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RAISE THE FUTURE SEE THROUGH IT

Free to Learn

by Peter Gray

Children are designed to learn through play. School keeps interrupting.

For you if

you sense that something about how we school children is fundamentally wrong and want the developmental science that explains why

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Gray is a developmental psychologist who noticed something disturbing: as the hours children spend in school and adult-directed activities have increased over the past fifty years, so have rates of childhood anxiety, depression, and helplessness. His argument, backed by evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and research at democratic schools like Sudbury Valley, is that children are biologically designed to educate themselves through play, exploration, and self-directed activity and that our educational system systematically dismantles that design in the name of preparation for a future that the children are already living. He draws on hunter-gatherer societies where children learn everything they need through free play, on the neuroscience of intrinsic motivation, and on decades of research showing that the more we control children's learning the less they are capable of directing it themselves. The most rigorous scientific case for unschooling ever written and the one that connects Winnicott's psychology, Illich's philosophy, and Boal's theatre practice into a single coherent argument: children learn best when they are free.

Where This Book Lives

Themes
child developmenteducation critique

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Most Likely to Succeed poster

Most Likely to Succeed(2015)

dir. Greg Whiteley

The best case for project-based learning, with caveats.

A year inside High Tech High, a San Diego charter school built entirely around project-based learning instead of standardized instruction, following two classes of ninth graders.

Why it’s here: Makes the most vivid case in documentary form for project-based learning over the standard model — but its history of how American schooling got this way has been disputed by actual education historians, and its producers have their own stake in the reform it's arguing for. Worth watching with that critique alongside it, not instead of it.

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