6: Peter Gray | The Psychology of Play, the Benefits of Free Play for Children

Jesper Conrad: 00:00
Today we have uh Peter Greg as our guest, and um if not everybody knows him, then I hope they will uh go and dig into his work. Welcome, Peter.

Peter Gray: 00:12
I'm glad to be here.

Jesper Conrad: 00:15
Thank you.

Cecilie Conrad: 00:16
Well, um So I'm really excited. Yes, I'm really excited. So I read your books a hundred years ago, it feels like, and um you are my best uh um like uh how do you say that in English? Like the card I can pull out when people start criticizing our lifestyle. I'm like, yeah, I'll go read this card. And then uh so thank you very much for all the work you've done. Um really carved the way to uh big mountain for a lot of people, uh, us included, our four children and their personal freedom. And uh because the personal freedom of the children is not greater than the the feeling of comfort of the parents doing this radical thing of not putting them in the school system. So when you can sue with the parents, then the children can actually have their personal freedom, which is uh obviously very important to me and and our list. So thank you very much, and I'm so excited to finally meet you.

Peter Gray: 01:16
Well, thank you. It's great to meet you.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:21
So should I just okay? So we've discussed what we would ask you uh as the most important things. Um and when we talk to other people who want to homeschool or unschool, and also actually in our personal life, there's one thing that's like the really big, I wouldn't say problem but challenge, and that's the other kids. Where do you find the social life for the other children? Uh, we have to drive really far, uh, even fly sometimes to find someone to hang out with. I think the situation is probably worse in Europe than in the States because it's more rare here. But still, I think the problem is the same. And I am very often asked the question would it be better that they were in school and then they had someone to hang out with? Um, because it's so hard to find um friends.

Peter Gray: 02:21
Yeah, that's a great question. That's a great question. I think probably the the hardest thing for uh parents today is that this is gonna sound funny, but because there are so many things that people think is hard. But the hardest thing is uh arranging finding a community of children for your children. Children need a community of children, they really do. Um I I shouldn't emphasize that too much. People are very adaptable, children grow up okay almost no matter what. But um but when the the history of childhood, including the ancient history of childhood, the pre-civilized history of childhood, as well as even back in the 1950s when I was a child, is that children spend far more time with other children than they spend with adults. Children are biologically designed to learn from other children. They play in age-mixed groups, they uh they're more interested in what other kids uh think and do than what their parents think and do. They're more interested in uh they are naturally so. And and I think when you look at hunter-gatherer cultures and you see that children are spending all day long playing in age-mixed groups, and the younger children are learning from the older children as they do this, and the older children are learning how to nurture by interacting with the younger children as they do this, that that uh age-mixed children's play is sort of the children's uh is sort of the natural environment for for kids to grow up in, and it's very hard to find that kind of environment today. So in the United States, when I was a child in the 1950s, um, you know, I often say, well, I had school, uh, but school was not, it was regular school, but it was not the big deal that it is today. Far less uh hours at it. There were the school year was five weeks shorter, the school day was an hour shorter, we didn't have homework in elementary school. We had two hours outdoors, uh counting recess, two recesses, and and lunch hour out of the six-hour school day. We had far less of uh sit-in-the-classroom school and and essentially no homework in elementary school. So we had far more time free away from school than we had at school-like activities. And in that time, you know, the you the refrain of parents was get out of the house. I don't want you in the house. Houses were smaller, families were bigger, you know, moms didn't want the kids hanging around the house. And so you you would be out. This was in northern Minnesota, and it might be below zero, and uh you but you were outside, and other kids were outside. And so you had so it was easy to find other kids to play with. And we moved around a lot, I have to say, but it was easy to find a new a new group uh of kids because they were outdoors. So, what do you do today to solve that problem? And it's not an easy question. I've been working with, and it and this is a problem whether your kids are going to regular school or not, because regular schools are not, you know, people talk about well, you should send your child to school so they'll be socialized. People were, you know, you're not you're homeschooling, you're not. But what kind of a social environment is school? It's uh age segregated, the kids uh in your class are all the same age, you have almost no opportunity to interact with kids who are different in age. Uh, and you're controlled pretty much all the time. What time do you really have? Even even recesses in the United States are now so short and so adult controlled that there's very little opportunity for actual social, real social interaction among children. It is true that you can meet other children, you can get to know them, but then if you don't have an opportunity to play with them outside of school, in the United States, I think probably more than in most of Europe, but not more than in the UK. I know UK is as bad as the United States is this. The parents are not letting their kids out to play. Um don't blame parents for that, but the whole society uh believes that it's dangerous for children to be outdoors without an adult accompanying them. And so um so this is a problem for everybody. In my mind, um the very best that in my research, that the one group of children which regularly have a culture of childhood are children who are in uh democratic schools. So that children who are going to a Sudbury school or an Agile Learning Center or a Liberators Learner Center, these kinds of centers which are designed for self-directed education, uh, so children have charge of their own time. These are places where children can interact with one another uh all day long. Uh we recently, I and a couple of others recently published a study that we did a couple of years ago of the uh alumni of a democratic school called the Hudson Valley Sudbury School. And we asked the alumni of this school uh questions about their experiences at the school, uh questions about their the role of staff members in their experiences, the role of the formal democratic processes at the school, and the role of other children uh at the school. And far and away their response was the most important part of the school was the other children, the other kids. By children, I'm including everybody who was at the school age four through 18 or 19 years old. Uh they believed that their education came largely from the fact that they had so much time with this group of people who became friends, who they learned from, who they collaborated with in various forms of play and hobbies and projects. Uh for those children who came to the school, as a fair number did, with uh psychological problems, anxiety or depression, um, or had been bullied where they had been before, uh, they found this this group of other kids was really therapy for them. It helped them overcome their anxieties and depression. The fact that they were accepted is so important for children to feel accepted by other children. So I don't have an easy answer to this question. My hope is I recently did a study also and published this in the American uh Journal of the American Journal of Play of libraries as places for children to uh hang out and get to know one other children.

Peter Gray: 09:59
This is occurring more and more in libraries in the United States. Uh there are some libraries catering specifically to homeschooled kids, so homeschooled kids can hang out there during the day. Uh these are in areas where there's a high concentration of homeschool of homeschoolers. Uh and many libraries now have maker spaces in the library, places where you could have there's high-tech equipment. Uh this has been a recent development. Over the last 10 or 12 years, there's been a huge growth in the number of libraries that have maker spaces in them. And what the libraries find is that the primary users of them are kids. Um, and the kids figure out how to use the equipment. The librarians don't have to know how to use the equipment. They figure out how to use the equipment. And oftentimes, we'll, if there are adults there, oftentimes it's as likely that the adults are learning from the kids as vice versa. So, and some some libraries, actually, quite a few libraries these days, have just a room available for teenagers. You can hang out here, you can play games, you can do whatever you want, as long as you're not being too noisy and boisterous, uh, disturbing the patrons in other parts of the library. There are some libraries that uh uh are have uh play at the library for regular hours. Uh there's this is a small number of libraries. Most libraries have play for very little kids, but um but a small number of libraries are now developing play for um for a larger, for sort of an for larger groups of kids. Um the two librarians that were co-researchers with me on this study of libraries, um they s they are involved with a library in Austin, Texas, where they uh have after-school play, they put up a big sign that says joyful noise, welcome, and kids can come.

Cecilie Conrad: 11:59
Can I ask you something clarifying?

Peter Gray: 12:02
Yes.

Cecilie Conrad: 12:03
Not that I don't want to hear the rest of the story. In the European school systems, or at least in Scandinavia where we come from, uh there are hours for schooling, and then in the afternoon there are hours for more or less play. So it's two different institutions. Sometimes the kids have to walk like around the block for another um to another house and until they are even until the parents have the time to pick them up. So maybe you're in school until three o'clock, but your parents are not off for work yet. So you can go to sometimes they call it the club or something like that, and then the kids get to hang out there until they are picked up. Obviously, the younger kids this is more needed for the youngest as they cannot walk home alone through traffic. So do you have anything like that, or is school just school with structured learning hours and then go home?

Peter Gray: 12:60
Well, that's great what you just described. And can can homeschool kids uh join that join the other kids?

Cecilie Conrad: 13:08
Yeah, sometimes you because it's actually two different institutions. So you pay for the afterschool thing and you don't pay for the school, and at least in Scandinavia, and the after it's very cheap, but you still pay for it.

Peter Gray: 13:22
That sounds good. That sounds good.

Cecilie Conrad: 13:23
Um of them accept homeschooled children and some don't.

Peter Gray: 13:27
I still yeah, it would be nice if there was more of that. We what um the closest thing we have to that is something that so I uh along with uh Lenore Scenezi, who wrote the book Free Range Kids, um found she's the primary founder of a group of an of a nonprofit organization called Let Grow, um, which is uh the the premises that parents need to let their children go in order to let them grow. They have to allow get allow them out of their sight, allow them to have adventures, allow them. So we've been working, this organization has been working with schools to have after school play. Uh and um often though unfortunately many schools have chosen to make it before school play. So they'll have an um an hour of free play before school. Uh some of them though have now have an hour of free play after school. My goal, what I would love to see, would be that schools would stay open uh after school. Let the use the school playground, the gymnasium, the the uh the art room, the you know, have a room with games, have all kinds of opportunities. If the school has a swimming pool, have the swimming pool open. From the hours.

Cecilie Conrad: 15:03
And it's voluntary, whereas schooling is more or less meant.

Jesper Conrad: 15:08
But should we choose freedom?

Cecilie Conrad: 15:09
Yeah, yeah. I'm just gonna curious about the because I somehow think that you know the states in Europe, it's all Western Europe, Western European culture somehow, but it's different. We did have that freedom when we were in school.

Jesper Conrad: 15:23
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 15:24
For many hours every day.

Peter Gray: 15:26
Right.

Cecilie Conrad: 15:26
At least I I was picked up at you know three, four hours, three hours after school stuff. So I had a lot of hours every day with my and you usually you always go to the same club as your schoolmates, so it's the same group of children that you've been in school with all day, and I hated it.

Jesper Conrad: 15:44
Yeah, but it's it's also closer to being age degraded than what we would prefer.

Peter Gray: 15:51
Yeah, okay. I think the age mixed aspect of it is really, really important. Um when you're when you're with everybody the same age, there's kind of a competitive edge. There's kind of some it's sort of somewhat conducive to bullying, it's kind of who's better, who's and so on. When it's age mixed that really changes. The older kids become nicer, not just to the younger kids, but nicer to one another when there's younger kids around. Uh, you can kids who have some social difficulties with kids their own age, they haven't really quite learned how to get along well, can play with younger kids who are happy to play with them and develop social skills that way. Uh, the younger kids are learning um more advanced ways of playing by interacting with the older kids. Um it's just in my mind, age-segregated uh groups is uh abnormal. This is like, you know, this is not normal a childhood group. Uh the the history of children's experiences is that whether we're talking about old-fashioned neighborhood play, not everybody in the neighborhood is the same age, you're playing across ages, or whether we're talking about hunter-gatherer bands, where there's only about 20 kids total, and so you're interacting with all the kids, you know, from age four on to teenage years, uh, all playing together typically. So I think that's a that's a really valuable part of it. That's one of the reasons I think recess is not particularly valuable play, even though I'm in favor of recesses because kids need a break from sitting in the classroom. But when recesses are age segregated, it's not the best situation for play.

Cecilie Conrad: 17:44
So I think also the problem is that once you age segregate the children in school time, they they tend to age segregate their choice of friends. And and even in these, we had this after-school thing. I think it was an age span of more maybe three or four years, but we would always hang out with our group from our class. So so it didn't really, even though the the space was with somewhat mixed age, my child was what who was not with mixed, except I have a lot of siblings, so I had a lot of age that way in my free time at home. But in school and in this after school uh institution, we were always with with children of our own age. So even if if recess was with mixed age, maybe it wouldn't fix the problem.

Peter Gray: 18:40
So that that's a good point. I think that um if it were if it's a long enough period of time, what we observed with uh, and I've done some of the observ a little bit of observation myself, but others have done more observation of what happens. The schools call this play club, where where all the kids in this is in elementary school, so these are kids from kindergarten through fifth grade, so basically age five through eleven, all playing together. And they do age mix. They really do. Uh the little kids and bigger kids are playing together. Not always, they tend to play, you know, if you were to look at any given child, any given child would play a little more often with somebody their own age, but they're often uh playing across ages. The little kids love to love the older kids. The older kids like to play chase games and rough and tumble games with the little kids. And what we also see is that so one of the things with play club in in uh schools is we it teach, we give the instructions to the teachers who are monitors that while play club is going on, they're not teachers. Uh they're more like a lifeguard on an ocean beach. Their job is to save a life if they think a life is in danger. But other than that, let the kids solve their own problems. And one thing that we've observed, and the teachers have observed, is if they hold back, let's say they see a couple of those smaller children quarreling in some way, maybe even beginning to fight a little bit, uh, an older child will step in and say, Hey, what's the problem here? And that's so much more effective than if an adult stepped in. Uh the the older child is learning, hey, you know, I can I can be a caretaker for these younger kids. And the younger kids who kind of worship these older kids, you know, that's more that's more that's more effective than if an adult authority figure steps in and saw and and does it. They feel like they've been disciplined if an adult steps in. They feel like, in a way, that this is somewhat of an older peer who's telling them, you know, this just isn't the way we should be behaving, you know, and uh and it's more genuine when it comes from another kid who is uh older than you are. So uh so the age mixing aspect really um is is really really very valuable. You know, the the other thing is that we used to have in the United States, we had a lot of after school opportunities. When I was in college, I worked at a place. I was in, I I was I went to college in New York City, and this was in the 1960s, and I worked at a place called the Clinton Youth Center, and it was owned by the YMCA, but it was for kids who couldn't afford the real YMCA. And it was a rundown old, rickety old building, it had a kind of a gymnasium in it, there was a lot of art supplies and stuff that had been donated. It was on a dead end street in a neighborhood that at that time was largely African American and Puerto Rican. And um and so this was an after school program, and there would sometimes end And I I worked there and there was a manager of the program who was from the neighborhood, African American, and he had a stutter. He couldn't raise his voice if he wanted to, was the most gentle person I've ever known. He and I, if you counted me as an adult, I was 19 at the time, were the only adults there. And there would sometimes be 100 or 150 kids there playing indoors, playing outdoors, age mixed, the whole range of ages. I don't remember any discipline problems there, fortunately, because neither that manager nor I were capable of disciplining, you know, so the uh but they managed themselves. And that was um that was in the 1960s. In the United States, nobody can imagine that right now. Nobody can imagine that that would work. People would think there would just be chaos, that people wouldn't, the kids wouldn't be able to control themselves. We've changed in so many ways. And it used to be, I mean, kids would more often play with no adults around. So this was not an unusual situation. This was just a little bit more organized, the fact that there were a couple of adults and there was this equipment available. Um I was hired because I had been a basketball player in high school and I could kind of referee basketball games if they wanted basketball. So that was the um that was the situation. We don't have anything like that now that kids can go to in the United States.

Cecilie Conrad: 23:39
Are you familiar with um the French pedagogue Celeste Frenny?

Peter Gray: 23:45
What is his name?

Cecilie Conrad: 23:47
His name is Frenny, his last name is Frenet. Well, we have some schools in Europe based on his philosophy. Uh we have two for some reason in Copenhagen, and our oldest child was in this school, and it's an age-mixed school with a lot of um democracy, you would say. The children plan their own week on Mondays, evaluate on Fridays, do academic work before lunch, and more crafty work after lunch, and then they have this free time after like something like three o'clock until they're picked up, they can do whatever they want. And um, that would be 30 children of mixed age with two adults in the school time, and after school, I think it was two to three adults and the 200 children, so it's kind of the same as you described, yeah. Um, and it was not like there was always something someone watching the children because they learned very quickly the culture of looking after each other, and it was really beautiful to see how that really worked out. Because in a in a normal school and in like the public school in Denmark, we would find a classroom with 30 children, a very, very packed classroom, and people would complain that's too many children for one room.

Peter Gray: 25:05
Right, right.

Cecilie Conrad: 25:06
But once you set them free, it's not too many children for one room, it's just like five or six groups of a few children hanging out with each other, and before lunch, they have to study-ish. They could more or less do whatever they wanted. And then they had lunch with they had to which they cooked, like taking turns in the kitchen with professional cook. Yeah, and they had like these chores of cleaning up. It was a long time, it was an hour and a half of cooking and cleaning and playing and having a break, and then the afternoons were four workshops. It was beautiful, actually.

Peter Gray: 25:42
I think I think all of what we're talking about illustrates a principle that I've long believed. I don't uh there's a little bit of research supporting this, but I I wish there were more research. They I think that when children realize that there's no adult there to control them, or even if there isn't an adult, the adult's job is not to control them. The job is like being a lifeguard. That um that then children recognize, well, uh, we have to be the adults. We have to, it's you know, children, when there's an adult there, children might be pressing the rules. They might say, you know, I can do this, we can do this, we can do this. The adult will stop us if we can't. And so they're kind of always pushing the edges of what they're and so they're more likely to be undisciplined when there's an adult guarding them and trying to control them, and there's rules that they're supposed to be following that are adult um directive without the children's input to the rules. I think in those conditions, adults behildren behave more unruly than they do uh than they do when there's no adult around. Um one interesting uh kind of demonstration of this is New Zealand. This is a few years ago, and I think there's still a YouTube on it called the No Rules School, uh, where uh this uh the super the principal of this school in New Zealand uh decided that he was going to have a much longer recess and the kids would be age mixed at recess and there would be no rules. And uh the kids could do whatever they wanted. And um what he found was that uh it was actually there was a professor at a local university that encouraged this too and made observations about it. And what they found was there was there was less fighting, less bullying, people were less injuries when there were no rules than when there were rules. The kids were doing things in the video, they were climbing trees, they were doing all kinds of things that they had previously not been allowed to do. But because they were happily playing in ways that they wanted to play, and also because with no adult enforced rules, they recognized, well, I've I've got to make my own decision about what's safe or not. And uh children are pretty good at that, you know.

Cecilie Conrad: 28:25
So and they take care of each other if they've there are no elements.

Peter Gray: 28:32
They take care of each other, and and this is another thing that's part of the history of humanity that at least in the United States we've forgotten throughout history, older children always took care of younger children, you know. By the time a child was five or six, they might be responsible to take care of their three-year-old sibling, you know.

Cecilie Conrad: 28:51
Uh I have a lot of younger siblings, I know this personally in my life.

Peter Gray: 28:56
Same with me. I've got three younger brothers, and I was kind of responsible for them, you know.

Cecilie Conrad: 29:04
And it's a good life, it's not it's not something you should like protect the child from the responsibility of life because you're a person when you're born.

Jesper Conrad: 29:14
Peter, I have a question. Uh in in your book, uh free to learn, you um well, you know, you describe the school and explain how it can be seen as a prison. Um and now here we are at the same time talking about what could be done to better the school system. Um so part of me is we we are kind of radical in our choice of not schooling in Denmark. The percentage is so low, and we being there for 10 years more than uh are among the first uh really uh underschooled and started homeschooling in Denmark. So we we choose to not go in for the schooling, uh and it seems like there's a need to uh, as you also point out, normalize not going to school. Uh but at the same time, if I believe in the states is it around two to three percent that it's homeschooled, maybe, then it's many kids uh left behind if we don't try to fix the school. So I'm over here where I kind of don't want to try to fix the school, but at the same time it's a lot of human beings whose life can be better. Um the question is uh I don't know what the question is.

Cecilie Conrad: 30:37
Should we give up on the schools or shouldn't we try to fix them?

Peter Gray: 30:41
Yeah, that this is I think I think I've got it. Um, so I I kind of wear two hats. One of my hats is uh the one that played a role in in helping to found the Alliance for Self-Directed Education. That organization is aimed at helping people leave school, promoting uh homeschooling, especially the version of it that we call uh the most people call unschooling. Uh, I prefer the term self-directed education or be because unschooling is such a negative term.

Cecilie Conrad: 31:16
People don't get it. So we say unschooling because that's what they understand. But it's why would we have the negativity and the word school in defining what we do?

Peter Gray: 31:26
Right. I find if you if you tell people um when they ask about your children's school, if you say, Well, we unschool, that sounds like you're not you're you don't believe in education, your child is gonna be ignorant, it tells you what you're not doing, but it doesn't tell you what you're doing. So if you say, Well, you know, we do self-directed education, so well, that's sound that's you know, those are all positive terms, self-directed education, you know, halos around them. And so it's a much more positive thing. And then the question might be, well, what does that mean? And then you can have a real discussion about it, and people don't get defensive that you are saying unschooling, you're also kind of telling them if they're sending their child to school, you're kind of putting them on the defensive, too, about defending school. So that's the um so at any rate, that's a little bit of a digression. I the so uh you were a few years ago, you would have been right about two or three percent uh in the United States homeschooling. It's now 11%. Wow. It has really increased. It was before COVID, it was up to 5%. Lots of people left school during COVID uh for homeschooling and have not, and as far as I know, have not gone, many many have not gone back. So the the the last um the last uh uh poll on this was um was was shortly after it was uh was about a a little bit more than a year ago, and at that time it was 11% uh of families with school-age children or homeschooling their children. So this is a huge number. It's a huge increase. And um and I think what happened is with COVID, a lot of kids were home, and um parents, a lot of parents found it's not so bad to have them home. It's not as bad as I thought it would be. And so and and there was this distance education. So the kids were doing school on Zoom, and parents were supposed to be sitting there with their child, and so parents saw what's happening with school and they said, Oh Lord, you know, uh you know, I could do better than that, you know, and helping my child. My child isn't interested in that, but doing this other thing. So parents, I think a lot of parents, by no means the majority, but a lot of parents became encouraged about the idea of homeschooling. And they also saw for the first time if their child has more free time, that their child is actually doing things that are educational in the broad sense of education. They're they're involved in hobbies and play and doing things, and um and they're developing in very positive ways because they've got this free time that they didn't have before. So I think that um that that had a big effect. We'll see how this plays out down the road, but my prediction is that homeschooling is going to even continue to increase. I think that what is going to happen eventually, so my dream is that libraries will become the replacements for schools, that the new educational institutions will be libraries. Libraries are designed for self-directed education. Librarians, that's their job, is to help people learn what they want to learn rather than to tell them what they should learn, what they believe that they should learn. So uh, and so I that's why I'm interested in libraries. I think that as we have more and more homeschoolers, they're going to be using libraries more and more. And libraries will uh libraries are already publicly supported. So libraries bec and and there are libraries just like there are schools everywhere, there are libraries everywhere. So the infrastructure is there. It's already there, it's already there, it's in place.

Cecilie Conrad: 35:36
We would need some space for running and jumping and playing ball and learning to play musical instruments and maybe painting. And that's right. That's right.

Cecilie Conrad: 35:48
It's only one element.

Peter Gray: 35:50
So libraries need to, but the fact that they've already got makerspaces in them, the fact that some libraries now do have play in the library, some libraries have outdoor areas where kids play. So this is a minority of libraries. Well, actually, it's all it's probably half the libraries now, half the large libraries now have maker spaces, and and a growing number of libraries are doing. So I think as libraries, so my vision is as as more and more people leave public schools, some of that money, huge amount of money that towns are spending on public schools, some of that money should now become available for the libraries. And libraries ought to be able to expand and add a gymnasium, add uh you know, add a swimming pool, add uh uh libraries. There are already some libraries that are calling themselves community centers or they're connected with you know, this is a place everybody can come and socialize, and there are places you know that we call them cultural centers now in uh Denmark. Uh-huh.

Cecilie Conrad: 36:53
I don't know which best of Scandinavia, but now they they reframe it as cultural centers and they that's interesting. Like uh music rooms and and rooms that's great for yeah for public speaking and you know more things.

Jesper Conrad: 37:08
The two heads.

Peter Gray: 37:09
One is for fighting for self-direction, and the other head so the other hat is the is the part that helped to start the organization called Let Grow, which is uh Lenore Scanese is the president of it. And uh through Let Grow, we work with schools as well as communities in other ways, but primarily, as it turns out, is we're working with schools, public schools. And um and one of the ways we're working with schools is to is to encourage them to bring what the schools call play club, which I've already described into the school, this age-mixed opportunities for play. Uh we also uh, you know, when when we're invited to speak to uh groups of uh of teachers and principals at such schools, or sometimes groups of parents who at a particular school, we talk about the idea that education is far more than what you're learning in school. And that means that children need time beyond schoolwork. And um so we encourage the schools to give less homework, not more homework, recognizing the children need time to do other things outside of school. We encourage them to um uh uh we we encourage them to not drop the more creative kinds of things that schools used to do, but which they have been dropping in recent decades because of ever since the so-called No Child Left Behind bill, all the instruction is so oriented towards test taking that children are learning in very narrow way of sort of memorizing the stuff they need to know for the test rather than rather than drawing pictures and involved with with uh decorating the classroom, more more creative things that kids used to be able to do, which were kind of playful in the classroom. We're trying to encourage more of that. With some success, albeit in a minority of schools so far, a fairly small minority of schools, but a growing number of schools are getting interested in this. There's recogn more and more recognition that children um are being deprived of play and that schools should have some role in in reversing the harmful effects that schools have had of depriving children of play. So that's the other hat that I wear. Um and um and I feel like we've made some progress.

Cecilie Conrad: 39:47
I I I think we talked about um leaving the children out of sight and and the no rule school and and this um and made me think about maybe we have to re-educate the adults so that well if if the adult's presence in the children's life is uh harmful, maybe it's not because they are adults but more because they have this agenda and and they put on this policeman hat and make all these rules and and curricula curricula, curriculum in plural, I don't know. Um so it would be nice, uh, I think also to discuss could we fix the problem because we talk from a point of view of homeschooling where the children are close to the parents all of the time, more or less. Uh especially here in Europe, uh we don't have these, well many places we don't have a library to drop them off at. So if I don't want them in school, I will have them in the home. And as I work from home, I'm in the home too. So even though I want to give my children a lot of freedom, I will know what they do all the time because I'm there. So maybe we could also rethink the role of the adult as a companion more than a controlling element in the life of the child, or do you think it's it's inherent in in just being the adult that it's the problem?

Peter Gray: 41:29
That we have this problem. Well, I I think in in I can speak primarily from the viewpoint of being in the United States, and which is different from different from Scandinavia, certainly. The Scandinavians, uh my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, children are still pretty free to play outdoors. That they can go ride their bike, they can play in the park, they can take public transportation without an adult. In the United States, they really can't do that. And the reason they can't is that the whole society, and I don't blame parents any more than I blame anybody else for this, the whole society has come to the conclusion that a parent who allows their child to go and play in the park without an adult watching them allows their child to take a bicycle to school. Even we're even the 12-year-old or 13-year-old child, let alone a much younger child, that that is a negligent parent. And in fact, uh parents have been arrested for allowing their.

Jesper Conrad: 43:32
So you've got you've got to drag your child with in.

Peter Gray: 43:37
Yeah, I mean, this used to be common all the time. P kids didn't want to, you know, the mom just needed to go in and get something and didn't want to drag the kids in. And so, but now we've we've become so um this is, you know, we we begin there were this really began in the nineteen eighties. This trend began in the nineteen eighties. There were two cases in the United States of young boys being um abducted who were playing outdoors, and one of them was murdered. Two cases. You know, this is out of millions and millions of children.

Cecilie Conrad: 44:19
I just heard that. Yeah.

Peter Gray: 44:20
Yeah. So the result of that, well, the result of that was that a huge campaign against allowing your children to be outdoors. Parents, because of that campaign, um, you know, you would hear on the radio, you would hear public service announcements, do you know where your child is now? You know, and if the implication is you're a negligent parent if you don't. And so that changed people's views of what proper parenting is. So proper parenting means that you always know where your child is. You and and and the belief got spread that this is very common, that there are all these weird people out there in the world who want to steal your child, molest your child, whatever it is. The truth of the matter is these crimes are extraordinarily rare. They never were very common. They're more rare now than ever, partly because children aren't outdoors, admittedly, but they're extraordinarily rare. You know, but the truth is anything can happen. You can get hit by lightning. It's extraordinarily unlikely, but it can happen, right? And so parents have this vision in their mind that if their child is out there, something terrible could happen. Some terrible person could snatch their child away. There's also a lot of fear of traffic, but traffic isn't the primary motivator because even in areas where there essentially is no traffic, or no more traffic than there was when I was a kid in the 1950s, parents are still not letting their kids out. So it's a change in what is regarded as moral. You're regarded as an immoral parent, as an as an unfit parent, if you don't have somebody supervising your child all the time. And once it becomes a moral issue, common sense kind of goes out the window. You know, uh you you just feel like you're doing something wrong. Your neighbors are gonna your neighbors are gonna feel like you're doing something wrong, and God forbid they may even call the police. And this does occasionally happen. So the another thing that we're doing through the Let Grow organization is we're trying to change this. We're trying to change this through the state legislators, legislature processes. So what we've been doing is promoting uh kind of lobbying for laws that we call uh uh reasonable independence laws. They're they're more informally often called the free range kids laws, which state where the legislators pass a law that is essentially says that in this state, parents have the right to decide if an activity is safe for their child or not. And that parent and that parents can't be convicted of a crime unless it's obvious to any reasonable observer that what they've done, that that that this is an unsafe situation. So if you were to leave a an infant in the park all night, that clearly would be negligence. But that but having a a 10-year-old and a six-year-old play together in the park, that would not be. So there's always big debate. We've we've passed this law in several states already now. And um and it's beginning to change the culture in those places because at least the parents feel that they're not gonna be they're not gonna have their kids taken away from them. They're not gonna be put in jail, they're not gonna be fined if they allow their child to do these things, and so it's encouraging more parents in those states to do it. We're we're now this is just coming up in another state in Virginia, and we're gonna be lobbying with the Virginia legislature for that kind of a change.

Cecilie Conrad: 48:32
Is this really I'm sorry, I'm just baffled. Is this really true? Like kids in America, if they live in walking distance from small forests, let's say, they can't go by themselves.

Peter Gray: 48:43
That's right. They wouldn't just go and you know, pick there are you know, let me let me tell you how extreme this is. So I live in I live in a suburban area where there's essentially never a crime. You know, it's a completely safe area. Um I know there are kids living here, living in this area. I never see them. The only time I ever saw them was during the COVID lockdown when they would be outside playing in their yard. But other than that, uh now I never see them. What I do see is parents sitting with the child waiting for the school bus. They're sitting with the child. The child isn't even out there by themselves. And these are sometimes 10 or 11-year-old children. I also see them parents whose house is a little back from the street, they'll drive their car up to the street, they'll sit in the car and wait for even when it's not raining, they'll sit in the car, wait for the child to get off the school bus, and then drive back up their driveway to their house. This is the norm in the United States. Not even trusting your child to get off the school bus and run up your driveway to your house. I mean, this is this is insane. It's absolutely I'm like just shocked.

Cecilie Conrad: 50:10
What about older? What if they are like 14?

Peter Gray: 50:13
Uh so even 14-year-olds, you don't see it. I think that there are some. There are some kids by the time they're th by the time they're 14, by the time they're in high school, there are some kids who are walking to school.

Cecilie Conrad: 50:27
I mean, when they're 16, they can drive.

Peter Gray: 50:29
And when they're 16, and then when they're 16, some of them are now driving to school. Is isn't that crazy that some somehow suddenly go from not being allowed to ride a bicycle or walk to school to now you can drive to school and endanger other people? So yeah, no, it's true.

Cecilie Conrad: 50:47
So you go from that. I'm not sure that you can drive to school.

Peter Gray: 50:50
So so this is and then you go to college and you're yeah and you have not had experience being independent. And one of the things that's happening, this is a huge deal. I wrote a blog post. If people are interested, I wrote a blog post on this a few years ago. But there, but there is really a crisis in you in American universities. It's the crisis of young people going off to college who are not yet prepared to take on the adult responsibilities of college. They are emotionally fragile, they aren't used to, they aren't used to being in a situation where um where they they might be called bad names, they might be, you know, this gets called bullying, they might be, they they have breakdowns about issues that they that they that are you know that are hard to deal with. Like, so for example, a romantic breakup might be cause for such depression among a college student today that they'll say, I can't go to classes, I need uh I they'll they'll they need this they need psychotherapy to deal with this and so on and so forth. Well, you know, a romantic breakup, breakup with your boyfriend or girlfriend, that's hard. It is hard. It is, but it's something that let's say you've been a kid growing up in a normal, what used to be a normal kid environment. Your best friend today hates you tomorrow, right? You're you're used to it. You're used to it in some sense. It's hard, but you're used to it, and you know it isn't the end of the world. And so you've you're used to you've you've been bullied to some degree, but you've figured out how to deal with bullies when you're out there with other kids on your own. You you get lost and you find your way home. You fail at some of the things you want to do, you get teased, you get all these things. This is these are kind of hard things to deal with, but by dealing with them, you learn how to deal with them. And you're learning how to deal with them when they're somewhat smaller issues than when you're older. And you and and that's how children grow up to have kind of resilience and a certain kind of mental toughness that allows them not to have emotional breakdowns.

Peter Gray: 53:07
Right now, we college students are having the the college counseling services and therapy services are overwhelmed. Huge numbers of students suffering from anxiety, from depression, relatively high rates of suicide, suicidal ideation. Uh, these are all at record levels, not just among college students, among younger kids too. But it's very much affecting the environment of higher education uh right now. But this is what happens when we overprotect children as they're growing up, they don't learn how to protect themselves.

Cecilie Conrad: 53:51
So that takes us back to the education of the parents because it seems to me that the parental strategy that you describe is of parents maybe not being emotionally ready ready to be parents. I mean, you love your children to the moon and back, but you have to face the fact that life is sometimes tough and you can't protect them from everything. They have to actually experience something and very often something not very nice, and then they grow up, and and uh maybe your role as the parent is to be there while they experience all these things, like a resonancing or bouncing, someone to talk to, someone to help you, someone to hold you, and then when you're like 15 or 20, you're ready to do it by yourself. But if you that's exactly right, children from everything, then they have no experience.

Peter Gray: 54:42
This is exact this is the message that we're trying to get out. And so, you know, we've been through a period where parents think that they're being good parents, they're doing something good, they're protecting their child, they love their child, they're protecting their child, they don't want their child to be bullied, they don't want their, they don't want their child to be risked, they don't want their child to get injured, they're protecting their child, they're doing a good thing. And the educational system believes it's doing a good thing. They believe in in academic education, and they believe more academic education is better than less academic education. So here we've got people doing what they think is a good thing, but what they don't recognize is too much of it is not a good thing. And so they keep doing more and more of it. And um, and so the uh and we need to reverse this. We need to start reversing it. And so we're trying that we're trying very hard to get the message out. I would love to get this message um in the United States to pediatricians. I've just submitted, and it's under review, an article um in the Journal of Pediatrics, because many, at least in the United States, many parents get their parenting advice from their pediatricians. They take their kids to the pediatrician, even all the way through teenage years. Um and if I could get pediatricians to talk to parents about, you know, it's important to protect your child from real dangers, but it's also important that children, as they're growing up, experience more and more independence. And um and if if pediatricians could have discussions with the parents, you know, in your neighborhood, and given your child and so on, what are the kinds of things that your child might be able to do more on his or her own? Could they walk to school, could they go out and play without without an adult there? Could they do this and take to start engaging, get pediatricians? The whole the point of this article that I've written is that the a lot of the suffering that uh children are engaged in is the the that children are experiencing now is the result of their the children not developing what uh researchers call an internal locus of control. A sense that I I am I have the power to solve my own problems. I have the power to do things on my own, to take initiative, I can protect myself. I am not a victim of the of the outside world. Um I you know, things can happen to me and I can deal with it. That's the that's an internal locus of control. Research has shown that has declined, understandably. That there are there are ways of uh testing this locus of control. Internal locus of control has declined. Children more and more feel like they're victims of situations that they can't control. Understandably, if they're not allowed to learn how to control situations, well it's true, kind of, isn't it? It is true that they don't have control, they they don't they're not allowed to have control, so then they believe that they could have control if they had the had the opportunity so this even if they can get experience, so if we could get pediatricians to understand this and start working with parents, that would be one way of educating parents.

Cecilie Conrad: 58:14
That's a good plan. That's a really good plan.

Jesper Conrad: 58:18
Yeah, Peter, what what is it? Um I I uh read your book recently, uh, and I know that you you started this dive down this road uh due to your son uh and moving him to uh the Saltbury Valley School. But uh now your son is a grown-up and you still keep fighting this fight. Uh so why what is it that keeps the fire ignited in you? Why is it you continue? And I'm very happy you do.

Peter Gray: 58:47
Yes. Well, I I think I think that the primary motivation, um, you know, there's maybe it's uh an ego thing to believe that you can help change the world, you know. But you can't you know I I grew up in a family of idealists. Um you know, we were we were a relatively working class family, but my parents were always involved wherever we lived and trying to make the community better. They grew up believing that's part of what life should be, is you should be working to make the world better. And um and so this is a way that you know I'm feeling. And I also think, you know, once you see it, once once you see that self-directed education works, once you once you look at it in this way, it becomes so obvious. And you begin to think, well, everybody ought to see this. You know, this ought to be obvious to people. You know, the things we've been talking about here, that children need, you know, what shouldn't it be obvious that children need uh experiences? I mean, the whole purpose of childhood is to learn how to be independent. If you never have experience being independent, you're not gonna learn how to be an adult. You're not gonna learn how to be independent. So these things seem so obvious that it it then you really you feel like you look at kids, I look at those kids getting on the school bus with their parents sitting there in the car, and my heart goes out to those kids, you know. And so you you feel like you've really gotta work on this. So the other thing, of course, is that you know, at first when I did the study of the Sudbury Valley School many years ago, I was a concerned parent. I wanted to know if my child would be okay going to such a difficult school. But he I knew he would be happy there, he was happy there, but would he uh be able to make a living as an adult? Would he if he wanted to go on to higher education, could he? I had the same questions any parent would have who would think of doing something so radical. You probably had questions when you decided, uh, you know, and so you so the and there hadn't been any any studies of children who had done such education, uh, any systematic studies of what they'd done. So it was academically very interesting to me. And then I got academically interested in how children learn. So there so not only is there the cause, but there's the a real academic interest on my part on what what are the what what are the instincts that children come into the world with that allow them to learn on their own? Their curiosity, their playfulness, their desire to take control, their willfulness, their desire to grow up. These are part of normal human nature, and to study this part of human nature and how it plays itself out in different situations. I did a little study of children in hunter-gatherer cultures by interviewing anthropologists who had studied hunter-gatherer cultures. Um and so there are always more questions. Uh the role of age mixing, and so there are so there are academic um motives as well as um as human uh justice motives for my for my doing this work.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:02:22
I think it's amazing you do it. Yeah, I wouldn't risk questioning. It's really really good.

Jesper Conrad: 01:02:29
I'm very thankful for you, Peter, because um I remember when Cecilia came and had had read your book all those years back and wanted us to start down this road. I was the normal dad who was like out of work and the public school system was good enough for me. What is this nonsense you're talking about? Uh and and uh the the long story short is 10 years down the road, we there's so many doors that have opened for us that we didn't need to put our child child uh children to a school meant that we could actually live a location-independent life. We weren't weren't forced to be next to a school for all these years, and and we have taken that to the extreme by having this full-time traveling lifestyle uh together with our children. And and uh you are among the the people we have to uh thank uh for that. So I'm very grateful for all your work.

Peter Gray: 01:03:24
I'm glad to hear that. It is interesting to me that um it seems like in general, uh moms are uh more ready for this than dads are. I've heard from many moms who say thank you for your book. I gave it to my husband, and it finally convinced him to go in this.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:03:51
I think maybe he trusted me that I read it.

Jesper Conrad: 01:03:56
But the trust problem from the parents sometimes uh we also need it when we sometimes console people that uh that they do not they they are afraid.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:04:08
They but that's the general problem we're talking about about the parents and the whole climate around the child, uh, teachers, parents, pediatricians alike, that they don't trust the child to go out and get some bruises and find his or her own way. Um because what? We are afraid that we didn't do it well enough, that uh that we were like not good enough parents, maybe that our children get hurt in a way that can never get fixed. Maybe that we made the wrong choices for our children, and now we have to live with the fact that we ruined their life. It's it's like really scary questions, and I think most parents never really get to stop and think about that this is this is a big chunk of inner work that we have to do if we want to have children. We have to live with this. We have this responsibility, even though I believe in the freedom of my children and their right to make their own choices, it's still somewhat my responsibility that they have a good life.

Peter Gray: 01:05:12
I think that I think that's right. I think I think that we works sometimes. The truth of the matter is I think that parents have less influence than most people think parents have. You know, that your kids are gonna be your kids, they're gonna be who they are. And and um, you know, there's this concept of a good enough parent. A good enough parent, you know, doesn't doesn't beat the child, doesn't, you know, doesn't provides for the child, is there for the child, and so on and so forth. And oftentimes I think the good enough parent is is the best parent. The parents who try to be who try to be super parents, they're the ones who are doing too much for their child, who are protecting their child too much, who are trying to control the child because they see the child as their product. And I think the better attitude towards a child is that. You know, this is somebody who's come and visited. This is somebody who's entered our home. And our job is not to shape this person, not to tell this person who they are, but to um help this person um uh find out who they are, to provide for this person what they seem to need and want, to understand this person. This is a person, this is a stranger who's entered our our life, and we uh and uh who is in some sense dependent on us, very clearly dependent on us when young, and um, but is going to ultimately leave, is going to ultimately move on. And uh, you know, whereas ideally your spouse is with you forever, it's kind of almost appropriate to say my spouse is my better half, but it's not appropriate to say that about your child. Your child is your child is an independent person, is going to be gone on, leaving, leaving the home. Uh hopefully it'll still be a loving relationship. You'll see, but you can't guarantee that. And and so, and also you have no, no matter, no matter I think what here's something that I really think is one of the things that that that leads many families to who even come to the intellectual understanding that maybe homeschooling or unschooling or a democratic school would be better for my child than the typical school. I think there's a there's a a way of thinking that I even went through uh when my child, when the when the question arose with my child, and it's it's this suppose something awful happens with my child, suppose my child in developmentally, suppose my child grows up to be insane in some way, have schizophrenia, or uh becomes a criminal, or um becomes unemployed, uh whatever. Suppose that happens. If I've done all the usual things, if I've sent my child to the typical school and that happens, I'm not likely to be blamed for it. I did all right things in people's minds. But if I did something unusual, I sent it, I homeschooled him, I sent him to Sudbury Valley, I did this or that, then the fear is I don't know if this would really happen, but the fear is aha. That's well you can't know if it would really happen, but the chances are it would.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:08:41
I mean, I I feel I really clearly feel that we stand how would I frame phrase this? Like we are being judged much harder. And if my child has tomato sauce on his t-shirt, then I'm just such a neglector. It's just tomato sauce on the t-shirt. It happens all the time, but I'm being looked at. My children can't have like dreadlocks or holes on their knees, or because we we're being looked at in in a different way because we homeschool, and we had we had to face that at some point and we talk to the children about it. You're going out there in the world, everybody knows that you're the unschooled, homeschooled children. You're representing the tribe or whatever the and you have to look good and behave.

Peter Gray: 01:09:35
I think that's right. And I and I think that's a really significant issue.

Peter Gray: 01:09:39
My son calls it defensive parenting, that um we we parents, we wanna part of our way we parent is dictated by our feeling about how other people will judge us. And it's everything from where you send your child to school or don't send your child to school to things like on the playground, if your child is gets messy or your child is uh rowdy or does something looks risky, how are the other parents judging you for allowing your child to do that? And would you and you step in not because you really think you have to step in for your child's sake, but you step in because you don't want the other parents, even if they're parents who don't know you, you know, to be judging you negatively. This I think this is a strong phenomenon.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:10:29
And um that's what's driving the whole fear-based parenting of the states that you just described with that's right, not being lit.

Jesper Conrad: 01:10:39
Yeah, and and Peter, we experienced a really weird change uh as we unschooled. We have been unschooling for more than 10 years now, but the first five of them were in was in a normal short uh suburb in co near Copenhagen and uh suburb was it? No, no, it was in Copenhagen, but we we experienced much more judgment when we were the the the weird ones.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:11:04
We have to explain ourselves all the time.

Jesper Conrad: 01:11:06
But now when we travel full-time, people are like, oh, that's interesting, oh that must be fun. And I'm like, we're doing the same thing.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:11:13
It's the exact same education, we just move everything around.

Jesper Conrad: 01:11:17
But then the the judgment became different. It was more, they were more interested.

Peter Gray: 01:11:22
I did a study some years ago, uh, along with my colleague Gina Riley of um unschooling families, was mostly moms who responded to the survey. And one of our questions was what is the most difficult thing about unschooling? Far and away, the most difficult thing in their response was exactly what you're talking about, having to justify it to other people. Uh, and the second most difficult thing almost as much was having to justify it to myself. That that's that voice in the back of your head that comes from other people, that comes from your own school, like schooly experiences, it comes from the fact that for generations everybody's gone to school. It's telling you maybe I'm doing something crazy here. That you really have to work to get over that. Um, so those were the by far, it wasn't that it's it's so hard to have the kids home, or that it's so hard to have uh one parent not being able to work outside the house because we need a parent home, at least when the kids are young and so on and so forth. That wasn't the big problem. It wasn't and most of them, you know, were financially able to figure things out and so on and so forth. And and it wasn't really concerned about their about their how their child was doing at this point, because they could see their child was doing fine. It was it was the fact that they and we we also we did a survey of grown unschoolers and we asked the unschoolers what's the biggest disadvantage, not quite to the same degree as the parents, but uh they also said the biggest disadvantage is I get tired of having to explain this to everybody all the time, you know.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:13:09
Our 14-year-old daughter and our 17-year-old son, they say it uh they get really annoyed when they have to explain the most annoying thing, is the two most frequent questions they get once they say they're not in school. First question is, can you read? And this is like almost adults, right? Obviously, I can't read, and in most cases they talk to the people in their second language, which is in and of itself, like and the second question is do you have any friends? And it's just annoying, and they have to explain this over and over like these things that for us and for them are obvious. Obviously, I can read, it's not that being the problem, and right obviously I can talk to people. I'm talking to you right now, it's not like I don't have a social skill. So and it's the same thing over and over. It's going, it's the same thing all the time. Can you read? Do you have any friends?

Peter Gray: 01:14:17
It's interesting, yeah. Yeah, reading

Peter Gray: 01:14:20
is reading is an interesting issue because uh in school, as you know, children uh I have yet to find somebody who doesn't learn to read by the time they're a teenage, by the time they're 18, let's say, but the age of learning how to read varies tremendously, even within the same family. One child will learn to read at four, and another one will learn to read at 10 or 11. So it isn't too uncommon for a kid to not know how to read uh by the age that if they were in school, they ought to be reading or they'd be way behind. That's not too uncommon, but it's not a problem because whenever they do learn to read, they and and then and then and for kids who don't learn to read later, I think it's largely because they've learned they're doing so many other interesting things that don't involve reading. They're developing other kinds of abilities, other parts of their brain, and so on and so forth.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:15:12
And um It's actually hard to stop them. I mean, what would you do to make sure a child would not learn to read? It would take a lot of effort, actually, in this present day. You're surrounded by texts all the time.

Peter Gray: 01:15:26
I I did a little informal study that was just through my Psychology Today blog where I asked readers, I was looking for readers who had a child who had been diagnosed with dyslexia while they were in public school and who could not read while they were in public school, and who was then taken out of public school for homeschooling or some kind of democratic schooling where reading wasn't an issue. And I asked them, so what I wanted to know is when you took the child out of school, what happened with their reading? So these were people diagnosed with dyslexia, which people believe it's not true, but people believe this is a brain disorder that prevents children from being able to learn how to read, or that they could only learn how to read if they're trained by a specialist who knows exactly how to train them, uh, somebody who has this disorder. Well, I got, I forget exactly how many responses I got, but it was about 15 responses, 12 or 15 responses, something like that. Maybe a biased sample, but in every single case that responded, they said my child learned to read after I took them out of school. But not necessarily right away. And what was interesting to me is every one of them said the primary problem why my child wasn't reading was anxiety. The child was so frightened of reading. The child, you know, like if you're a slow reader, if you haven't learned how to read when the other kids can read and you're being called on to read in front of everybody, that's terrifying, you know, and you can't do it. That's terrifying. So you develop this mental block, and then if you get a diagnosis, dyslexia, that's almost a relief. This is an explanation, right? This is you're off the hook. Yeah. Oh, I've got dyslexia. You know, so so so and then and then there, and then there's and once you've got dyslexia, then sort of the motivation to learn how to read. I can't learn how to read. My brain is not capable of it. So, at any rate, what happens with all of these, what the parents said, one parent after another, is what I had to do was not ask him to read, not tell him to read. I read to him. I I uh some of them initially tried to teach reading and they backed off because the child wouldn't do it. The child hates reading, doesn't want to do it. But everyone, if they backed off, they waited until the child wanted to learn to read. Some of the children just taught themselves. The parents didn't even know how they learned to read, they learned to read. And others asked for some help. Two or three of them used the kind of program that's been designed for dyslexia, but most of them did not. But even that program was useless until the child was ready to overcome, to want to learn how to read, and no longer was terrified by the idea of learning to read. In my study of the graduates of the Sudbury Valley School, too, there were, this was a long time ago, um, there were two of the graduates of the school who both told me they had come to the school unable to read, diagnosed with dyslexia. They'd come at age 15, they couldn't read at age 15. Both of them told me they'd come at different times in the history of the school. Both of them told me that they learned how to read within a few months of being at Sudbury Valley. And I asked them, well, how could that happen? And both of them told me in different words, essentially this. One of them put it in exactly these words. For the first time in my life, nobody cared if I could read. And that was such a relief. So what I can picture is I overcame my fear of it. It doesn't matter there. People would say, oh, that's cool, you can't read. You must have a great memory, you know. So the uh so that so then they could learn to read because it was no longer afraid. And both of them did ask for some help, and the a staff member helped them a little bit. Nothing like the training that occurs in school, but just a little help pointing out that the letters have sounds and so on. And and they picked it up and learned to read. Both of them went on to higher education uh without any kind of a disability uh label uh and did well. So, you know, I I'm I've become convinced that a lot of what we call learning in the United States, I don't know how it is in parts of Europe, but in the United States, huge numbers of children get diagnosed with one another kind of learning disability. And I'm sure that these are school-induced and largely anxiety, and uh a lot of it comes from trying to teach children skills too young when they're still not ready for it. Some kids are ready for it, some kids really they're interested in learning how to read. And they do learn, many kids learn how how to read before they're ever start school, um, pretty much on their own. Uh, but but most kids aren't really interested in learning how to read when they're six or five or six or seven. Um, but by the time they're seven or eight or nine, most kids are. Uh but some kids aren't until they're older than that.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:20:59
But we have stories like that within our own group of four children.

Jesper Conrad: 01:21:03
Yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:21:04
We have the first one, she was interested. But the day she she started in that uh school I described earlier. And the day she started, she said, now I'm in school, now I can read. And magically it was true. It was really fun. Uh now she's a writer, which is like she's a great success with that. We never really taught her a lot.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:21:27
Uh, the second child decided he would never read, he found it the most difficult task ever, and we had to, with our first homeschool child, face this uh thank you for your books, uh, challenge of just being okay with it. He was, I think, 13 when he decided, now there is this book, I cannot get it as an audiobook, and it's not being translated into my language, so I will A have to learn to speak English and B have to learn to read to get the second book in the series. So he decided to do that and he did it, uh, which is quite amazing. And the third child had learned to read long before that because she just learned it by herself when she was four. Okay. And the fourth, we thought we had another late reader because he was eight and not reading. Well, he was seven and not reading and not interested and not doing anything particular about it, but at that time we'd started traveling all over Europe. And when he finally started reading the same week he was eight, he started reading in three languages.

Jesper Conrad: 01:22:40
Wow.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:22:42
So I think that was the explanation because even though it's the same system, it's not exactly the same system, right? The letters don't produce the same sounds in the different languages and all this. So he he could read in English, Danish, and Spanish the same week.

Peter Gray: 01:22:58
Amazing.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:22:59
Oh, I'm just saying this, like for the listeners to hear that there's so many different circumstances and personalities and and ways this happens. And in my experience, please leave the children alone with this. They will read just as they walk. We don't teach them to walk, we don't have to teach them to read. We answer their questions just as we hold their hand when they're small and they want to be held, and then they learn to walk just as they learn to read. It's such a big issue for homeschoolers. I wish it wasn't that. Such a waste of time and worry.

Peter Gray: 01:23:39
And I think the I think part of the pro part of the issue is if you're in school, if you're going to a typical school, then it truly is important that you learn how to read by second or third grade at latest, because you'll be hopelessly behind if you don't. You everything depends on reading. Everything you do in the classroom depends on reading. And so, and you will get labeled, you will get um, and there's even research showing that late readers who are in school are boys at least, who are late readers, are much more likely to become um delinquents in various ways, get into crime, do drugs and alcohol and so on as they become teenagers than kids who um who uh learn to read on schedule. So you really, if you're in a typical school, it is actually very important that your child learn to read. But if you're not in a typical school, there's so many ways to learn, and that's especially true today. I mean, kids are using YouTube, kids are, you know, so many ways to learn, so many interesting things to do, um that there's no reason to worry about it. And reading is not there's no critical period for learning to read. You can learn to read at any age. There are people who um, you know, um, not that I'm a big supporter of Fidel Castro's Cuba, but Castro wiped out illiteracy in Cuba in a few years by sending school children out to live with the peasants and teach them how to read. You know, they could learn how to read at any age. Um the um so the so there's no and reading isn't that difficult. I mean, compared to learning your native language, reading is simple. It's just kind of a code for for for for pres you know for putting your language into it. It's not that is and and the fact that kids can learn to read, my son was one was an early reader. He could, and it was somewhat of a mystery to me how he learned, though in retrospect I can see it, but he could read well before he was four. He could read pr reasonably well by the time he was three, but he could he was reading um and it was and it was clear that he got in he got in, and who knows why somebody gets interested in reading, but I assume he was interested in reading because I was a graduate student all the time, I was reading all the time. His mom was a big reader, she read to him a lot, and so he came into the world probably looking around and saying, Well, reading seems to be what people do in this world. I better learn how to read. They don't seem to do much else, so I better learn how to read. And he taught the way he taught himself to read, uh we would we lived in New York City at the time, and I'd carry him in a backpack, and his mom did too, and she was out, and he'd be looking the same direction we were looking. And I think it was probably his first actual word was what's that say? And he'd point to a sign and say, What's that say? And I'd say, I'd say, exit. It says exit. So his actual first reading word was exit. And he'd ask that, and then he does the same thing about serial boxes in the morning. He'd point to the words on the box, he'd say, What's that say? So he was he was getting our help, but he was insisting on the help. He was asking for it. We weren't trying to teach him how to read, he was teaching himself how to read and using us for that for that purpose. There there have now been studies of pre so-called precocious readers, readers who learn before they're of school age. And um, and that seems to be the rule. It doesn't seem to be the case that these are kids whose parents decided I'm gonna start teaching them to read when they're two or three years old. These are kids who the parents discover that this child could read and they see that the child is is um asking for help in these kinds of ways. And then at some point, when the child is reading and you know the child enjoys books, you start getting books from the library for the child to read. So but but this can you You know, on the other hand, I'll give you another story at the other the opposite end that the farthest opposite end that I'm aware of. I used to say that there's never been a graduate of Sudbury Valley School who couldn't read. And then somebody found me who uh turns out was a graduate of Sudbury Valley School. And he said, I left the school not able to read. I was 18 years old and I couldn't read. I defended my thesis there orally. You have to defend a thesis in order to graduate that says that you're basically on to go on. But after I graduated, I decided to go to college. And so I knew I had to learn how to read. So I spent a couple of months after school after uh Sudbury Valley learning how to read. He went on to major in philosophy of all things. You know, he reads really highfalutin philosophy books. He went on to start a, he's now the founder of a school that's modeled after a learning center that's in some ways modeled after Sudbury Valley. But he's a big reader, more so than I am. And uh uh so it shows that you can you can learn how to read anytime, and it's no big loss if you don't learn to read until considerably later in life than most people learn how to read.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:29:22
I agree.

Jesper Conrad: 01:29:23
And I just wish that everybody knew because it's such a waste of good quality time of childhood to sit there and rehearse the alphabet and read out loud when they are not ready, when it's not enough parenting uh ease of and I remember being so afraid that with my boy who first started to read at 13, I was like, when will he learn?

Cecilie Conrad: 01:29:48
Yeah, you were really scared.

Jesper Conrad: 01:29:49
Yeah, yeah. And that was of the outside judgment.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:29:53
Oh, your homeschool son cannot read, and it's like it was a great challenge because there was our first homeschool child, and he said it out loud, I'm not going to learn to read, just so you know. So you were like, please, and then you know, yeah, and then his sister learned to read, and he said, Now I have even less reason to read. If I need anything, I'll just ask my sister. Yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 01:30:21
But Peter, it's uh it's about time. We would love to yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:30:25
I have another big theme, so I think I'll call you back for another talk, another time.

Peter Gray: 01:30:33
Well, this has been fun, so I've uh I've enjoyed talking with you.

Jesper Conrad: 01:30:36
Uh Peter, if people want to uh dive deeper into reading uh all this all your different work, what where would you suggest they should go?

Peter Gray: 01:30:48
Well, that so uh they should go to my psychology today blog. So I do a blog called Freedom to Learn for Psychology Today. Uh there are about 210 essays that I've written on these kinds of topics there that are available, but also for people who want to read any of my academic writings, and my academic writings are very readable. I I write pretty much in a way that anybody, anybody who can read can read them, right?

Cecilie Conrad: 01:31:20
Uh the um or they can hear them as they are available as audiobooks, actually.

Peter Gray: 01:31:25
Yeah, as far as I know. My my book is an audiobook, but yeah, but the my academic articles are also many of them are available on the psychology day blog. So if you go to the author page, which is not always obvious how to get to the author page, but if you click, if you go to any of my blog posts and click on my photo, it takes you to the author page. And in the left-hand column are PDFs of many of my published academic articles that are Maybe the link and don't know to make it easy.

Peter Gray: 01:31:57
Yeah. And so those can um those are available.

Jesper Conrad: 01:32:02
Yeah. And if people want to know more about the the two organizations, uh self-directed and the other one, etc.

Peter Gray: 01:32:10
So those they're pretty easy to find. So the Alliance for Self-Directed Education, ASD, A S D E, you can just Google Alliance for Self-Directed Education. Um, the website uh has a lot of information. There are many, you can find there, um there are a lot of resources for people involved in unschooling or for um people wanting to start a democratic school, that kind of thing. Um and um and the other is let grow, and it's just if you just type in let grow as one word, uh letgrow.org, uh you come to the website for that. Perfect.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:32:50
We put the links in the show notes.

Jesper Conrad: 01:32:52
We'll put the links in the show notes and thanks a lot for your time.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:32:55
Thank you very much.

Peter Gray: 01:32:56
Thank you. Have a great day, bye bye.