed.

Sociability: We are not only the supremely curious and playful animal, but also the
supremely social animal. Our sociability is such that we want to know what other people
know, and we want to share our stories and knowledge with others. This, perhaps more than
anything else, is what distinguishes us from the other mammals. Through language and our
desire to communicate with and understand others, our minds are linked in a vast network
with the minds of other people. No other animal has such a capacity and drive for
communication, and that is why no other animal has developed culture as we have. In
Mitra's experiments, sociability motivated children to play together, to want to know and do
what the others knew and did, and to share their own knowledge with others. When one
child made a new discovery about something that could be done with the computer, that
discovery spread like a brush fire through the whole group of children nearby; and then
some child in that group, who had a friend in another group, would carry the spark of new
knowledge to that other group, where a new brush fire was ignited, and so on, and so on,
through the roughly 300 children who at varying times were using the computer. Each
discovery by one child became the discovery of all the children in the network.

Why don't school lessons spread in the same wildfire way that Mitra observed in his
experiments on minimally invasive education? It is not hard to think of many answers to this
question. Here are a few that pop to mind:

• Children in school are not free to pursue their own, self-chosen interests, and this mutes
their enthusiasm.

• Children in school are constantly evaluated. The concern for evaluation and pleasing the
teacher--or, for some children, a rebellious reaction against such evaluation--overrides and
subverts the possibility of developing genuine interest in the assigned tasks.

• Children in school are often shown one and only one way to solve a problem and are told
that other ways are incorrect, so the excitement of discovering new ways is prevented.

26
• Segregation of children by age in schools prevents the age mixing and diversity that seem
to be key to children's natural ways of learning. Mitra observed that the mix of abilities and
interests in the age-mixed groups that gathered around the outdoor computers ensured that
different functions of the computer were tried out and played with by different children and
that a wide variety of discoveries were made, which could then spread from child to child.

Learning is so easy, and such fun, when it occurs naturally. We make learning hard and
dreary in our classrooms by depriving children of the opportunity to use their natural ways
of learning and by replacing them with coercion. If we would concentrate on providing
children with environments and tools that optimize their abilities to teach themselves, in
age-mixed groups, and if we would stop trying to control children's learning, life would be
more fun for all of us and the culture would flourish even more than it does now.
--------

Some references describing Mitra's work:

For a video of Mitra talking about his research into minimally invasive education, click here.
To read about the most recent developments in Mitra's program of minimally invasive
education, click here.

Published articles by Mitra and his colleagues:

Dangwal, R., Jha, S., & Kapur, P. (2006). Impact of minimally invasive education on children:
An Indian perspective. British Journal of Educational Technology, 37, 295-298.
Inamdar, P. (2004). Computer skills development by children using ‘hole in the wall' facilities
in rural India. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 20, 337-350.
Mitra, S. (2003). Minimally invasive education: A progress report on the "hole-in-the-wall"
experiments. British Journal of Educational Technology, 34, 267-371.
Mitra, S. (2004). Hole in the Wall. Dataquest (India), Sept. 23 issue. URL
http://dqindia.ciol.commakesections.asp/04092301.asp.
Mitra, S. (2005). Self organizing systems for mass computer literacy: Findings from the ‘hole
in the wall' experiments. International Journal of Development Issues, 4, 71-81.
Mitra, S., & Rana, V. (2001). Children and the internet: Experiments with minimally invasive
education in India. British Journal of Educational Technology, 32, 221-232.

27
3 Why We Should Stop Segregating Children by Age

3.1 The Value of Play in the Zone of Proximal Development

Age segregation interferes with children's natural means of learning.

September 9, 2008

One of the oddest, and in my view most harmful, aspects our treatment of children
today is our penchant for segregating them into separate groups by age. We do that not only
in schools, but increasingly in out-of-school settings as well. In doing so, we deprive children
of a valuable component of their natural means of self-education.

The age-segregated mode of schooling became dominant at about the same time in
history when the assembly-line approach to manufacturing became dominant. The implicit
analogy is pretty obvious. The graded school system treats children as if they are items on an
assembly line, moving from stop to stop (grade to grade) along a conveyor belt, all at the
same speed. At each stop a factory worker (teacher) adds some new component (unit of
knowledge) to the product. At the end of the line, the factory spits out complete, new, adult
human beings, all built to the specifications of the manufacturers (the professional
educators).

Of course everyone who has ever had or known a child, including everyone who works
in our age-graded schools, knows that this assembly-line view of child development is
completely false. Children are not passive products, to which we can add components.
Children are not incomplete adults that need to be built bit by bit in some ordered
sequence. Children are complete human beings in their own right, who constantly demand
to control their own lives and who, despite what we put them through, insist on learning
what they want to learn and practicing the skills they want to practice. We can't stop them.
We would all be much better off if we went with them on this rather than fought them.

In previous postings I have described settings where children educate themselves,

without adult direction or prodding. In particular, I have discussed self-education as it once
occurred in hunter-gatherer bands and as it occurs today in schools designed for self-
education, particularly the Sudbury Valley School. A prominent feature of such settings is
that children regularly interact with others across the whole spectrum of ages.
Anthropologists have claimed that free age mixing is the key to the self-education of hunter-
gatherer children; and Daniel Greenberg has long claimed that free age mixing is the key to
self-education at the Sudbury Valley School, which he helped to found.8

8
Greenberg, D. (1992). Sudbury Valley's secret weapon: Allowing people of different ages to mix freely
at school. In D. Greenberg (Ed.), The Sudbury Valley School experience, 3rd ed. Framingham, MA: Sudbury
Valley School Press.
28
 Several years ago, Jay Feldman (who then was a graduate student working with me)
and I conducted some studies of age-mixed interactions at the Sudbury Valley School, aimed
at (a) determining how much age mixing occurred at the school, (b) identifying the contexts
in which age-mixing occurred, and (c) identifying ways by which age mixing seemed to
contribute to students' self-education.

When given a choice, children spend considerable time interacting with others who are
older or younger than themselves.
Sudbury Valley has, at any given time, approximately 170 to 200 students, who range
in age from 4 to 18 years old and sometimes older. Students can move freely at all times
throughout the school buildings and campus, and they can interact with whomever they
please. The school is large enough that students could, if they chose, interact just with
others who are within a year or two of themselves in age. But they don't do that. In our
quantitative study we found that more than 50% of students' social interactions at the
school were with other students who were more than two years older or younger than
themselves, and 25% of their interactions were with other students who were more than 4
years older or younger than themselves.9 Age mixing was especially frequent during play.
Active play of all sorts was more likely to be age mixed than was conversation that did not
involve play.

Over the next several installments of this blog, I will discuss various advantages of an
age-mixed environment for self-education, using examples from our observations at Sudbury
Valley.10 One clear advantage, and the topic of this rest of today's installment, is this:

Age mixing allows younger children to engage in, and learn from, activities that they could
not do alone or only with age-mates.
In the 1930's, the Russian developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky developed a
concept that he called the zone of proximal development, defined as the realm of activities
that a child can accomplish in collaboration with more skilled others but cannot accomplish
alone or with others who are at his or her same level.11 Vygotsky claimed that children learn
best when they are engaged with more skilled others within their zones of proximal
development. Since Vygotsky's time, education professors have often used Vygotsky's
concept to describe interactions between adult teachers and young learners, but the
concept applies far better, I think, to naturally occurring age-mixed interactions among
children.

9
Gray, P. and Feldman, J. (1997). Patterns of age mixing and gender mixing among children and
adolescents at an ungraded democratic school. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 43, 67-86.
10
. Gray, P. and Feldman, J. (2004). Playing in the Zone of Proximal Development: Qualities of Self-
Directed Age Mixing Between Adolescents and Young Children at a Democratic School. American Journal of
Education, 110, 108-145.
11
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Interaction between learning and development. In M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S.
Scribner, and E. Souberman (Eds), Mind and society: the development of higher psychological processes.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
29
 As an illustration (which I have used elsewhere), imagine two 4-year-olds trying to play
a simple game of catch.12 They can't do it. Neither child can throw the ball straight enough
for the other to catch it, so the game is no fun and quickly dissolves. Now imagine a 4-year-
old playing catch with a skilled 8-year-old. The older child, by diving and leaping, can catch
the wild throws of the younger one and can have fun doing it; and the older child can lob the
ball directly into the outstretched hands of the younger one, so the latter can experience the
joy catching. Thus, catch is a game within the 4-year-old's zone of proximal development. In
an age-segregated environment consisting of only 4-year-olds, there would be no catch; but
in an age-mixed environment that includes some 8-year-olds as well as 4-year-olds, catch is
within everyone's realm of possibility.

At any given time of day at Sudbury Valley you can find young children playing games,
with older children, that they would not be able to play just with age-mates. These include
intellectual games as well as athletic ones. They play together not because anyone requires
them to, but because they want to. Younger children are attracted to the activities and
personalities of older ones; and older children enjoy opportunities to interact with younger
ones.

Here's an example of intellectual play in the zone of proximal development. In several

instances we observed 7- or 8-year-olds playing complicated card games in groups with older
children and teenagers. By themselves, 7- and 8-year-olds would not be able to play such
games. They would not be able to keep their attention focused long enough, or keep track of
the rules, or even hold their cards straight enough to keep others from seeing them. They
could play the games with older children because the older ones kept them on track,
reminded them when necessary of what they had to do, and sometimes gave them strategy
hints: "Pay attention." "Try to remember which cards were played." "Think before you lay
down a card, so you don't put down something another player can take." Attention,
memory, and forethought are the elements of what we commonly call intelligence. In the
process of playing cards, which they were only doing to have fun, the older children were
incidentally helping the younger ones to develop their intelligence.

Vygotsky's concept also helps us understand how young children learn to read at
Sudbury Valley. Children who can't read, or can't read well, can regularly be found playing
games (especially computer games) that involve the written word with children who can
read well. The readers read aloud what the others cannot, and in the process the non-
readers gradually become readers themselves.

Age mixing also allows young children to engage in playful adventures that would be
too dangerous for them to do alone or just with age mates. Children who would, quite
appropriately, be too frightened to venture off into the woods by themselves feel safe doing
so with older children, who know the woods. Similarly, little kids new to tree climbing feel

12
Gray, P. The value of age-mixed play. Education Week, April 16, 2008.
30
safe venturing up onto some of the lower branches if big kids are under them, advising them
how to do it, ready to catch them if they fall.

When you are little and just with kids your own age, the range of possible activities is
restricted by the knowledge and abilities of those in your age group; but in collaboration
with older kids there is almost no limit to what you might do!

3.2 The Unique Educative Qualities of Age-Mixed Play

Age-mixed play is more playful than same-age play.

September 17, 2008

During the long course of human history, play almost always occurred in age-mixed
settings. The biological foundations for play evolved to serve educative purposes in settings
where children were almost never segregated by age. Anthropologists who have studied
play in hunter-gatherer groups report that a typical playgroup might range in age from age 4
through 12, or 8 through 17. When we observe play in age-segregated settings (such as
school playgrounds)--where 6-year-olds can play only with other 6-year-olds and 12-year-
olds only with other 12-year-olds--we are observing an artifact of modern times. Studying
children's play in age-segregated settings is like studying monkeys in cages; we are observing
behavior under unnaturally confined conditions. Monkeys in cages show a lot more
aggression and dominance behavior than do monkeys in the wild, and the same is true of
children in age-segregated settings compared to those in age-mixed settings.

In my last posting, I described how age-mixed play allows younger children to

participate in, and learn from, activities that would be too difficult for them to do alone or
just with age-mates. In this posting I will comment on some qualitative differences between
age-mixed play and age-segregated play. My main point is this:

Age-mixed play is less competitive, more creative, and more conducive to practicing new
skills than is same-age play
Age-mixed play is, in short, more playful than is same-age play. When children who are
all nearly the same age play a game, competitiveness can interfere with playfulness. This is
especially true in our current culture, which puts so much emphasis on winning and on all
sorts of comparisons aimed at determining who is better, an emphasis fostered by our
competitive, graded school system. In contrast, when children who differ widely in age play
a game together, the focus shifts from that of beating the other to that of having fun. There
is no pride to be gained by the older, larger, more skilled child in beating the much younger
one, and the younger one has no expectation of beating the older one. So, they play the
game more joyfully, in a more relaxed manner, modifying the rules in ways to make it both
fun and challenging for all involved. A playful mood facilitates creativity, experimentation,
and the learning of new skills, while a serious mood tends to inhibit these and leads a person
31
to fall back on skills that have already been well learned (a point to be expanded upon in a
future posting).

My own systematic studies of age-mixed play have taken place primarily at the
Sudbury Valley School, where, as I have pointed out in previous posting, students age 4
through 18 are free to interact with one another, as they please, at any time of day. In an
essay that he wrote several years after graduating from Sudbury Valley, Michael Greenberg
described age-mixed soccer games at the school. I offer the following rather extensive
quotation from that essay, because it illustrates so beautifully some of the values of age-
mixed play.

"One person says, "lets play soccer" to some other people. Whoever feels like playing at
the moment comes to the field. There are 6-year-olds, 10-year-olds, 18-year-olds, maybe a
staff member or a parent who feels like joining in. There are boys and girls. Teams are chosen
with a conscious effort at creating evenly matched sides. ... this often consists of one team
having an extra "big kid' who can play well and the other team getting a small army of 6-
year- olds to get in his way. People want even teams because they are playing for fun. It's no
fun to play a game with lopsided teams. ... The game is played by whoever wants to play, for
as long as they feel like playing. There will always be certain people who value winning, but
there is little peer performance pressure. Most people don't really care who wins.

"Now, you might get the impression that people are not trying very hard to be good at
the game, but that's not true. The process of play is only fun if you exert effort and challenge
yourself. That is why people developed the idea of games like soccer in the first place.
Running around for no reason gets boring, but running around trying to kick a ball between
two posts that are guarded by people who are trying to stop you--that's exciting.

"The people who play sports as we do at [Sudbury Valley School] learn far more
profound lessons about life than those that can be taught by regimented, performance-
oriented sports. They learn teamwork--not the ‘we against them' type of teamwork, but the
teamwork of a diverse group of people of diverse talents organizing themselves to pursue a
common activity--the teamwork of life. They learn excellence, not the ‘I'm the star' type of
excellence, but the type of excellence that comes from setting a standard for yourself to live
up to and then trying your best to live up to it.

"I'm 23 years old and I've played a lot of soccer. It would be pretty silly for me to try to
be better than the three 8-year-olds who crowd around my feet every time I try to kick the
ball. I think that the 8-year-olds are too busy running after kids who are three feet taller than
they are to worry about being the best 8-year-old. In this game, as in real life, the only
standard that matters is one you set for yourself. One of the profound truths you learn is that
we are all so different from each other that peer pressure and comparisons of worth are
meaningless. If you're 11 years old and you are only allowed to play with other 11-year-olds,
it's very hard to glimpse this profound truth, which unlocks the meaning of excellence.

32
 "[You also] learn responsibility and restraint. In all the years of playing very physical
games like football, soccer, and basketball, there has never been an injury beyond a minor
cut or bruise. People play all these sports in their regular clothes without any of the standard
protective equipment that is normally required. How can this be explained when people
wearing protective pads injure each other with alarming frequency? Because in a
regimented, performance-oriented way of looking at sports (or life), making sure you don't
hurt someone becomes less important than winning. So it doesn't matter how much you talk
about "sportsmanship" or how many safety pads you wear, people are going to get hurt.
When you approach sports (or life) as a fun, exciting process, as something that is done for
the sheer joy and beauty of doing it, then not hurting someone, not impairing their ability to
enjoy the same process, becomes a top priority. ...

"To participate in an activity where the clash of unequal bodies is transformed through
teamwork, pursuit of personal excellence, responsibility, and restraint into a common union
of equal souls in pursuit of meaningful experience has been one of the most profound
experiences of my life. I am sure it has had a similar effect on others."13

In our systematic observations at Sudbury Valley (noted in the previous posting), Jay
Feldman and I recorded many occurrences of age-mixed play that fit well with Michael
Greenberg's description. In one instance, for example, Feldman watched a tall 15-year-old
boy playing basketball with a group of much shorter 8- to 10-year-olds. The older boy rarely
shot, but spent much time joyfully dribbling while the gang of small boys who made up the
opposing team tried to steal the ball from him. Then he would pass to his single teammate
(age 8) and encourage him to shoot. By dribbling and passing rather than shooting, the older
boy made the game fun and challenging not just for the younger children but also for
himself. Shooting baskets is too easy to be fun when nobody is tall enough to block your
shots, but dribbling through a gang of short people who are trying to steal the ball is a great,
fun way to improve your dribbling. Here's another example, quoted from one of our articles,
which illustrates the creative, light-hearted nature of age-mixed athletic play:

"In an age-mixed game of capture the flag, one team, the Big People, consisted of three
adolescents and one 11-year-old, and the other team, the Hordes, consisted of ten 4- to 8-
year-olds and one 12-year-old. Larry (age 4) would often run across the line and get captured
by Sam (age 17) in an act that included lots of tickling and carrying of Larry in mock combat.
After Larry was set down, he would prance merrily back to his side, without going to jail.
Often one or more of the Big People would cross into the Hordes' territory not to go after the
flag but simply to run around with a gang of small children chasing them. Nobody seemed to

13
Greenberg, M. (1992). On the nature of sports at S.V.S. and the limitations of language in describing
S.V.S. to the world. In D. Greenberg (Ed.), The Sudbury Valley School experience, 3rd ed. Framingham, MA:
Sudbury Valley School Press.

33
be much focused on winning, but when the Hordes did finally capture the flag, they cheered
loudly."14

Board games and card games, likewise, are played in more playful, creative, non-
competitive ways when the players vary widely in age than when they are age-mates.
Feldman observed many games of chess, which happened to be a fad at the time of his
research. Games between equally matched players tended to be quite serious; the players
appeared intent on winning. Games between unmatched players, who usually differed
widely in age, were more creative and light-hearted. To make the game interesting, the
older players would typically self-handicap in some way, for example by deliberately getting
into difficult positions, and would frequently point out better moves to the younger players.
The older players seemed to be using such games to experiment with new styles of play,
which they were not yet ready to try out in serious games.

Some of the most creative and joyful samples of play I have witnessed involved
teenagers and younger children engaged together in shared fantasy play. Here is another
quotation, describing one such scene that I observed not long ago:

"I was sitting in the playroom at the Sudbury Valley School, ... pretending to read a
book but surreptitiously observing a remarkable scene. A 13-year-old boy and two 7-year-old
boys were creating, purely for their own amusement, a fantastic story involving heroic
characters, monsters, and battles. The 7-year-olds gleefully shouted out ideas about what
would happen next, while the 13-year-old, an excellent artist, translated the ideas into a
coherent story and sketched the scenes on the blackboard almost as fast as the younger
children could describe them. The game continued for at least half an hour, which was the
length of time I permitted myself to watch before moving on. I felt privileged to enjoy an
artistic creation that, I know, could not have been produced by 7-year-olds alone and almost
certainly would not have been produced by 13-year-olds alone. The unbounded enthusiasm
and creative imagery of the 7-year-olds I watched, combined with the advanced narrative
and artistic abilities of the 13-year-old they played with, provided just the right chemical mix
for this creative explosion to occur."15

Age mixing is sometimes a means of matching abilities.

My main concern in this essay has been with the value of play among people with
unequal abilities. Before closing, though, I should add that freely chosen play among people
with relatively equal abilities is also valuable. In general, children who are similar in age are
more similar in abilities than are those who are different in age, but that is not always the
case. In an age-mixed environment, a person who is ahead of or behind his or her age-mates
in some realm of activity can find equal partners among older or younger children. The child

14
Gray, P. & Feldman, J. (2004). Playing in the Zone of Proximal Development: Qualities of Self-Directed
Age Mixing Between Adolescents and Young Children at a Democratic School. American Journal of Education,
110, 108-145.
15
Gray, P. The value of age-mixed play. Education Week, April 16, 2008.
34
who is awkward at climbing can play at scrambling up rocks and trees with younger children
without feeling constantly left behind, and in that way can improve her climbing ability. The
talented 11-year-old guitar player, whose musical ability is beyond that of his age-mates, can
jam with teenagers who are at his level.

Feldman observed a number of examples of students at Sudbury Valley who were

advanced for their age in certain abilities and frequently played with older children. One
example was that of 12-year-old Randy, an excellent chess player, who went to tournaments
and had an official ranking. His only chess peers at the school were Jack (age 17), Elana (age
17), and Ken (age 18). All of his serious games, with which he measured his own progress,
were with these older students. He might practice new moves in games with his age-mates
and younger children, but he tested himself in games with students who were five or six
years older than himself.

3.3 Older Children Are Excellent Models, Helpers, and Teachers

Why age-mixing is crucial to children's self-education.

September 24, 2008

We adults flatter ourselves when we think that we are the best models, guides, and
teachers for children. Children are much more interested in other children than in us.
Children are especially interested in, and ready to learn from, those others who are a little
older than themselves, a little farther along in their development, but not too far along.
Children are drawn to older children, and older children are drawn to adolescents.
Adulthood is too far off to be of much concern. That is why age-mixing is crucial to children's
self-education.

In my two just-previous posts I focused on the value of age-mixed play. I described

how younger children are lifted up in such play to do things that they couldn't do just with
age-mates; and I described how age-mixed play is often more creative, less competitive, and
more conducive to experimentation than is same-age play. Now I complete this series on age
mixing by describing some ways, beyond play, by which the presence of older and younger
children promotes self-education. As before, my examples come mostly from observations
at the Sudbury Valley School, where the students, who range in age from 4 through high-
school age, mingle freely all day long.

Younger children want to do what older children do.

One sunny morning as I sat near the school's playground I watched two 10-year-old
girls easily and nonchalantly perform the trick of walking upright down the slide. A 6-year-
old girl nearby watched them more intently than I, and then she climbed the ladder and
started gingerly walking down the slide herself. This was clearly a challenge for the little girl.
She walked with knees bent and hands down, ready to grab the rails if she lost balance. I also
35
noticed that the two older girls remained next to the slide and looked on with a degree of
apprehension, ready to catch her, but not too obviously so, if she should fall. One said, "You
don't have to do it, you can just slide," but the little girl continued, slowly, and beamed with
pride when she made it to the bottom. Shortly after that, the two older girls began climbing
a nearby tree, and the younger girl followed them in that activity too. The little girl was
clearly motivated to do, with effort, what the older girls could do with ease.

This is just one of many, many observations of young children modeling their behavior
after that of older children. Children on the verge of being able to play strategy games, or
read, or perform new operations on the computer, or engage in more advanced athletic
activities, become motivated to do so by observing those activities in older children and
adolescents. In our study of how and why children learn to read at the school, some told us
that they wanted to read because they were envious of the older kids who were reading and
talking about what they had read. As one student put it, "I wanted the same magic they had;
I wanted to join that club."

Younger children don't just blindly mimic older ones. Rather, they watch, think about
what they see, and incorporate what they learn into their own behavior in ways that make
sense to them. Because of this, even the mistakes and unhealthy behaviors of older children
can provide positive lessons for younger ones. Young children talk endlessly about what they
like and don't like about the activities of the older ones around them. Negative models can
be as helpful as positive ones. "I'm not going to do what X does, because I can see all the
trouble it brings him."

Children also learn an enormous amount just by listening to or overhearing older ones,
even when they aren't interacting with them. Through hearing the language and thoughts of
older children--which are more sophisticated than their own, but not so much more so as to
be out of reach--they expand their own vocabularies and range of thought.

Older children are also inspired by younger ones.

It is not just the younger children whose horizons are expanded by the age-mixed
environment. At Sudbury Valley, older children and teenagers are inspired by the playthings
and actions of younger ones to continue to engage in activities that they probably would
have dropped by middle childhood in an age-segregated environment. They continue, for
example, to play with blocks, clay, crayons, and paint. As a result, many of them become
extraordinarily good at those activities. The school has produced a remarkable number of
successful creative artists, and I suspect that the age-mixed environment has much to do
with that.

36
Older children are excellent helpers and advisors of younger children, partly because they
do not help or advise too much.
Children often prefer to ask an older child rather than an adult for help or advice, even
when an adult is available whom they could easily ask. I suspect there are many reasons for
this, but one of the main reasons, I think, has to do with control.

Children seeking help or advice do not want to give up their own control of the
situation. They don't want any more help than what they ask for, and they want to decide
themselves whether or not to accept what is offered. Because adults are more likely to be
seen as authority figures than are older children, it is harder to reject an adult's help or walk
away when advice goes beyond what the child wants. Moreover, in my observations, older
children are much less likely than are adults to extend help or advice beyond what the
young child wants. Older children are not worried about the long-term development of the
child who has asked them for help, or about whether or not they are coming across as
wonderful teachers and guides, so they just give the help that is asked for, which is all that
the younger child wants.

In one of Jay Feldman's observations, for example, 5-year-old Sue asked 8-year-old
Anne to thread the needle on a beading loom for her, which she needed to do to complete a
bracelet she was making.16 After Anne threaded the needle, Sue continued her work on her
own, without further help, and Anne offered none, even though Sue continued to have
difficulties with the loom and made many mistakes. If Sue had asked an adult to thread the
needle, rather than an older child, the adult might have hovered around and helped Sue
with other parts of her project, which would have taken away Sue's pride in doing the work
herself. Sue clearly didn't want such further help, even though the project was difficult for
her, so it was safer to ask an 8-year-old. [Note: Students' names in this and other examples
are pseudonyms.]

So, here is a valuable lesson that we adults can learn from children about helping and
advising children: Don't give more help, or more advice, than is asked for! Come to think of it,
the same lesson applies to helping and advising adults. I know that when I ask for help I am
not asking for supervision. I just want the help I asked for. I want to do the rest myself, even
if I'll make more mistakes that way. A too-helpful helper takes away my sense of freedom,
self-control, and play.

Older children are excellent teachers of younger ones, partly because they are not too far
ahead of the younger ones.
Daniel Greenberg made this point in one of his books about Sudbury Valley, where he
wrote: "Kids love to learn from other kids. First of all, it's often easier. The child teacher is
closer than an adult to the student's difficulties, having gone through them somewhat more

16
Feldman, J. (1997). The educational opportunities that lie in self-directed age mixing among children
and adolescents. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Psychology, Boston College, 1997.
37
recently. The explanations are usually simpler, better. There's less pressure, less
judgment."17

Not only are the explanations simpler, but, because they come from someone closer in
age, they are easier to challenge. They are more likely to be viewed as ideas to think about,
rather than as Truth, and understanding comes from thought, not from blind acceptance.
Here is an example from one of Jay Feldman's observations:

Eight-year-old Ed was complaining to 14-year-old Arthur about how two other boys
had been teasing him by calling him names he didn't like. Arthur told Ed that he should bring
a complaint to the school's Judicial Committee. Ed then said, "They have freedom of
speech." Arthur, after a little thought, replied that freedom of speech meant that they had
the right to say those things, but Ed also had the right not to hear them. Ed, after a little
thought, said, "Okay."18

Notice that in this example Ed felt equal enough to Arthur to challenge his suggestion,
and the challenge led to a new idea. Notice also the elegant language of the exchange. Big
ideas were expressed in few and simple words.

Older children expand their own understanding through explanations to younger children.
Everyone who has ever been a teacher knows that we learn more when we teach than
when we are taught. The requirement to put ideas into words that others can understand,
and the need to think through objections that others might make, leads us to think deeply
about what we thought we knew. Often this leads us to a better understanding than we had
before. In an age-mixed environment, children, not just adults, can learn through teaching.

In the above example, 14-year-old Arthur, the "teacher," probably learned at least as
much as 8-year-old Ed, the protégé, in their conversation. Ed's challenge to Arthur's
suggestion led Arthur to think further and expand on his explanation in a way that he may
not have thought about before. Both parties probably left the conversation with a deeper
understanding of democracy at the school than they had before.

As another example, consider the case of an older child playing chess or some other
strategy game with a younger one and teaching strategy as they play. When the older child
says to the younger one that move A would be better than move B, the younger one says,
"Why?" To answer this, the experienced player cannot just rely on gut instinct developed
from long experience with chess, but must articulate a reason. She must turn her implicit
chess knowledge into conscious, explicit knowledge, and in doing so she becomes a better

17
Greenberg, D. (1987). Free at last: the Sudbury Valley School. Framingham, MA: SudburyValley School
Press.
18
Gray. P. & Feldman, J. (2004). Playing in the zone of proximal development: Qualities of self-directed
age mixing between adolescents and young children at a democratic school. American Journal of Education,
110, 108-145.
38
chess player. Similar examples occur in every realm of exchange of knowledge and ideas
among people who feel free to ask questions.

Older children develop compassion and nurturing skills through helping younger ones.
Even more valuable than the cognitive gains derived from interacting with younger
children are the moral gains. To develop effectively as responsible, ethical beings, children
need to have the experience of caring for others, not just the experience of being cared for
by others. Observations in many cultures have shown that both boys and girls behave in
more caring ways toward children who are several years younger than themselves than
toward children near their own age. Little children seem to draw out the nurturing instincts
that lie latent in all of us. One study, in Kenya, revealed that boys who cared for younger
siblings at home behaved less aggressively, more kindly, toward same-age peers than did
boys who lacked that opportunity.19 Apparently, the nurturing instinct is strengthened
through interactions with younger children, and, once strengthened, it generalizes to age-
mates.

In observations at Sudbury Valley, many examples of children nurturing younger ones

can be seen every day. These include scenes of older children reading to younger ones, who
sit on their laps; older children helping younger ones find lost objects or fixing things they
have broken; and older children giving needed boosts to younger ones as they go about their
daily activities. Some of the most interesting scenes are those in which an older child
criticizes a younger one for his or her poor treatment of a still younger child. In one case, for
example, we observed a 10-year-old girl explain to three 6-to-8-year-old girls why they
should let a certain 4-year-old join them in their game. "How would you feel if you weren't
included," she said. In another case we observed a 17-year-old boy reprimand a 13-year-old
for his unfriendly way of rejecting an 8-year-old boy who asked to play a game with him. The
reprimands we heard in these examples were much more effective coming from an older
child than they would have been if they had come from an adult.

Taking this essay along with the previous two, I conclude with the following summary.
An age-mixed environment (1) allows younger children to engage collaboratively in activities
that they could not do just with age-mates; (2) promotes non-competitive, creative forms of
play that are ideal for acquiring new skills; (3) allows those who are ahead of or behind their
age-mates in certain realms to find others who are at their level; (4) permits younger
children to be inspired by the activities of older ones, and vice versa; (5) allows younger
children to receive help and advice without giving up their own autonomy; (6) allows older
children to learn through teaching; and (7) allows older children to practice caring for
younger ones and to develop a sense of responsibility and maturity. When we segregate
children by age, in schools and in other settings, we deprive them of all of this. We rob them
of the opportunity to use fully their natural and joyful ways of learning from one another.

19
Ember, C. R. (1973).Feminine task assignment and the social behavior of boys. Ethos, 1, 424-439.
39
4 Why Schools Are What They Are

4.1 A Brief History of Education

To understand schools we must view them in historical perspective.

August 20, 2008

When we see that children everywhere are required by law to go to school, that
almost all schools are structured in the same way, and that our society goes to a great deal
of trouble and expense to provide such schools, we tend naturally to assume that there must
be some good, logical reason for all this. Perhaps if we didn't force children to go to school,
or if schools operated much differently, children would not grow up to be competent adults.
Perhaps some really smart people have figured all this out and have proven it in some way,
or perhaps alternative ways of thinking about child development and education have been
tested and have failed.

In previous postings I have presented evidence to the contrary. In particular, in my

August 13 posting, I described the Sudbury Valley School, where for 40 years children have
been educating themselves in a setting that operates on assumptions that are opposite to
those of traditional schooling. Studies of the school and its graduates show that normal,
average children become educated through their own play and exploration, without adult
direction or prodding, and go on to be fulfilled, effective adults in the larger culture. Instead
of providing direction and prodding, the school provides a rich setting within which to play,
explore, and experience democracy first hand; and it does that at lower expense and with
less trouble for all involved than is required to operate standard schools. So why aren't most
schools like that?

If we want to understand why standard schools are what they are, we have to
abandon the idea that they are products of logical necessity or scientific insight. They are,
instead, products of history. Schooling, as it exists today, only makes sense if we view it from
a historical perspective. And so, as a first step toward explaining why schools are what they
are, I present here, in a nutshell, an outline of the history of education, from the beginning
of humankind until now. Most scholars of educational history would use different terms
than I use here, but I doubt that they would deny the overall accuracy of the sketch. In fact, I
have used the writings of such scholars to help me develop the sketch.

In the beginning, for hundreds of thousands of years, children educated themselves

through self-directed play and exploration.
In relation to the biological history of our species, schools are very recent institutions.
For hundreds of thousands of years, before the advent of agriculture, we lived as hunter-
gatherers. In my August 2 posting, I summarized the evidence from anthropology that

40
children in hunter-gatherer cultures learned what they needed to know to become effective
adults through their own play and exploration. The strong drives in children to play and
explore presumably came about, during our evolution as hunter-gatherers, to serve the
needs of education. Adults in hunter-gatherer cultures allowed children almost unlimited
freedom to play and explore on their own because they recognized that those activities are
children's natural ways of learning.

With the rise of agriculture, and later of industry, children became forced laborers. Play
and exploration were suppressed. Willfulness, which had been a virtue, became a vice that
had to be beaten out of children.
The invention of agriculture, beginning 10,000 years ago in some parts of the world
and later in other parts, set in motion a whirlwind of change in people's ways of living. The
hunter-gatherer way of life had been skill-intensive and knowledge-intensive, but not labor-
intensive. To be effective hunters and gatherers, people had to acquire a vast knowledge of
the plants and animals on which they depended and of the landscapes within which they
foraged. They also had to develop great skill in crafting and using the tools of hunting and
gathering. They had to be able to take initiative and be creative in finding foods and tracking
game. However, they did not have to work long hours; and the work they did was exciting,
not dreary. Anthropologists have reported that the hunter-gatherer groups they studied did
not distinguish between work and play--essentially all of life was understood as play.

Agriculture gradually changed all that. With agriculture, people could produce more
food, which allowed them to have more children. Agriculture also allowed people (or forced
people) to live in permanent dwellings, where their crops were planted, rather than live a
nomadic life, and this in turn allowed people to accumulate property. But these changes
occurred at a great cost in labor. While hunter-gatherers skillfully harvested what nature had
grown, farmers had to plow, plant, cultivate, tend their flocks, and so on. Successful farming
required long hours of relatively unskilled, repetitive labor, much of which could be done by
children. With larger families, children had to work in the fields to help feed their younger
siblings, or they had to work at home to help care for those siblings. Children's lives changed
gradually from the free pursuit of their own interests to increasingly more time spent at
work that was required to serve the rest of the family.

Agriculture and the associated ownership of land and accumulation of property also
created, for the first time in history, clear status differences. People who did not own land
became dependent on those who did. Also, landowners discovered that they could increase
their own wealth by getting other people to work for them. Systems of slavery and other
forms of servitude developed. Those with wealth could become even wealthier with the help
of others who depended on them for survival. All this culminated with feudalism in the
Middle Ages, when society became steeply hierarchical, with a few kings and lords at the top
and masses of slaves and serfs at the bottom. Now the lot of most people, children included,
was servitude. The principal lessons that children had to learn were obedience, suppression
41
of their own will, and the show of reverence toward lords and masters. A rebellious spirit
could well result in death.

In the Middle Ages, lords and masters had no qualms about physically beating children
into submission. For example, in one document from the late 14th or early 15th century, a
French count advised that nobles' huntsmen should "choose a boy servant as young as seven
or eight" and that "...this boy should be beaten until he has a proper dread of failing to carry
out his masters orders."20 The document went on to list a prodigious number of chores that
the boy would perform daily and noted that he would sleep in a loft above the hounds at
night in order to attend to the dogs' needs.

With the rise of industry and of a new bourgeoisie class, feudalism gradually subsided,
but this did not immediately improve the lives of most children. Business owners, like
landowners, needed laborers and could profit by extracting as much work from them as
possible with as little compensation as possible. Everyone knows of the exploitation that
followed and still exists in many parts of the world. People, including young children, worked
most of their waking hours, seven days a week, in beastly conditions, just to survive. The
labor of children was moved from fields, where there had at least been sunshine, fresh air,
and some opportunities to play, into dark, crowded, dirty factories. In England, overseers of
the poor commonly farmed out paupers' children to factories, where they were treated as
slaves. Many thousand of them died each year of diseases, starvation, and exhaustion. Not
until the 19th century did England pass laws limiting child labor. In 1883, for example, new
legislation forbade textile manufacturers from employing children under the age of 9 and
limited the maximum weekly work hours to 48 for 10- to 12-year-olds and to 69 for 13- to
17-year-olds.21

In sum, for several thousand years after the advent of agriculture, the education of
children was, to a considerable degree, a matter squashing their willfulness in order to make
them good laborers. A good child was an obedient child, who suppressed his or her urge to
play and explore and dutifully carried out the orders of adult masters. Such education,
fortunately, was never fully successful. The human instincts to play and explore are so
powerful that they can never be fully beaten out of a child. But certainly the philosophy of
education throughout that period, to the degree that it could be articulated, was the
opposite of the philosophy that hunter-gatherers had held for hundreds of thousands of
years earlier.

For various reasons, some religious and some secular, the idea of universal, compulsory
education arose and gradually spread. Education was understood as inculcation.
As industry progressed and became somewhat more automated, the need for child
labor declined in some parts of the world. The idea began to spread that childhood should

20
Quoted by Orme, N. (2001), Medieval children, p 315.
21
Mulhern, J. (1959), A history of education: A social interpretation, 2nd edition.
42
be a time for learning, and schools for children were developed as places of learning. The
idea and practice of universal, compulsory public education developed gradually in Europe,
from the early 16th century on into the 19th. It was an idea that had many supporters, who
all had their own agendas concerning the lessons that children should learn.

Much of the impetus for universal education came from the emerging Protestant
religions. Martin Luther declared that salvation depends on each person's own reading of
the Scriptures. A corollary, not lost on Luther, was that each person must learn to read and
must also learn that the Scriptures represent absolute truths and that salvation depends on
understanding those truths. Luther and other leaders of the Reformation promoted public
education as Christian duty, to save souls from eternal damnation. By the end of the 17th
century, Germany, which was the leader in the development of schooling, had laws in most
of its states requiring that children attend school; but the Lutheran church, not the state, ran
the schools.22

In America, in the mid 17th century, Massachusetts became the first colony to
mandate schooling, the clearly stated purpose of which was to turn children into good
Puritans. Beginning in 1690, children in Massachusetts and adjacent colonies learned to read
from the New England Primer, known colloquially as "The Little Bible of New England".23 It
included a set of short rhymes to help children learn the alphabet, beginning with, "In
Adam's Fall, We sinned all," and ending with, "Zaccheus he, Did climb the tree, His Lord to
see." The Primer also included the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, the Ten Commandments, and
various lessons designed to instill in children a fear of God and a sense of duty to their
elders.

Employers in industry saw schooling as a way to create better workers. To them, the
most crucial lessons were punctuality, following directions, tolerance for long hours of
tedious work, and a minimal ability to read and write. From their point of view (though they
may not have put it this way), the duller the subjects taught in schools the better.

As nations gelled and became more centralized, national leaders saw schooling as
means of creating good patriots and future soldiers. To them, the crucial lessons were about
the glories of the fatherland, the wondrous achievements and moral virtues of the nation's
founders and leaders, and the necessity to defend the nation from evil forces elsewhere.

Into this mix we must add reformers who truly cared about children, whose messages
may ring sympathetically in our ears today. These are people who saw schools as places for
protecting children from the damaging forces of the outside world and for providing children
with the moral and intellectual grounding needed to develop into upstanding, competent
adults. But they too had their agenda for what children should learn. Children should learn

22
Again, Mulhern (1959).
23
Gutek, G. L. (1991), An historical introduction to American education, 2nd edition.
43
moral lessons and disciplines, such as Latin and mathematics, that would exercise their
minds and turn them into scholars.

So, everyone involved in the founding and support of schools had a clear view about
what lessons children should learn in school. Quite correctly, nobody believed that children
left to their own devices, even in a rich setting for learning, would all learn just exactly the
lessons that they (the adults) deemed to be so important. All of them saw schooling as
inculcation, the implanting of certain truths and ways of thinking into children's minds. The
only known method of inculcation, then as well as now, is forced repetition and testing for
memory of what was repeated.

With the rise of schooling, people began to think of learning as children's work. The same
power-assertive methods that had been used to make children work in fields and factories
were quite naturally transferred to the classroom.
Repetition and memorization of lessons is tedious work for children, whose instincts
urge them constantly to play freely and explore the world on their own. Just as children did
not adapt readily to laboring in fields and factories, they did not adapt readily to schooling.
This was no surprise to the adults involved. By this point in history, the idea that children's
own willfulness had any value was pretty well forgotten. Everyone assumed that to make
children learn in school the children's willfulness would have to be beaten out of them.
Punishments of all sorts were understood as intrinsic to the educational process. In some
schools children were permitted certain periods of play (recess), to allow them to let off
steam; but play was not considered to be a vehicle of learning. In the classroom, play was
the enemy of learning.

A prominent attitude of eighteenth century school authorities toward play is reflected

in John Wesley's rules for Wesleyan schools, which included the statement: "As we have no
play days, so neither do we allow any time for play on any day; for he that plays as a child
will play as a man."24

The brute force methods long used to keep children on task on the farm or in the
factory were transported into schools to make children learn. Some of the underpaid, ill-
prepared schoolmasters were clearly sadistic. One master in Germany kept records of the
punishments he meted out in 51 years of teaching, a partial list of which included: "911,527
blows with a rod, 124,010 blows with a cane, 20,989 taps with a ruler, 136,715 blows with
the hand, 10,235 blows to the mouth, 7,905 boxes on the ear, and 1,118,800 blows on the
head".25 Clearly, that master was proud of all the educating he had done.

In his autobiography, John Bernard, a prominent eighteenth-century Massachusetts

minister, described approvingly how he himself, as a child, was beaten regularly by his

24
Quoted by Mullhern (1959, p 383).
25
Again, in Mullhern (1959, p 383).
44
schoolmaster.26 He was beaten because of his irresistible drive to play; he was beaten when
he failed to learn; he was even beaten when his classmates failed to learn. Because he was a
bright boy, he was put in charge of helping the others learn, and when they failed to recite a
lesson properly he was beaten for that. His only complaint was that one classmate
deliberately flubbed his lessons in order to see him beaten. He solved that problem, finally,
by giving the classmate "a good drubbing" when the school day was over and threatening
more drubbings in the future. Those were the good old days.

In recent times, the methods of schooling have become less harsh, but basic assumptions
have not changed. Learning continues to be defined as children's work, and power
assertive means are used to make children do that work.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, public schooling gradually evolved toward what we all
recognize today as conventional schooling. The methods of discipline became more humane,
or at least less corporal; the lessons became more secular; the curriculum expanded, as
knowledge expanded, to include an ever-growing list of subjects; and the number of hours,
days, and years of compulsory schooling increased continuously. School gradually replaced
fieldwork, factory work, and domestic chores as the child's primary job. Just as adults put in
their 8-hour day at their place of employment, children today put in their 6-hour day at
school, plus another hour or more of homework, and often more hours of lessons outside of
school. Over time, children's lives have become increasingly defined and structured by the
school curriculum. Children now are almost universally identified by their grade in school,
much as adults are identified by their job or career.

Schools today are much less harsh than they were, but certain premises about the
nature of learning remain unchanged: Learning is hard work; it is something that children
must be forced to do, not something that will happen naturally through children's self-
chosen activities. The specific lessons that children must learn are determined by
professional educators, not by children, so education today is still, as much as ever, a matter
of inculcation (though educators tend to avoid that term and use, falsely, terms like
"discovery").

Clever educators today might use "play" as a tool to get children to enjoy some of their
lessons, and children might be allowed some free playtime at recess (though even this is
decreasing in very recent times), but children's own play is certainly understood as
inadequate as a foundation for education. Children whose drive to play is so strong that they
can't sit still for lessons are no longer beaten; instead, they are medicated.

School today is the place where all children learn the distinction that hunter-gatherers
never knew--the distinction between work and play. The teacher says, "you must do your
work and then you can play." Clearly, according to this message, work, which encompasses

26
From “Autobiography of the Rev. John Bernard,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society,
3rd Ser., 5 [1836]: 178-182. Extracted in J. Martin (Ed.) (2007), Children in Colonial America.
45
all of school learning, is something that one does not want to do but must; and play, which is
everything that one wants to do, has relatively little value. That, perhaps, is the leading
lesson of our method of schooling. If children learn nothing else in school, they learn the
difference between work and play and that learning is work, not play.

In this posting I have tried to explain how the history of humanity has led to the
development of schools as we know them today. In my next posting I will discuss some
reasons why modern attempts to reform schools in basic ways have been so ineffective.

4.2 Forces Against Fundamental Change

Why educational reform must occur outside the school system.

August 27, 2008

In previous postings I have presented evidence supporting the following claims: (1)
Children's instincts to play and explore on their own provided the foundation for education
during our long history as hunter-gatherers. (2) Children today can and do educate
themselves very well, without coercion or adult prodding or direction, if they are provided
with an environment that supports their instincts to play and explore. (3) Conventional
schools are what they are today because of historical circumstances that led people to
devalue play, believe that children's willfulness must be broken, and believe that everything
useful, including learning, requires toil.

Today, many people understand the educative value of free play and exploration,
regret that children are provided relatively little opportunity for such activities, and believe
that children's willfulness is a positive force for their development, education, and
enjoyment of life. Yet schools continue on, as before. In fact, conventional schooling and
other adult-led activities modeled after such schooling occupy an ever-growing percentage
of our children's time. Why is it so difficult to reverse this trend? Why is it so difficult to
institute fundamental changes within the school system? I don't pretend to know the full
answer to this question, but here is an outline of my thoughts concerning the forces that
make the educational system so difficult to change in a fundamental manner.

The Normality of Conventional Schooling

As social psychologists frequently point out, people will go to amazing lengths to
appear normal. If we behave differently from the norm, others may reject us, and nothing is
worse for us as social beings than rejection. If everyone in a culture binds girls' feet,
essentially crippling them, then even parents who don't believe in that practice do it, so their
daughters won't look weird. If all of the children in the neighborhood go to a conventional
school, then the child who does something quite different from that may be seen as weird,
and the parents may be seen as not only weird but negligent.

46
 As one piece of evidence concerning the degree to which we today identify children
with their conventional schooling, listen to almost any conversation (or attempt at
conversation) between an adult and a child that the adult has just met: "What grade are you
in school?" "What is your favorite subject?" "Do you like your teacher?" "Are you eager for
school to start?" We have to find whole new ways of talking with children who don't attend
such a school.

New schools that are founded on principles very different from those of conventional
schools attract relatively few students, even from among those who believe in the principles,
because of the fear of doing something that looks abnormal. Children who do make a
decision to attend such a school need lots of social support to counteract that fear, and their
parents need even more.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecies of Conventional Schooling

Conventional schooling has promoted ways of thinking and acting that turn its own
premises into self-fulfilling prophecies. The premises appear to be true because we evaluate
them within the context of conventional schooling and by criteria established by such
schooling.

Here's an example of such a premise: Schools need to motivate children to learn. I

have, countless times, encountered parents who believe that unconventional schools such
as Sudbury Valley are fine for "self-motivated kids" but not for their kids, because their kids
are "not self-motivated." And the kids themselves also often believe that. They say things
like, "I need teachers who'll kick my butt, or I'll do nothing all day." Why do people in our
culture have this perception that school-aged children will not learn much if left to their own
devices? Almost nobody has that perception of kids younger than school age, and hunter-
gatherers don't have that perception of kids of any age.

One reason for the perception that school-aged kids are not motivated to learn on
their own comes from our culture's general acceptance of the school system's definition of
learning. If learning is defined as doing school assignments or work that looks a lot like
school assignments, then it is certainly true that kids who are "unschooled" or who attend
Sudbury schools spend little time "learning." Instead, they spend their time playing and
exploring, in unpredictable ways, and they pick up the culture's knowledge and skills as a
side effect.

Another reason for the perception is that kids who spend their day at a conventional
school taking tests and doing work that they don't want to do may, at the end of the day,
spend their free time relaxing, kicking back, or letting off steam, much as their parents do
after a stressful day at work. This interferes with the opportunity to become fully engaged in
the sort of play, exploration, and conversation that we most easily identify as educational.

47
 Another example of a self-fulfilling school prophecy is this: Good performance in school
predicts subsequent success. We have made this prophecy come true by setting up a world
for children in which we essentially define "success" as good performance in school. The job
of children is to get good grades in school, and there are many rewards for doing so. Good
grades are the criteria for advancement to the next level in the graded school system, for
placement on the "honor roll," for eligibility to play sports, for getting into college, for
nominations to sought-after societies, for praise from many adults, and so on. So, of course,
by all these measures of success, good performance in school (as measured by grades)
predicts subsequent success.

We are also constantly bombarded with statistics showing correlations between years
of schooling and career success as measured by income. But there are lots of reasons for
those correlations that have nothing to do with learning. Here are three such reasons:

(1) We have set up a world in which certain high-paying jobs, such as law, medicine,
and business administration, commonly require a certain number of years of higher
education. In such a world, years of schooling inevitably correlate with income.

(2) We have set up a world in which "success" is more or less defined as good grades
during youth and as high income later on. In such a world, those people who are highly
achievement motivated, by conventional standards, will work hard for high grades in school
and for money in adulthood; and, voila, we have the correlation. We have also set up a
world in which very few people do not attend conventional schools, so parents and children
have few models that they can look to of success through any other route.

(3) Children from wealthy homes can afford more schooling than can those from
poorer homes, so they obtain more schooling. Children from wealthy homes also have more
opportunities for high paying jobs, because of family connections and lots of other
advantages, than do those from poorer homes. This too helps create the correlation
between years of schooling and subsequent income.

For these and other reasons an overall correlation between schooling and "success" is
inevitable in the world we have built. There is no statistical way to know if any of that
correlation has anything at all to do with what is actually learned in school.

The Entrenchment of the Education Business

Another reason for the inertia that operates against real change in our educational
system has to do with the massive, entrenched nature of the educational establisment. In
the United States, 6.8 million people currently make their living as teachers. 27 Contrary to
popular belief, teaching pays better than does the average white-collar or professional job28
and offers many other benefits, including, usually, job security, excellent pension plans, and

27
U.S. Census Bureau
28
Greene & Winters, 2007
48
lots of vacation time. Schools of education, which prepare teachers for conventional schools,
comprise a huge portion of the higher educational establishment. The textbook industry is
also massive and lucrative. A radical change in our system of education would upset all of
this. Such a change would abolish our need for teachers, as presently defined. It would also
abolish our need for schools of education and most if not all of our need for textbooks.

Many people in our culture have an economic interest in not just retaining but
expanding conventional education. The more hours and years we require young people to go
to school, the more teachers, school administrators, education professors, and textbook
authors and publishers we can employ. The education business is just like every business; it
is constantly trying to expand for the benefit of those who profit from it.

The education industry thrives on small changes and fads. New ideas about how to
motivate children, new courses, and new ways of teaching old courses (such as the "new
new new math") all provide jobs for education professors and textbook publishers. But
fundamental change of the type I have been talking about in previous postings of this blog
would upset everything.

Gradual Change Doesn't Work

Another barrier to the kind of change in schooling that I have been talking about is that
it cannot be done gradually within a school or school system. The change requires a
paradigm shift, from one in which teachers are in charge of the educational process to one in
which each student is truly in charge of his or her own education. You can't do that a little at
a time. As long as teachers set a curriculum, no matter how many choices they offer within
that curriculum, students will see it as teachers' jobs, not theirs, to decide what to learn. As
long as teachers evaluate students' progress, no matter how they do so, students will see
that their job is to meet teachers' expectations, not to establish and meet their own
expectations.

In fact, the addition of choices and of less clearly defined means of evaluation within
the conventional schooling system can make students' lives even more stressful than before.
After such "liberal" changes, it becomes each student's job to guess what it is that the
teachers want them to do and to guess at the real, unspoken criteria for evaluation. School
becomes an exercise in mind reading. My own belief is that within the conventional school
system the most benign way to teach is to be as clear as possible about the requirements
and criteria, so students can meet those requirements and criteria with minimal fear that
they may be studying the wrong things.

You also can't, within the conventional school system, expect to eliminate evaluation
gradually, one course at a time. Suppose you introduce into the curriculum one course in
which students will not be graded. What you will find is that most students won't do
anything in that course, even if they want to. In a system where other courses are graded,
the ungraded course is understood as irrelevant. How can a good student justify devoting
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time to a course that is not graded if other courses are graded? In order to change that
mindset, the whole system has to change.

How Change is Occurring

Fundamental change in education is, nevertheless, occurring outside of the traditional
school system. It is occurring among groups of families who decide to "unschool" their
children (that is, to home school them in a free way, where there is no curriculum or
evaluation) and among people who start non-school schools, such as those modeled after
the Sudbury Valley School. People in these movements establish among themselves new
sets of social norms, which allow them to overcome the barriers to behaving in ways that
seem abnormal to others. Their observations of children who are educating themselves lead
them to perceive education in a new light, as something to admire and enjoy in children but
not to control. They begin to see many examples of people who have educated themselves
freely and happily, outside of the conventional school system, and have gone on to
successful lives by every meaningful definition of success, and so the self-fulfilling prophesies
of conventional schooling are understood for what they are.

We have no reason to be discouraged about the future of education. We just must

realize that real reform is not going to occur within the established school system. It will
continue to occur outside of that system. The gradual change that will occur is that more and
more people will opt out of conventional schooling. To permit that to happen, we need to be
sure that people have the legal right to opt out. On a political level, that should be the
highest priority for those of us who look for a world in which children can develop freely and
happily, with the full experience of democracy and the rights and responsibilities that
democracy entails.

4.3 “Why Don’t Students Like School?” Well, Duhhhh…

Children don't like school because they love freedom.

September 2, 2009

Someone recently referred me to a book that they thought I'd like. It's a 2009 book,
aimed toward teachers of grades K through 12, titled Why Don't Students Like School? It's by
a cognitive scientist named Daniel T. Willingham, and it has received rave reviews by
countless people involved in the school system. Google the title and author and you'll find
pages and pages of doting reviews and nobody pointing out that the book totally and utterly
fails to answer the question posed by its title.

Willingham's thesis is that students don't like school because their teachers don't have
a full understanding of certain cognitive principles and therefore don't teach as well as they
could. They don't present material in ways that appeal best to students' minds. Presumably,

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if teachers followed Willingham's advice and used the latest information cognitive science
has to offer about how the mind works, students would love school.

Talk about avoiding the elephant in the room!

Ask any schoolchild why they don't like school and they'll tell you. "School is prison."
They may not use those words, because they're too polite, or maybe they've already been
brainwashed to believe that school is for their own good and therefore it can't be prison. But
decipher their words and the translation generally is, "School is prison."

Let me say that a few more times: School is prison. School is prison. School is prison.
School is prison. School is prison.

Willingham surely knows that school is prison. He can't help but know it; everyone
knows it. But here he writes a whole book entitled "Why Don't Students Like School," and
not once does he suggest that just possibly they don't like school because they like freedom,
and in school they are not free.

I shouldn't be too harsh on Willingham. He's not the only one avoiding this particular
elephant in the room. Everyone who has ever been to school knows that school is prison, but
almost nobody says it. It's not polite to say it. We all tiptoe around this truth, that school is
prison, because telling the truth makes us all seem so mean. How could all these nice people
be sending their children to prison for a good share of the first 18 years of their lives? How
could our democratic government, which is founded on principles of freedom and self-
determination, make laws requiring children and adolescents to spend a good portion of
their days in prison? It's unthinkable, and so we try hard to avoid thinking it. Or, if we think
it, we at least don't say it. When we talk about what's wrong with schools we pretend not to
see the elephant, and we talk instead about some of the dander that's gathered around the
elephant's periphery.

But I think it is time that we say it out loud. School is prison.

If you think school is not prison, please explain the difference.

The only difference I can think of is that to get into prison you have to commit a crime,
but they put you in school just because of your age. In other respects school and prison are
the same. In both places you are stripped of your freedom and dignity. You are told exactly
what you must do, and you are punished for failing to comply. Actually, in school you must
spend more time doing exactly what you are told to do than is true in adult prisons, so in
that sense school is worse than prison.

At some level of their consciousness, everyone who has ever been to school knows
that it is prison. How could they not know? But people rationalize it by saying (not usually in
these words) that children need this particular kind of prison and may even like it if the
prison is run well. If children don't like school, according to this rationalization, it's not
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because school is prison, but is because the wardens are not kind enough, or amusing
enough, or smart enough to keep the children's minds occupied appropriately.

But anyone who knows anything about children and who allows himself or herself to
think honestly should be able to see through this rationalization. Children, like all human
beings, crave freedom. They hate to have their freedom restricted. To a large extent they
use their freedom precisely to educate themselves. They are biologically prepared to do
that. That's what many of my previous posts have been about. Children explore and play,
freely, in ways designed to learn about the physical and social world in which they are
developing. In school they are told they must stop following their interests and, instead, do
just what the teacher is telling them they must do. That is why they don't like school.

As a society we could, perhaps, rationalize forcing children to go to school if we could

prove that they need this particular kind of prison in order to gain the skills and knowledge
necessary to become good citizens, to be happy in adulthood, and to get good jobs. Many
people, perhaps most people, think this has been proven, because the educational
establishment talks about it as if it has. But, in truth, it has not been proven at all.

In fact, for decades, families who have chosen to "unschool" their children, or to send
them to the Sudbury Valley School (which is, essentially, an "unschool" school) have been
proving the opposite. Children who are provided the tools for learning, including access to a
wide range of other people from whom to learn, learn what they need to know--and much
more--through their own self-directed play and exploration. There is no evidence at all that
children who are sent to prison come out better than those who are provided the tools and
allowed to use them freely. How, then, can we continue to rationalize sending children to
prison?

I think the educational establishment deliberately avoids looking honestly at the

experiences of unschoolers and Sudbury Valley because they are afraid of what they will
find. If school as prison isn't necessary, then what becomes of this whole huge enterprise,
which employs so many and is so fully embedded in the culture?

Willingham's book is in a long tradition of attempts to bring the "latest findings" of

psychology to bear on issues of education. All of those efforts have avoided the elephant
and focused instead on trying to clean up the dander. But as long as the elephant is there,
the dander just keeps piling up.

In a future post I'll talk about some of the history of psychology's failed attempts to
improve education. Every new generation of parents, and every new batch of fresh and
eager teachers, hears or reads about some "new theory" or "new findings" from psychology
that, at long last, will make schools more fun and improve learning. But none of it has
worked. And none of it will until people face the truth: Children hate school because in
school they are not free. Joyful learning requires freedom.

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4.4 Seven Sins of Our System of Forced Education

Forced education interferes with children's abilities to educate themselves.

September 9, 2009

In my last post I took a step that, I must admit, made me feel uncomfortable. I said,
several times: "School is prison." I felt uncomfortable saying that because school is so much
a part of my life and the lives of almost everyone I know. I, like most people I know, went
through the full 12 years of public schooling. My mother taught in a public school for several
years. My beloved half-sister is a public schoolteacher. I have many dear friends and cousins
who are public schoolteachers. How can I say that these good people--who love children and
have poured themselves passionately into the task of trying to help children--are involved in
a system of imprisoning children? The comments on my last post showed that my references
to school as prison made some other people feel uncomfortable also.

Sometimes I find, no matter how uncomfortable it makes me and others feel, I have to
speak the truth. We can use all the euphemisms we want, but the literal truth is that
schools, as they generally exist in the United States and other modern countries, are prisons.
Human beings within a certain age range (most commonly 6 to 16) are required by law to
spend a good portion of their time there, and while there they are told what they must do,
and the orders are generally enforced. They have no or very little voice in forming the rules
they must follow. A prison--according to the common, general definition--is any place of
involuntary confinement and restriction of liberty.

Now you might argue that schools as we know them are good, or necessary; but you
can't argue that they are not prisons. To argue the latter would be to argue that we do not,
in fact, have a system of compulsory education. Either that, or it would be a semantic
argument in which you would claim that prison actually means something different from its
common, general definition. I think it is important, in any serious discussion, to use words
honestly.

Sometimes people use the word prison in a metaphorical sense to refer to any
situation in which they must follow rules or do things that are unpleasant. In that spirit,
some adults might refer to their workplace as a prison, or even to their marriage as a prison.
But that is not a literal use of the term, because those examples involve voluntary, not
involuntary restraint. It is against the law in this and other democratic countries to force
someone to work at a job where the person doesn't want to work, or to marry someone that
he or she doesn't want to marry. It is not against the law, however, to force a child to go to
school; in fact, it is against the law to not force a child to go to school if you are the parent
and the child doesn't want to go. (Yes, I know, some parents have the wherewithal to find
alternative schooling or provide home schooling that is acceptable to both the child and the
state, but that is not the norm in today's society; and the laws in many states and countries

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work strongly against such alternatives.) So, while jobs and marriages might in some sad
cases feel like prisons, schools generally are prisons.

Now here's another term that I think deserves to be said out loud: Forced education.
Like the term prison, this term sounds harsh. But, again, if we have compulsory education,
then we have forced education. The term compulsory, if it has any meaning at all, means
that the person has no choice about it.

The question worth debating is this: Is forced education--and the consequential

imprisonment of children--a good thing or a bad thing? Most people seem to believe that it
is, all in all, a good thing; but I think that it is, all in all, a bad thing. I outline here some of the
reasons why I think this, in a list of what I refer to as "seven sins" of our system of forced
education:

1. Denial of liberty on the basis of age.

In my system of values, and in that long endorsed by democratic thinkers, it is wrong
to deny anyone liberty without just cause. To incarcerate an adult we must prove, in a court
of law, that the person has committed a crime or is a serious threat to herself or others. Yet
we incarcerate children and teenagers in school just because of their age. This is the most
blatant of the sins of forced education.

2. Fostering of shame, on the one hand, and hubris, on the other.

It is not easy to force people to do what they do not want to do. We no longer use the
cane, as schoolmasters once did, but instead rely on a system of incessant testing, grading,
and ranking of children compared with their peers. We thereby tap into and distort the
human emotional systems of shame and pride to motivate children to do the work. Children
are made to feel ashamed if they perform worse than their peers and pride if they perform
better. Shame leads some to drop out, psychologically, from the educational endeavor and
to become class clowns (not too bad), or bullies (bad), or drug abusers and dealers (very
bad). Those made to feel excessive pride from the shallow accomplishments that earn them
A's and honors may become arrogant, disdainful of the common lot who don't do so well on
tests; disdainful, therefore, of democratic values and processes (and this may be the worst
effect of all).

3. Interference with the development of cooperation and nurturance.

We are an intensely social species, designed for cooperation. Children naturally want
to help their friends, and even in school they find ways to do so. But our competition-based
system of ranking and grading students works against the cooperative drive. Too much help
given by one student to another is cheating. Helping others may even hurt the helper, by
raising the grading curve and lowering the helper's position on it. Some of those students
who most strongly buy into school understand this well; they become ruthless achievers.
Moreover, as I have argued in previous posts, the forced age segregation that occurs in

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school itself promotes competition and bullying and inhibits the development of nurturance.
Throughout human history, children and adolescents have learned to be caring and helpful
through their interactions with younger children. The age-graded school system deprives
them of such opportunities.

4. Interference with the development of personal responsibility and self-direction.

A theme of the entire series of essays in this blog is that children are biologically
predisposed to take responsibility for their own education. They play and explore in ways
that allow them to learn about the social and physical world around them. They think about
their own future and take steps to prepare themselves for it. By confining children to school
and to other adult-directed settings, and by filling their time with assignments, we deprive
them of the opportunities and time they need to assume such responsibility. Moreover, the
implicit and sometimes explicit message of our forced schooling system is: "If you do what
you are told to do in school, everything will work out well for you." Children who buy into
that may stop taking responsibility for their own education. They may assume falsely that
someone else has figured out what they need to know to become successful adults, so they
don't have to think about it. If their life doesn't work out so well, they take the attitude of a
victim: "My school (or parents or society) failed me, and that's why my life is all screwed up."

5. Linking of learning with fear, loathing, and drudgery.

For many students, school generates intense anxiety associated with learning.
Students who are just learning to read and are a little slower than the rest feel anxious about
reading in front of others. Tests generate anxiety in almost everyone who takes them
seriously. Threats of failure and the shame associated with failure generate enormous
anxiety in some. I have found in my college teaching of statistics that a high percentage of
students, even at my rather elite university, suffer from math anxiety, apparently because of
the humiliation they have experienced pertaining to math in school. A fundamental
psychological principle is that anxiety inhibits learning. Learning occurs best in a playful
state, and anxiety inhibits playfulness. The forced nature of schooling turns learning into
work. Teachers even call it work: "You must do your work before you can play." So learning,
which children biologically crave, becomes toil--something to be avoided whenever possible.

6. Inhibition of critical thinking.

Presumably, one of the great general goals of education is the promotion of critical
thinking. But despite all the lip service that educators devote to that goal, most students--
including most "honors students"--learn to avoid thinking critically about their schoolwork.
They learn that their job in school is to get high marks on tests and that critical thinking only
wastes time and interferes. To get a good grade, you need to figure out what the teacher
wants you to say and then say it. I've heard that sentiment expressed countless times by
college students as well as by high-school students, in discussions held outside the
classroom. I've devoted a lot of effort toward promoting critical thinking at the college level;

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I've developed a system of teaching designed to promote it, written articles about it, and
given many talks about it at conferences on teaching. I'll devote a future post or two in this
blog to the topic. But, truth be told, the grading system, which is the chief motivator in our
system of education, is a powerful force against honest debate and critical thinking in the
classroom. In a system in which we teachers do the grading, few students are going to
criticize or even question the ideas we offer; and if we try to induce criticism by grading for
it, we generate false criticism.

7. Reduction in diversity of skills, knowledge, and ways of thinking.

By forcing all schoolchildren through the same standard curriculum, we reduce their
opportunities to follow alternative pathways. The school curriculum represents a tiny subset
of the skills and knowledge that are important to our society. In this day and age, nobody
can learn more than a sliver of all there is to know. Why force everyone to learn the same
sliver? When children are free--as I have observed at the Sudbury Valley School and others
have observed with unschoolers--they take new, diverse, and unpredicted paths. They
develop passionate interests, work diligently to become experts in the realms that fascinate
them, and then find ways of making a living by pursuing their interests. Students forced
through the standard curriculum have much less time to pursue their own interests, and
many learn well the lesson that their own interests don't really count; what counts is what's
measured on the schools' tests. Some get over that, but too many do not.

--------------

This list of "sins" is not novel. Many teachers I have spoken with are quite aware of all
of these detrimental effects of forced education, and many work hard to try to counteract
them. Some try to instill as much of a sense of freedom and play as the system permits;
many do what they can to mute the shame of failure and reduce anxiety; most try to allow
and promote cooperation and compassion among the students, despite the barriers against
it; many do what they can to allow and promote critical thinking. But the system works
against them. It may even be fair to say that teachers in our school system are no more free
to teach as they wish than are students free to learn as they wish. (But teachers, unlike
students, are free to quit; so they are not in prison.)

I must also add that human beings, especially young human beings, are remarkably
adaptive and resourceful. Many students find ways to overcome the negative feelings that
forced schooling engenders and to focus on the positive. They fight the sins. They find ways
to cooperate, to play, to help one another overcome feelings of shame, to put undue pride
in its place, to combat bullies, to think critically, and to spend some time on their true
interests despite the forces working against them in school. But to do all this while also
satisfying the demands of the forced education takes great effort, and many do not succeed.
At minimum, the time students must spend on wasteful busywork and just following orders
in school detracts greatly from the time they can use to educate themselves.

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 I have listed here "seven sins" of forced education, but I have resisted the temptation
to call them the seven sins. There may be more than seven. I invite you to add more, in the
comments section below.

Finally, I add that I do not believe that we should just do away with schools and replace
them with nothing. Children educate themselves, but we adults have a responsibility to
provide settings that allow them to do that in an optimal manner.

4.5 Is Real Educational Reform Possible? If So, How?

Educational reform must occur outside of the compulsory school system.

August 19, 2011

From the dawn of institutionalized schooling until now there have always been
reformers, who want to modify the way schooling is done. For the most part, such
reformers can be scaled along what might be called a liberal-conservative, or progressive-
traditionalist, continuum. At one end are those who think that children learn best when
they are happy, have choices, study material that is directly meaningful to them, and, in
general, are permitted some control over what and how they learn. At the other end are
those who think that children learn best when they are firmly directed and guided, by
authoritative teachers who know better than children what to learn and how to learn
it. Over time there has been regular back-and-forth movement of the educational pendulum
along this continuum. But the pendulum never moves very far. Kindhearted progressives,
viewed as softheaded by the traditionalists, push one way for a while, and that doesn't work
very well. And then hardnosed traditionalists, viewed as petrified fossils by the
progresssives, push the other way for a while, and that doesn't work very well either.

The pendulum never moves very far before it is pushed back in the other direction,
because neither type of reform works. Progressive policies, inserted into a system in which
children are still expected to learn a certain pre-specified set of skills and body of knowledge,
don't work because children on their own don't choose to learn the specific curriculum that
is expected of them. The no-nonsense policies of the traditionalists have the advantage of
making it clear to children what they are supposed to do and learn, but those policies don't
work because they preclude creative thought and most strongly interfere with children's
natural ways of learning. Children may learn the rote material needed to pass tests, but they
don't remember it or use it in daily life because it has no meaning to them.

Such back-and-forth nudging of the pendulum is the stuff of continuous debate and of
countless books written by professors of education. The people writing the books and doing
the nudging call themselves reformers, but these slight pushes are not real reforms.

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What do I mean by real educational reform?
Real educational reform, as I see it, requires a fundamental shift in our understanding
of the educational process. It requires the kind of shift that I have been advocating in the
whole series of essays that constitute this blog.

For starters, it requires that we abandon the idea that adults are in charge of children's
learning. It requires, in other words, that we throw out the basic premise that underlies our
system of schooling.

Essentially everyone involved in the educational enterprise--progressives as well as

traditionalists--holds strongly to the premise that adults are in charge of children's
learning. Progressive educators see teachers as clever manipulators of the child's
environment, setting things up and subtly directing so that children will play the right games,
explore the right questions in the right way, and learn the right answers, ultimately so they
can pass the tests. Traditionalists aim for a more direct route to imparting the right answers,
without the games. Both sides believe that good learning is a function of good teaching; they
just disagree on what constitutes good teaching. Both sides also believe that it is adults'
responsibility to decide what children should learn and to test children, in one way or
another, formally or informally, to be sure that they are learning the right things.

The idea that children are and should be responsible for their own learning is the
thesis that runs through most of the previous essays of this blog. "Freedom to
Learn." Children come into the world intensely motivated to learn about the physical, social,
and cultural world around them; but they need freedom in order to pursue that motive. For
their first four or five years of life we generally grant them that freedom. During those first
few years, without any teaching, they learn a large portion of what any human being ever
learns. They learn their entire native language, from scratch. They learn the basic practical
principles of physics. They learn psychology to such a degree that they become experts in
how to please, annoy, manipulate, and charm the other people in their environment. They
acquire a huge store of factual knowledge. They learn how to operate the gadgets that they
are allowed to operate, even those that seem extraordinarily complex to us adults.

They do all this on their own initiative, with essentially no direction from adults. In fact
adults can't stop children from learning all this, unless they shut them away in closets. It is
not just a few special "geniuses" or uniquely self-motivated children who do this; all children
do it, except a very few who have real brain damage.

But then, at school age, we do the equivalent of shutting children into closets. We
force them into settings called "schools" where we deprive them of their natural ways of
learning, so they can't learn much on their own, and there we give teachers the task of
"teaching" them. So, of course, in those settings whatever the child manages to learn is very
much affected by the teacher. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you force children into settings
where they can't learn on their own, then learning is necessarily dependent on teaching.
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 Children learn wonderfully without anyone systematically or deliberately teaching
them, but yet, we adults do have, or should have, the responsibility of providing the
conditions that allow children to take charge of their own learning. Real educational reform,
in my view, is reform that provides those conditions.

The most important condition is freedom. To learn on their own, children need
unlimited time to play, explore, become bored, overcome boredom, discover their own
interests, and pursue those interests. To learn what they need to know to become highly
effective, productive, moral members of the larger society they also need a rich environment
within which to play and explore. By a rich environment I mean an environment that brings
them into meaningful contact with the valued tools, skills, ideas, ethical principles, mores,
and meaningful debates of the larger culture. Such an environment is, among other things,
an age-mixed environment, in which younger children learn new skills and ideas by
observing and interacting naturally with older children and adults, and where older children
learn to nurture and lead by interacting with younger ones.

In hunter-gatherer bands, all of this was provided naturally, with no particular effort,
because children were automatically immersed in all of the activities of the band. The
Sudbury Valley School and other schools modeled after it have shown that it is possible, with
some thought and effort, to provide all this for children in our culture--at far less expense
and trouble than the current cost and trouble of public schools--with wonderful educational
consequences. Many unschooling families, likewise, have figured out ways to provide the
sort of rich environment needed to allow their children to educate themselves marvelously.

Real reform is not possible from within the existing conventional school system.
My friend and colleague, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, uses the phrase
"You can't get there from here" to refer to a basic principle of evolution that applies to
cultural evolution as well as biological evolution. Organisms, whether they are biological
organisms like dinosaurs or cultural organisms like our compulsory schooling system, are
capable of gradual evolutionary change, but they are not infinitely capable of such
change. Sometimes you just can't get there from here. The existing structure is built in such
a way that it cannot be modified in ways necessary to produce a desirable, adaptive
outcome. Dinosaurs reached a point where they couldn't change to meet the new
conditions of life, so they died out and their niches were replenished with new, highly
adaptable little creatures called mammals. Our system of compulsory schooling--which
arose originally for purposes of indoctrination and obedience training--cannot be modified
to serve effectively the function of real education.

There is no way that gradual change in our current schooling system can result in the
kind of educational reform that I am calling real reform. The small steps in what would seem
to be the right direction, urged on by the progressive educators, fail within this system. They
fail because they don't work when taken one by one or just a little at a time. A little

59
"freedom" in a system where success is measured by tests doesn't work, because free
children don't choose to learn the test answers. "Play" in a setting where children are
segregated by age and are constrained in what they can play at is not a particularly effective
learning tool.

Moreover, like the dinosaur, the schooling system has by now grown so huge and
cumbersome that it is refractory to forces for serious change. It is an enormous economic
enterprise, employing many millions of people whose self-interest is to keep it going pretty
much as it is. Since its customers are there by compulsion, not choice, it senses little need to
change to please the customers. Instead, it operates for the self-interests of those who run
it. And, because education has now been compulsory for several generations, nearly
everyone has gone through the system and has difficulty imagining life without it. One thing
that compulsory schooling teaches very well is the mistaken belief that we need compulsory
schooling in order to learn.

For all these reasons and more, real reform within our existing school system is not
possible.

Real reform will occur only when enough people walk away from the conventional school
system.
Most people today are convinced that our current compulsory school system, or some
version of it, is essential to education in our society. When they talk about reform, they talk
about nudges, one way or the other, of the pendulum. But a growing minority think
differently. These are the people who are walking away from the conventional schooling
system because, like me, they see no hope for effective change within that system. Some of
these people are choosing and even founding radically non-conventional schools, along the
lines of Sudbury Valley. Others are choosing homeschooling or unschooling (essentially,
homeschooling directed by the kids themselves), and many of these people are getting
together to create rich learning environments for their children, such as Open Connections
in Pennsylvania. These little schools and learning centers are, right now, like the little
mouse-like mammals of the late Mesozoic era, scurrying about trying to avoid being stepped
on and squashed by the dinosaurs. But the future, I think, is theirs.

Here is the scenario I envision for real educational reform in our society. The trend for
people to walk away from the conventional schooling system will continue and will
accelerate. It will accelerate because with each new person who leaves the conventional
system, the less weird that choice will seem to everyone else. We are creatures of
conformity, at least most of us are. Few of us dare to behave in ways that seem abnormal to
others. But as more and more people walk away from the system, we will reach the point
where everyone knows one or more families who have made that choice, where everyone
can see that the choice led to happier children, with no loss at all in their chances for success
in our society as they grow up. Gradually, people will change their attitude. "Hey, it's not

60
necessary to do schooling as it is dictated by the conventional schooling system. You can
play, explore, enjoy your childhood, and learn in the process."

People will begin to understand that they have a choice. Which will they choose--
conventional schooling, where they must do as they are told, or freedom? What have
people always chosen when they truly understand that they have a choice between freedom
and dictatorship?

At some point in this process a tipping point will be reached. The number of people
choosing freedom for their kids will be so great that there will no longer be enough public
interest in the conventional schools to continue funding them. Instead, there will be a
clamor to develop good safe parks, craft centers, well-equipped libraries, Sudbury-type
schools where children can get away from their parents to play and explore, and other
excellent public learning centers--places that provide rich opportunities for learning without
compulsion. These will cost far less than do our public schools. It is very expensive to keep
children in schools by compulsion, for the same reason that it is very expensive to keep
convicts in penitentiaries.

How long will it take for this to happen? I don't know, but I think we can hasten the
pace by working politically to create more freedom of choice in education. In some states
compulsory schooling and testing laws are such as to make it illegal to open a Sudbury
school or do unschooling or many versions of homeschooling. Some people, with means to
hire lawyers, find ways to get around this; but it is difficult and many families find it
impossible to do what they want to do. Let's work first and foremost for freedom of choice
in education, and then, as my capitalist friends like to say, let's let the market decide. My
money is on the mice.

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5 What Einstein, Twain, and Forty Eight Other
Creative People Had to Say About Schooling
"I was at the foot of my class." -Thomas Edison

July 26, 2011

Throughout history, from Plato on, creative people have spoken out against the
stultifying effects of compulsory education. Here are quotations from fifty such people,
which I have culled partly from my own reading but mostly from various other websites.

Albert Einstein
 It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of education have not
yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate plant, aside from
stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without
fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be
promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.
 One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind, whether one liked it or not. This coercion
had such a deterring effect that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the
consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.
 Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked
by the laughter of the Gods.
Plato
 Knowledge that is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
Chuang Tzu
 Reward and punishment is the lowest form of education.
Mark Twain
 I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
 Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the
long run.
 Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.
 In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.
Oscar Wilde
 The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at
any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger
to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence.

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 Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing
that is worth knowing can be taught.
 Everyone who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
Winston Churchill
 How I hated schools, and what a life of anxiety I lived there. I counted the hours to the
end of every term, when I should return home.
 I always like to learn, but I don't always like to be taught.
Woody Allen
 I loathed every day and regret every moment I spent in a school.
Dolly Parton
 I hated school. Even to this day, when I see a school bus it's just depressing to me. The
poor little kids.
George Bernard Shaw
 There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school.
 What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of
reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary
real.
Finley Peter Dunne
 It don't make much difference what you study, so long as you don't like it.
Thomas Edison
 I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was at the foot of the class.
Henry David Thoreau
 What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
 How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?
Bertrand Russell
 Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
 Education is one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
Benjamin Franklin
 He was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant that he
bought a cow to ride on.
H. L. Mencken
 The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one
imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.

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George Saville, Marquis of Hallifax
 The vanity of teaching doth oft tempt a man to forget that he is a blockhead.
Joseph Stalin (Hmmm, a supporter of compulsory schooling.)
 Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it
is aimed.
Norman Douglas
 Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.
Paul Karl Feyerabend
 The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at
education.
Theodore Roosevelt
 A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a
university education, he may steal the whole railroad.
H. H. Munro
 But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious
till he's been to a good school.
Robert Frost
 Education is hanging around until you've caught on.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
 Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not
know, about something you do not want to know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
 I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the schoolboys who educate my son.
Alice James
 I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool than I am.
Helen Beatrix Potter
 Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the
originality.
Margaret Mead
 My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.
William Hazlitt
 Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not
made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.

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Laurence J. Peter
 Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.
Anne Sullivan (I bow to her.)
 I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to
me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to
think.
Alice Duer Miller
 It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and
then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's
curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching
for his scholastic difficulties.
Florence King
 Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already
embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.
Emma Goldman
 Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child
a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and
in everlasting antagonism with each other.
Edward M. Forster
 Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
William John Bennett
 If [our schools] are still bad maybe we should declare educational bankruptcy, give the
people their money and let them educate themselves and start their own schools.
John Updike
 School is where you go between when your parents can't take you, and industry can't
take you.
Robert Buzzell
 The mark of a true MBA is that he is often wrong but seldom in doubt.
Robert M. Hutchins
 The three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics
for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.
 The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness.
Elbert Hubbard
 You can lead a boy to college, but you cannot make him think.

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Max Leon Forman
 Education seems to be in America the only commodity of which the customer tries to get
as little as he can for his money.
Phillip K. Dick
 The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of
your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more
by going into banking.
David P. Gardner
 Much that passes for education is not education at all but ritual. The fact is that we are
being educated when we know it least.
Ivan Illich
 The public school has become the established church of secular society.
 Together we have come to realize that the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to
attend school.
Marshall McLuhan
 The school system ... is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for
processing.
Michel De Montaigne
 We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding
unfurnished and void.
Peter Drucker
 When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.
C. C. Colton
 Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask
more than the wisest man can answer.
Paul Simon
 When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all.
John Dewey
 It is our American habit, if we find the foundations of our educational structure
unsatisfactory, to add another story or a wing.
Anonymous (My favorite of all historical figures.)
 If nobody dropped out of eighth grade, who would hire the college graduates?
 Public school is a place of detention for children placed in the care of teachers who are
afraid of the principal, principals who are afraid of the school board, school boards who are

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afraid of the parents, parents who are afraid of the children and children who are afraid of
nobody.
 The creative person is usually rebellious. He or she is the survivor of a trauma called
education.
 You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much.
________

Friends, yes, I know, this is a biased sampling of quotations! I have deliberately

selected quotations that complain about the compulsory, standard system of schooling. But,
I challenge you. Develop a list this long of quotations supporting compulsory schooling and
see if the authors you quote rank close to these authors in creativity.

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