What would happen if we completely reimagined education? Dr. Peter Gray takes us on a provocative journey through the hidden history and troubling foundations of our modern school system.
Gray's path to becoming an educational revolutionary began with his own son's rebellion. "School is prison," his fourth-grader declared, triggering a family crisis that led to a radical decision: enrolling him in Sudbury Valley School, where children direct their own learning without traditional classes, grades, or tests. Skeptical about whether this approach would prepare his son for "real life," Gray launched a research study of Sudbury graduates – and what he discovered transformed his understanding of education forever.
The conversation reveals surprising historical truths about our educational model. Far from being merely an industrial-era creation, schools originated during the Protestant Reformation as instruments of religious indoctrination and obedience training. Children were physically punished for failing to memorize and recite lessons properly. While modern schools have abandoned corporal punishment, they maintain the same fundamental structure: rewarding compliance rather than fostering genuine curiosity or critical thinking.
Most compelling is Gray's challenge to the "preparation" mindset in education – the notion that each grade prepares students for the next academic level rather than for life itself. Sudbury graduates prove this sequential preparation unnecessary; when motivated by genuine interest, children learn rapidly and efficiently without years of preparatory instruction. Many Sudbury alumni have entered elite colleges and successful careers despite never experiencing traditional schooling.
Gray concludes with a powerful observation about what children truly need: time and freedom to explore, play, and discover themselves outside of constant adult direction. Today's children are increasingly "imprisoned around the clock" between rigid school environments and overprotective home settings, deprived of the independence necessary for healthy development. Perhaps true education isn't about curriculum at all – it's about creating space for children to become themselves.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
okay, here we are another episode shift, that
podcast coming to you.
I have such a great treat hereI have peter gray coming in um
to talk about kids, school,school play outdoor, and we're
(00:26):
going to do all this in 25minutes.
Peter, thanks so much forjoining me today.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Peter, I'd love to start just kind of getting a
read on the really importantmoments in your career that
brought you to where you aretoday.
Were there some foundationaloccurrences, meetings, things
where your career shifted tobring you closer to where you
(00:57):
are today?
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Well, the real shift, as I explain in my book Free to
Learn at the beginning of thebook, occurred when my own son
was rebelling at school.
He had been fighting the schoolsystem from kindergarten through
fourth grade and in fourthgrade it really reached a crisis
point.
He was very clearly, you know,he was coming home every day and
(01:23):
saying school is prison, you'resending me to prison.
His mother and I were regularlybeing called in by the teacher.
What are we going to do aboutthis child who is very
systematically rebelling againstthe classroom procedures, the
(01:49):
classroom procedures?
And ultimately you know I won'ttell the whole story because
people can read it in my bookbut ultimately it reached the
point where his mother and Idecided he really had won this
argument.
We had to be on his side, notagainst him.
He needed us.
He was genuine in his hatred,truly hatred and anger about
(02:14):
school, public school, and so wefound a radical alternative for
him the Sudbury Valley School,for him, the Sudbury Valley
School.
And both his mother and I werereally happy that.
You know, we kind of had ourson back.
(02:37):
He was happy again the angerdissipated.
He was, he delighted in thisschool, and.
But this was a school that isso different from what we think
of as school that I, like a lotof other parents, was concerned
about whether this would beharmful for him in the long run.
I was clearly helpful in theshort run.
(02:58):
Would it be helpful to him inthe long run or harmful?
So I ended up doing a study ofthe graduates of this school
initially, at least partly tosatisfy my own need as a parent
to see that the graduates aredoing okay, or if they're not
doing okay, I wanted to do whatI could to find some other form
(03:19):
of education for my son.
But that study of the graduatesreally turned my career.
The graduates of this verydifferent kind of school were
doing very well in life.
They had come from all sorts ofdifferent kinds of backgrounds
but it seemed like, regardlessof why were they at this school,
they were now out in the worlddoing well, including going on
(03:43):
to higher education.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
if that's what they wanted to do, so immediately
that school, too, just is aself-directed learning school,
right, so the student chooseswhat they want to pursue, their
interests, et cetera.
That's right, so I can.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
I can describe that school, but basically it's a
school.
It has school children therefrom age four on through what we
think of as high school age,but they don't segregate the
children by age.
They don't confine them to anyparticular part of the building
or the school campus.
Children are free to play andexplore and follow their own
(04:22):
interests all day long.
There are no rules regardinglearning, there are no tests,
there aren't even coursesoffered, although students who
are wished to could get togetherand create a course if they
like.
That doesn't happen very often,but it happens.
I mean typically in any givenyear there's two or three
courses going on that studentsthemselves have created.
(04:43):
The staff members don't callthemselves teachers because they
don't believe they do any moreteaching than anybody else at
the school, and so the school isrun democratically so that
every student and staff memberhas one vote, regardless of
their age, four years old onthrough the elderly, staff
(05:06):
members all have one vote.
Of course, there are many, manymore students than there are
staff members.
The school meeting, based onthis procedure, makes all the
rules of the school, chooses thepersonnel who will make certain
other kinds of decisions, butthen checks on those decisions
(05:29):
periodically.
So the school is truly run bythe school meeting so it's
democratically, the founders ofthe school.
The school was founded in 1968,so it's been going on now for
about something like 57 years,going full steam ahead, and so
(05:52):
this is not a fly-by-night newschool.
This is something so already bythe time, my son started, the
school had been in existence forabout 13 or 14 years, so there
were some students who had somegraduates who had done all of
what would be their elsewherecalled their K through 12
schooling at this school.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Right.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
And Peter what, what what in your research?
Speaker 1 (06:17):
what surprised you the most about that?
That these kids going to thiskind of self-directed school
would have the capacity to goout and go to higher ed and like
?
Was that your researchfoundation of what you were
trying to see?
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Well, I guess that was certainly one of my concerns
.
Could they go on to highereducation?
I don't believe I'm the kind ofparent who would push my child
on to higher education, but Iwould want that to be an option
for him, and so I was concernedthat, you know well, suppose he
were to decide to go on to acareer that required college.
Could he do that?
(06:51):
And I was both pleased and, Ihave to say, somewhat surprised
how easy it was for thesegraduates to get into college
and to do well there.
You know, if there's one thingthat we think that school, our
school system, prepares you for,is more schooling, and I am
(07:13):
convinced even then I wasconvinced that school has
relatively little to do withlife that I wasn't surprised
that kids could go on to greatjobs, that they could do well in
the real world, but a littlesurprised, I have to say, in
fact quite surprised, that theycould go on to higher education
and do apparently as well as, ifnot better than they would have
(07:36):
if they had gone through ourtraditional schooling system.
You know, that's kind ofsurprising.
Most colleges say you've got totake certain required courses,
you've got to do this, and thatYou've got to be good at exams
compliance.
And here are kids who have donenone of that and now some of
them, I have to say, went on tohigher education by this route,
(07:57):
which is really available toanybody, of going first to a
community college.
They'll accept anybody.
Of going first to a communitycollege, they'll accept anybody.
Some of them had taken somecommunity college courses even
while they were enrolled atSudbury Valley.
A few of them had maybe 16 or17 years old, because they were
interested in something, butalso maybe as a step towards
(08:18):
applying to college.
But there were.
So you can do that.
You can get a transcript fromthe community college and use
that as the foundation forshowing I can do college-level
work and apply to a four-yearcollege.
So that's one route.
But I was surprised at how manywent directly to a four-year
college including in some casesrather elite four-year colleges
(08:43):
without satisfying any of thesupposed criteria for
application, although althoughthey did take, if a school
required the sat test, they tookthe sat test and they prepared
themselves for it.
They prepared on their own, uh,with me sometimes asking for
some help from a staff member onthe math, on some of the math.
(09:04):
But they prepared themselves andum, motivation within
themselves to yeah, and so theother thing that I think one of
the advantages they had for foracceptance is that they would.
They stood out.
I mean, you know that.
Imagine that you are, that youare the admissions officer at an
(09:26):
Ivy League school or school ofthat ilk.
You know you must get awfulbored of those applicants where
everybody is the valedictorianof their school, everybody has
straight A's, everybody took allhonors classes, everybody did
all the correct extracurricularactivities and then you've got
(09:48):
to make a choice among themright.
So here you come across anapplication who says, excuse me?
You come across an applicationwhere you say so, I don't have a
transcript.
I went to the school.
We don't have grades, we don'thave courses.
But here's some of the thingsI've done.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
Great, here's my portfolio.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Here's some of the things I've done and here's why
I'm applying to your school andhere's why your school is the
school that is really best forme.
And they can give a really goodreason, because these people,
if they're going on to highereducation, they're not going on
just because it's the expectedthing to do.
They're going on because theyhave a real reason to go and
(10:36):
they can express that reason.
And the other thing is becausethey're used to an environment
where they are in many, manyways regarded as equal to adults
.
They're used to looking adultsin the eye, talking to adults in
a straightforward manner.
(10:57):
They're used to presentingtheir case at school meeting.
If they're arguing forsomething, so no surprise.
They're arguing for something,so no surprise.
They're very good at interviewsand a typical thing that
happens is the admissionsofficer would say well, you know
, this is interesting, we can'tjust throw it in the wastebasket
.
Let's interview this person.
(11:18):
And these kids come across astypically very good interviewees
.
So I think that played a bigrole.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
These kids come across as typically very good
interviewees, so I think thatplayed a big role.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it'sinteresting too, peter, that
you're that.
I love that.
That.
That's a moment that has youfeel foundational in where
(11:46):
you've come to now.
Author.
Lecturer.
You know, thinker, I wanted toask you about where did all this
start?
Like, I know that you've done alot of work on the history of
schooling and I always assumedthat it was kind of industrial
era.
But you go further back thanthat.
That saying that thefoundations of what we do in
(12:06):
school have been around like forfor a long, long, long time,
like this is not somethingthat's just been, you know, a
century or so old, it's actuallymultiple um centuries yeah, I,
I think you the.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
the common story for people who are sort of critics
of our schooling system is tosay that it's a relic of the
industrial age and there's acertain sense in which it is.
It sort of corresponds with theindustrial age when we began to
have mass government schools.
(12:37):
But really the schools as weknow them began well before that
.
Well before that they wereduring the Protestant
Reformation, so way back in the17th century, especially in
Prussia, is where they began.
But then they spread everywhere, including to the colonies, the
US colonies, american colonies,protestant schools, and in many
(13:04):
communities these were required.
I mean, protestantism was not achoice.
You had to send your kid toschool.
So in some sense these werecompulsory schools for at least
certain numbers of people, andthe express purpose of the
schools was biblicalindoctrination and obedience
(13:26):
training, and so of course theyhad to teach reading word of god
directly by reading the bible,rather than get it through a
(13:46):
hierarchy of uh, pope to bishop,to priest and so on and so
forth.
And so to get the word of goddirectly, you had to be able to
read.
You had to read the bible.
So the schools had the purposeof teaching reading, so kids
could read the Bible, but theeven greater purpose was
biblical indoctrination andobedience training.
I mean, the belief on the partof the Protestants at that time
(14:12):
was that children are born insin, children are innately
sinful and that you had tobasically beat the sinfulness
out of them.
You had to teach them to obey,and at that time children were
truly actually physically beatenif they didn't learn their
(14:33):
lessons properly and recite themproperly, not just for bad
behavior, but also for notlearning as they were supposed
to.
It was a reward, it was apunishment sort of system reward
and punishment system for beingable to recite the dogma that
you were being taught.
And so think about that.
(14:53):
So the standard format was thatthe master at that time, what
we now call teachers were calledmasters and most of them were
males at that time.
The what we now call teacherswere called masters and most of
them were males at that time andum, and the master would give
you the lesson, basically, andyou had to repeat it back.
That's, that is a well-designedsystem for indoctrination.
(15:19):
If you get somebody to repeatsomething over and over, and
over, and, over and over againin a mindless manner, they begin
to believe this must be true.
They begin to think this is andobedience clearly was the
message.
So this system has.
Once schools were taken over bythe states instead of the
(15:45):
church, the doctrine changed,but initially at least, not
quite so much today, although itvaries from place to place.
now the doctrine was really kindof nationalist doctrine it was
the doctrine of, you know, forGermany, the doctrine of what a
wonderful land Germany is andhow great the Germans are and
(16:08):
how beautiful the Germanlanguage is and how everybody
else is our enemies.
Germany was an early adopter.
Napoleon was big on schoolsbecause they saw it as training
ground for new soldiers.
Because they saw it as trainingground for new soldiers.
You know, dictators have alwaysloved public schooling because
(16:29):
they see it as ways of forming.
Now, in our more liberalsocieties it's evolved away from
that to a considerable degree,but still things are taught as
if they're doctrine.
In other words, the teacher ispresenting what presumably is
the truth and you have topresent it back.
(16:50):
And that's how you're tested.
Can you kind of feedback?
It may be presented orally inlecture or it may be presented
in books and readings, but thebasic job is to feedback the
information that you are given.
It's not to question thatinformation, it's not to deny
that information, it's not toargue with it, which is what my
(17:12):
son wanted to do and got himinto trouble constantly.
So it's clearly.
You know, teachers who go intothe schooling may think you know
I'm trying to inculcate a loveof learning and critical
thinking and creativity, makelifelong learners and like all
(17:38):
the jingle comes out is exactlythe same, except that instead of
beating children physically, wepunish them psychologically or
reward them for doing whatthey're supposed to do.
But it's still a system ofindoctrination, obedience
training.
You have to act as if youbelieve the lesson.
(18:01):
Whether you believe it or not,your job is to present that
information back on the test andsecondly, think about it.
The only way you can pass inschool is to do what you're told
to do.
Almost the only way you canfail is to not do what you're
(18:23):
supposed to, what you're told todo.
The lessons are not hard.
It's not hard for anybody.
The job is to do what you'retold to do, and if you don't do
what you're told to do, you'regoing to fail teacher's best
intentions, despite theenlightened views that many of
them are taught in educationschools and come to the job with
(18:48):
.
You're faced with 30 kids, 20,30 kids in the classroom.
You've got to get them all tolearn the same stuff.
At the same time, you, as theteacher, are judged on how they
perform on the tasks.
What are you going to do?
You've got to make them learnthat curriculum and feed it back
, and you're going to usewhatever systems of reward and
(19:10):
punishment you can to do that.
So we've still gotfundamentally the same system
that those early Protestants hadfor indoctrination and
obedience training.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Totally.
You know.
Another interesting point thatyou're putting up and I've heard
you talk about this before isthis preparation.
You know, like every grade isthe preparation for the next
grade, right, and you hadmentioned something about
preschool and kindergarten wheretrying to create that
compliance or that, you knowI've got to teach you all this
(19:45):
stuff so that you're ready forgrade one.
Your book kind of blows thatidea to pieces.
What are the misconceptionsthat educators, parents, have
about those really early yearsof when you're becoming a human
and figuring stuff out?
We tend to kind of like wantthem to get ready for instead of
(20:07):
letting them be human.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Yeah, exactly.
Well, first of all, regardingthis thing of you know, it is
true, I think if you ask atypical teacher at any grade,
what is it you're trying to do,the response you'll get usually,
if they're being sincere, isthat and usually they are
they're willing to say this.
What I'm doing is preparingthem for the next grade In
(20:31):
kindergarten.
I'm preparing them for firstgrade First grade.
I'm preparing them for secondgrade, middle school.
I'm preparing them for highschool, high school, I'm
preparing them for college.
Nobody's even pretendinganymore that we're preparing
them for life.
It's too obvious that they'renot preparing them for life.
The lessons in school havealmost nothing to do with life.
(20:52):
It all has to do with academia,and this is more true all the
time.
We've done away with thepractical courses largely.
We don't have shop, we don'thave home ec, we don't have, you
know, health classes have beengreatly reduced.
You know it's all training forthe next grade level, and so it
becomes sort of this goingthrough one hoop to be able to
(21:14):
enter the next hoop.
And yet even that turns out tobe false.
As I've just described here,we've got kids who didn't do
anything like that going atSudbury Valley, and then they
enter college.
And lo and behold, they're notbehind.
Why are they not behind?
(21:35):
They're not behind.
Why are they not behind?
It's partly because everycollege professor kind of starts
from the beginning anyway,because they recognize that
nobody remembers much from highschool.
They've learned it in a shallowway.
They've learned it to passtests.
They haven't learned it deeplyand so they've forgotten that.
So, and moreover, especiallytoday, we're in an age where you
(22:01):
know.
If you're in a class and theredoes seem to be some information
being talked about, maybe someterminology, that you don't know
what it means.
But others know what it meansbecause they have heard this
terminology X number of times ina previous course All you have
to do is look it up.
And now you've got this to lookit up on, you can sit there
(22:22):
right in class.
The biology professor istalking about meiosis.
You don't know what meiosis is.
A couple of thumb twitches.
Now you know what meiosis isand you're not behind Right.
So so I also know of cases wherekids who start off at Sudbury
Valley, or they start off inhomeschooling by the method
(22:42):
called unschooling, wherethey're not learning a typical
school curriculum, they'refollowing their own interests,
where the kid decides at somestage I want to go to regular
school, my friends are there, Iwant to see what it's like.
And the typical story is theygo at whatever grade level they
would be and they do fine.
You know, they've missed first.
(23:04):
They've missed kindergarten,first, second, third and fourth
grade, and there they are infifth grade and they're doing
fine.
One story I heard was from a mom, unschooling mom whose son told
her so I want to go to schoolnext year because my friends are
there, I want to see what it'slike.
And she said well, I don't seehow you could, because you don't
(23:28):
know how to read and you wouldbe by.
Your friends are going to be inthird grade.
You're old enough, you'd be inthird grade.
I don't think you want to gothere, to go to kindergarten or
go to first grade.
And so the kid said, all right,I'll learn how to read.
And he learned how to read andwent to third grade.
You know when somebody reallywants to learn something, they
can learn it very quickly andvery efficiently.
(23:49):
It's when you're trying to beatsomething into some kids heads
who aren't interested inlearning it, that's when
learning becomes difficult.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
Right, right and and hence, I think, the student,
some students, you knowrepulsion of school, you know
like, or just hatred, as youwere mentioning, like as we
started this, that you get soadverse to it because of that
control over you and thatthere's that freedom just
(24:19):
doesn't exist.
If you were to, um, provideadvice, like I know that you've
done tons of research, yourbooks are like super well known
like where do you look at Peterand say here are some small
things that we could tweak toour system, that could open up
(24:40):
more doors to students feelinglike they're a part of and I
really love your idea of theSudbury Valley School.
I mean, it makes a lot of sense.
What kinds of advice do youoffer to educators that they can
get there with a couple oflittle tweaks to what they do?
Speaker 2 (24:58):
They can't get there.
With a couple of little tweaksthey can't really get there.
There's no way that the schoolsystem is like this huge
dinosaur and it cannot evolve ina way that's going to lead it
to something like Sudbury ValleySchool.
There's a long history ofattempts to bring progressive
(25:21):
reforms into public schoolingand they all ultimately fail.
Because once you try tointroduce a little more freedom,
a little more choice, a littlebit more playfulness, the test
(25:43):
scores on the tests tend to godown, because kids are not
preparing for those tests asmuch.
They're following theirinterests.
They're learning stuff that maybe more important, more
valuable, but they're learningdifferent things, and so, as
long as the school system isgoing to evaluate its progress
and the progress of studentswith tests, you can't really
have anything like a Sudburyschool.
So what do I do when I talkwith and I do?
(26:06):
I give a lot of talks to publiceducators.
I give a lot of talks to groupsof teachers, administrators,
policymakers in public education, and so the first thing I
suggest to them is you know,over the history of public
schooling, we keep doing more.
We keep adding to the number ofdays of school, the number of
(26:28):
hours, the amount of homework.
We keep reducing children'sopportunities to play and
explore and learn things in thereal world because we are more
and more confining them toschool and even to school-like
activities outside of school.
Recognize that there's a lot ofthings children need to learn
(27:00):
that they're not going to learnin lessons in the classroom.
They're going to learn them inplay.
They're going to learn them inpart-time jobs.
They're going to learn them outthere in the real world,
interacting with people in thereal world, and they need time
to do that.
Children used to have time todo that.
So I was a kid in the 1950s.
School was not the big dealthen that it is now.
(27:21):
It wasn't great, but the largereason it was better is there
was less of it.
We didn't have homework inelementary school.
We had much less homework insecondary school than we have
today.
Most of us could do thathomework during study hall
periods and then we were freeafter school.
So I often say that I had twoeducations as a kid.
(27:47):
I had school and there weresome things I learned in school
that were useful.
But the bigger, better, moreimportant part of my education
is what I call myhunter-gatherer education, which
was the time out of school whenI was playing, exploring on my
own, doing all kinds of things.
That helped me learn who I am,how to make friends, how to keep
(28:08):
friends, helped me developpassionate interests in various
things, which ultimately helpedme decide what I want to do in
life.
None of that occurred in school.
All that occurred outside ofschool.
But now we're not providing,partly because of the amount of
time kids are spending at schooland school homework, but partly
because we're restrainingchildren's lives.
(28:29):
Even when they're not in school.
We're putting them inadult-directed activities.
Instead of allowing them toplay and explore and discover
who they are and what they liketo do, we're putting them in
adult-directed activities.
We're also in a world wherewe're kind of afraid to just let
kids go out and play andexplore, and so children are
(28:50):
more or less and I don't thinkthis is too extreme a statement
more or less imprisoned aroundthe clock.
In school they are told exactlywhat to do, they're micromanaged
, and at home they're kind ofunder home confinement.
They have to.
They almost if children underabout 12 or 13, at least in many
communities are really notallowed out of the house without
(29:12):
an adult guard with them.
So this is a dramatic changefrom the way children have
always grown up in the past.
Children need this time tolearn how to be independent, to
do their own things, to not beconstantly judged and monitored
by adults, to figure out how todeal with their peers, including
when peers aren't necessarilynice to them.
(29:33):
How do you deal with that?
How do you get along with them?
These are really, reallyimportant lessons that we're not
allowing children to learnbecause we are constantly
they're constantly undersurveillance and protection and
direction by adults.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
Amazing, totally like you're throwing out some big
seeds here, peter, to take root,I hope, for listeners, because
I mean it rings true what you'resaying To me.
Anyway, I see this.
I want to thank you, peter.
This has just been reallyfascinating your stories, and I
(30:11):
love the, the thoughtfulness ofyour um language and how you um
have kind of navigated thiscrazy world that we deal with.
Sometimes you feel like justkind of knocking your head
against the wall, um, but Ithink that your books and your
words help inform us better, andmaybe there's change coming.
(30:34):
We'll see.
That dinosaur, though, is big,very big anyway, peter, thanks
so much.
I hope one day we, uh, we canhop on again.
I have so many other thingsthat we I wanted to talk about,
but, um, our time is up.
So thanks again for this.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
I really appreciate it thank you, it's been a
pleasure.
okay, here we are another episode shift, that
podcast coming to you.
I have such a great treat hereI have peter gray coming in um
to talk about kids, school,school play outdoor, and we're
(00:26):
going to do all this in 25minutes.
Peter, thanks so much forjoining me today.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Peter, I'd love to start just kind of getting a
read on the really importantmoments in your career that
brought you to where you aretoday.
Were there some foundationaloccurrences, meetings, things
where your career shifted tobring you closer to where you
(00:57):
are today?
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Well, the real shift, as I explain in my book Free to
Learn at the beginning of thebook, occurred when my own son
was rebelling at school.
He had been fighting the schoolsystem from kindergarten through
fourth grade and in fourthgrade it really reached a crisis
point.
He was very clearly, you know,he was coming home every day and
(01:23):
saying school is prison, you'resending me to prison.
His mother and I were regularlybeing called in by the teacher.
What are we going to do aboutthis child who is very
systematically rebelling againstthe classroom procedures, the
(01:49):
classroom procedures?
And ultimately you know I won'ttell the whole story because
people can read it in my bookbut ultimately it reached the
point where his mother and Idecided he really had won this
argument.
We had to be on his side, notagainst him.
He needed us.
He was genuine in his hatred,truly hatred and anger about
(02:14):
school, public school, and so wefound a radical alternative for
him the Sudbury Valley School,for him, the Sudbury Valley
School.
And both his mother and I werereally happy that.
You know, we kind of had ourson back.
(02:37):
He was happy again the angerdissipated.
He was, he delighted in thisschool, and.
But this was a school that isso different from what we think
of as school that I, like a lotof other parents, was concerned
about whether this would beharmful for him in the long run.
I was clearly helpful in theshort run.
(02:58):
Would it be helpful to him inthe long run or harmful?
So I ended up doing a study ofthe graduates of this school
initially, at least partly tosatisfy my own need as a parent
to see that the graduates aredoing okay, or if they're not
doing okay, I wanted to do whatI could to find some other form
(03:19):
of education for my son.
But that study of the graduatesreally turned my career.
The graduates of this verydifferent kind of school were
doing very well in life.
They had come from all sorts ofdifferent kinds of backgrounds
but it seemed like, regardlessof why were they at this school,
they were now out in the worlddoing well, including going on
(03:43):
to higher education.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
if that's what they wanted to do, so immediately
that school, too, just is aself-directed learning school,
right, so the student chooseswhat they want to pursue, their
interests, et cetera.
That's right, so I can.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
I can describe that school, but basically it's a
school.
It has school children therefrom age four on through what we
think of as high school age,but they don't segregate the
children by age.
They don't confine them to anyparticular part of the building
or the school campus.
Children are free to play andexplore and follow their own
(04:22):
interests all day long.
There are no rules regardinglearning, there are no tests,
there aren't even coursesoffered, although students who
are wished to could get togetherand create a course if they
like.
That doesn't happen very often,but it happens.
I mean typically in any givenyear there's two or three
courses going on that studentsthemselves have created.
(04:43):
The staff members don't callthemselves teachers because they
don't believe they do any moreteaching than anybody else at
the school, and so the school isrun democratically so that
every student and staff memberhas one vote, regardless of
their age, four years old onthrough the elderly, staff
(05:06):
members all have one vote.
Of course, there are many, manymore students than there are
staff members.
The school meeting, based onthis procedure, makes all the
rules of the school, chooses thepersonnel who will make certain
other kinds of decisions, butthen checks on those decisions
(05:29):
periodically.
So the school is truly run bythe school meeting so it's
democratically, the founders ofthe school.
The school was founded in 1968,so it's been going on now for
about something like 57 years,going full steam ahead, and so
(05:52):
this is not a fly-by-night newschool.
This is something so already bythe time, my son started, the
school had been in existence forabout 13 or 14 years, so there
were some students who had somegraduates who had done all of
what would be their elsewherecalled their K through 12
schooling at this school.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Right.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
And Peter what, what what in your research?
Speaker 1 (06:17):
what surprised you the most about that?
That these kids going to thiskind of self-directed school
would have the capacity to goout and go to higher ed and like
?
Was that your researchfoundation of what you were
trying to see?
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Well, I guess that was certainly one of my concerns
.
Could they go on to highereducation?
I don't believe I'm the kind ofparent who would push my child
on to higher education, but Iwould want that to be an option
for him, and so I was concernedthat, you know well, suppose he
were to decide to go on to acareer that required college.
Could he do that?
(06:51):
And I was both pleased and, Ihave to say, somewhat surprised
how easy it was for thesegraduates to get into college
and to do well there.
You know, if there's one thingthat we think that school, our
school system, prepares you for,is more schooling, and I am
(07:13):
convinced even then I wasconvinced that school has
relatively little to do withlife that I wasn't surprised
that kids could go on to greatjobs, that they could do well in
the real world, but a littlesurprised, I have to say, in
fact quite surprised, that theycould go on to higher education
and do apparently as well as, ifnot better than they would have
(07:36):
if they had gone through ourtraditional schooling system.
You know, that's kind ofsurprising.
Most colleges say you've got totake certain required courses,
you've got to do this, and thatYou've got to be good at exams
compliance.
And here are kids who have donenone of that and now some of
them, I have to say, went on tohigher education by this route,
(07:57):
which is really available toanybody, of going first to a
community college.
They'll accept anybody.
Of going first to a communitycollege, they'll accept anybody.
Some of them had taken somecommunity college courses even
while they were enrolled atSudbury Valley.
A few of them had maybe 16 or17 years old, because they were
interested in something, butalso maybe as a step towards
(08:18):
applying to college.
But there were.
So you can do that.
You can get a transcript fromthe community college and use
that as the foundation forshowing I can do college-level
work and apply to a four-yearcollege.
So that's one route.
But I was surprised at how manywent directly to a four-year
college including in some casesrather elite four-year colleges
(08:43):
without satisfying any of thesupposed criteria for
application, although althoughthey did take, if a school
required the sat test, they tookthe sat test and they prepared
themselves for it.
They prepared on their own, uh,with me sometimes asking for
some help from a staff member onthe math, on some of the math.
(09:04):
But they prepared themselves andum, motivation within
themselves to yeah, and so theother thing that I think one of
the advantages they had for foracceptance is that they would.
They stood out.
I mean, you know that.
Imagine that you are, that youare the admissions officer at an
(09:26):
Ivy League school or school ofthat ilk.
You know you must get awfulbored of those applicants where
everybody is the valedictorianof their school, everybody has
straight A's, everybody took allhonors classes, everybody did
all the correct extracurricularactivities and then you've got
(09:48):
to make a choice among themright.
So here you come across anapplication who says, excuse me?
You come across an applicationwhere you say so, I don't have a
transcript.
I went to the school.
We don't have grades, we don'thave courses.
But here's some of the thingsI've done.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
Great, here's my portfolio.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Here's some of the things I've done and here's why
I'm applying to your school andhere's why your school is the
school that is really best forme.
And they can give a really goodreason, because these people,
if they're going on to highereducation, they're not going on
just because it's the expectedthing to do.
They're going on because theyhave a real reason to go and
(10:36):
they can express that reason.
And the other thing is becausethey're used to an environment
where they are in many, manyways regarded as equal to adults
.
They're used to looking adultsin the eye, talking to adults in
a straightforward manner.
(10:57):
They're used to presentingtheir case at school meeting.
If they're arguing forsomething, so no surprise.
They're arguing for something,so no surprise.
They're very good at interviewsand a typical thing that
happens is the admissionsofficer would say well, you know
, this is interesting, we can'tjust throw it in the wastebasket
.
Let's interview this person.
(11:18):
And these kids come across astypically very good interviewees
.
So I think that played a bigrole.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
These kids come across as typically very good
interviewees, so I think thatplayed a big role.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it'sinteresting too, peter, that
you're that.
I love that.
That.
That's a moment that has youfeel foundational in where
(11:46):
you've come to now.
Author.
Lecturer.
You know, thinker, I wanted toask you about where did all this
start?
Like, I know that you've done alot of work on the history of
schooling and I always assumedthat it was kind of industrial
era.
But you go further back thanthat.
That saying that thefoundations of what we do in
(12:06):
school have been around like forfor a long, long, long time,
like this is not somethingthat's just been, you know, a
century or so old, it's actuallymultiple um centuries yeah, I,
I think you the.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
the common story for people who are sort of critics
of our schooling system is tosay that it's a relic of the
industrial age and there's acertain sense in which it is.
It sort of corresponds with theindustrial age when we began to
have mass government schools.
(12:37):
But really the schools as weknow them began well before that
.
Well before that they wereduring the Protestant
Reformation, so way back in the17th century, especially in
Prussia, is where they began.
But then they spread everywhere, including to the colonies, the
US colonies, american colonies,protestant schools, and in many
(13:04):
communities these were required.
I mean, protestantism was not achoice.
You had to send your kid toschool.
So in some sense these werecompulsory schools for at least
certain numbers of people, andthe express purpose of the
schools was biblicalindoctrination and obedience
(13:26):
training, and so of course theyhad to teach reading word of god
directly by reading the bible,rather than get it through a
(13:46):
hierarchy of uh, pope to bishop,to priest and so on and so
forth.
And so to get the word of goddirectly, you had to be able to
read.
You had to read the bible.
So the schools had the purposeof teaching reading, so kids
could read the Bible, but theeven greater purpose was
biblical indoctrination andobedience training.
I mean, the belief on the partof the Protestants at that time
(14:12):
was that children are born insin, children are innately
sinful and that you had tobasically beat the sinfulness
out of them.
You had to teach them to obey,and at that time children were
truly actually physically beatenif they didn't learn their
(14:33):
lessons properly and recite themproperly, not just for bad
behavior, but also for notlearning as they were supposed
to.
It was a reward, it was apunishment sort of system reward
and punishment system for beingable to recite the dogma that
you were being taught.
And so think about that.
(14:53):
So the standard format was thatthe master at that time, what
we now call teachers were calledmasters and most of them were
males at that time.
The what we now call teacherswere called masters and most of
them were males at that time andum, and the master would give
you the lesson, basically, andyou had to repeat it back.
That's, that is a well-designedsystem for indoctrination.
(15:19):
If you get somebody to repeatsomething over and over, and
over, and, over and over againin a mindless manner, they begin
to believe this must be true.
They begin to think this is andobedience clearly was the
message.
So this system has.
Once schools were taken over bythe states instead of the
(15:45):
church, the doctrine changed,but initially at least, not
quite so much today, although itvaries from place to place.
now the doctrine was really kindof nationalist doctrine it was
the doctrine of, you know, forGermany, the doctrine of what a
wonderful land Germany is andhow great the Germans are and
(16:08):
how beautiful the Germanlanguage is and how everybody
else is our enemies.
Germany was an early adopter.
Napoleon was big on schoolsbecause they saw it as training
ground for new soldiers.
Because they saw it as trainingground for new soldiers.
You know, dictators have alwaysloved public schooling because
(16:29):
they see it as ways of forming.
Now, in our more liberalsocieties it's evolved away from
that to a considerable degree,but still things are taught as
if they're doctrine.
In other words, the teacher ispresenting what presumably is
the truth and you have topresent it back.
(16:50):
And that's how you're tested.
Can you kind of feedback?
It may be presented orally inlecture or it may be presented
in books and readings, but thebasic job is to feedback the
information that you are given.
It's not to question thatinformation, it's not to deny
that information, it's not toargue with it, which is what my
(17:12):
son wanted to do and got himinto trouble constantly.
So it's clearly.
You know, teachers who go intothe schooling may think you know
I'm trying to inculcate a loveof learning and critical
thinking and creativity, makelifelong learners and like all
(17:38):
the jingle comes out is exactlythe same, except that instead of
beating children physically, wepunish them psychologically or
reward them for doing whatthey're supposed to do.
But it's still a system ofindoctrination, obedience
training.
You have to act as if youbelieve the lesson.
(18:01):
Whether you believe it or not,your job is to present that
information back on the test andsecondly, think about it.
The only way you can pass inschool is to do what you're told
to do.
Almost the only way you canfail is to not do what you're
(18:23):
supposed to, what you're told todo.
The lessons are not hard.
It's not hard for anybody.
The job is to do what you'retold to do, and if you don't do
what you're told to do, you'regoing to fail teacher's best
intentions, despite theenlightened views that many of
them are taught in educationschools and come to the job with
(18:48):
.
You're faced with 30 kids, 20,30 kids in the classroom.
You've got to get them all tolearn the same stuff.
At the same time, you, as theteacher, are judged on how they
perform on the tasks.
What are you going to do?
You've got to make them learnthat curriculum and feed it back
, and you're going to usewhatever systems of reward and
(19:10):
punishment you can to do that.
So we've still gotfundamentally the same system
that those early Protestants hadfor indoctrination and
obedience training.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Totally.
You know.
Another interesting point thatyou're putting up and I've heard
you talk about this before isthis preparation.
You know, like every grade isthe preparation for the next
grade, right, and you hadmentioned something about
preschool and kindergarten wheretrying to create that
compliance or that, you knowI've got to teach you all this
(19:45):
stuff so that you're ready forgrade one.
Your book kind of blows thatidea to pieces.
What are the misconceptionsthat educators, parents, have
about those really early yearsof when you're becoming a human
and figuring stuff out?
We tend to kind of like wantthem to get ready for instead of
(20:07):
letting them be human.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Yeah, exactly.
Well, first of all, regardingthis thing of you know, it is
true, I think if you ask atypical teacher at any grade,
what is it you're trying to do,the response you'll get usually,
if they're being sincere, isthat and usually they are
they're willing to say this.
What I'm doing is preparingthem for the next grade In
(20:31):
kindergarten.
I'm preparing them for firstgrade First grade.
I'm preparing them for secondgrade, middle school.
I'm preparing them for highschool, high school, I'm
preparing them for college.
Nobody's even pretendinganymore that we're preparing
them for life.
It's too obvious that they'renot preparing them for life.
The lessons in school havealmost nothing to do with life.
(20:52):
It all has to do with academia,and this is more true all the
time.
We've done away with thepractical courses largely.
We don't have shop, we don'thave home ec, we don't have, you
know, health classes have beengreatly reduced.
You know it's all training forthe next grade level, and so it
becomes sort of this goingthrough one hoop to be able to
(21:14):
enter the next hoop.
And yet even that turns out tobe false.
As I've just described here,we've got kids who didn't do
anything like that going atSudbury Valley, and then they
enter college.
And lo and behold, they're notbehind.
Why are they not behind?
(21:35):
They're not behind.
Why are they not behind?
It's partly because everycollege professor kind of starts
from the beginning anyway,because they recognize that
nobody remembers much from highschool.
They've learned it in a shallowway.
They've learned it to passtests.
They haven't learned it deeplyand so they've forgotten that.
So, and moreover, especiallytoday, we're in an age where you
(22:01):
know.
If you're in a class and theredoes seem to be some information
being talked about, maybe someterminology, that you don't know
what it means.
But others know what it meansbecause they have heard this
terminology X number of times ina previous course All you have
to do is look it up.
And now you've got this to lookit up on, you can sit there
(22:22):
right in class.
The biology professor istalking about meiosis.
You don't know what meiosis is.
A couple of thumb twitches.
Now you know what meiosis isand you're not behind Right.
So so I also know of cases wherekids who start off at Sudbury
Valley, or they start off inhomeschooling by the method
(22:42):
called unschooling, wherethey're not learning a typical
school curriculum, they'refollowing their own interests,
where the kid decides at somestage I want to go to regular
school, my friends are there, Iwant to see what it's like.
And the typical story is theygo at whatever grade level they
would be and they do fine.
You know, they've missed first.
(23:04):
They've missed kindergarten,first, second, third and fourth
grade, and there they are infifth grade and they're doing
fine.
One story I heard was from a mom, unschooling mom whose son told
her so I want to go to schoolnext year because my friends are
there, I want to see what it'slike.
And she said well, I don't seehow you could, because you don't
(23:28):
know how to read and you wouldbe by.
Your friends are going to be inthird grade.
You're old enough, you'd be inthird grade.
I don't think you want to gothere, to go to kindergarten or
go to first grade.
And so the kid said, all right,I'll learn how to read.
And he learned how to read andwent to third grade.
You know when somebody reallywants to learn something, they
can learn it very quickly andvery efficiently.
(23:49):
It's when you're trying to beatsomething into some kids heads
who aren't interested inlearning it, that's when
learning becomes difficult.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
Right, right and and hence, I think, the student,
some students, you knowrepulsion of school, you know
like, or just hatred, as youwere mentioning, like as we
started this, that you get soadverse to it because of that
control over you and thatthere's that freedom just
(24:19):
doesn't exist.
If you were to, um, provideadvice, like I know that you've
done tons of research, yourbooks are like super well known
like where do you look at Peterand say here are some small
things that we could tweak toour system, that could open up
(24:40):
more doors to students feelinglike they're a part of and I
really love your idea of theSudbury Valley School.
I mean, it makes a lot of sense.
What kinds of advice do youoffer to educators that they can
get there with a couple oflittle tweaks to what they do?
Speaker 2 (24:58):
They can't get there.
With a couple of little tweaksthey can't really get there.
There's no way that the schoolsystem is like this huge
dinosaur and it cannot evolve ina way that's going to lead it
to something like Sudbury ValleySchool.
There's a long history ofattempts to bring progressive
(25:21):
reforms into public schoolingand they all ultimately fail.
Because once you try tointroduce a little more freedom,
a little more choice, a littlebit more playfulness, the test
(25:43):
scores on the tests tend to godown, because kids are not
preparing for those tests asmuch.
They're following theirinterests.
They're learning stuff that maybe more important, more
valuable, but they're learningdifferent things, and so, as
long as the school system isgoing to evaluate its progress
and the progress of studentswith tests, you can't really
have anything like a Sudburyschool.
So what do I do when I talkwith and I do?
(26:06):
I give a lot of talks to publiceducators.
I give a lot of talks to groupsof teachers, administrators,
policymakers in public education, and so the first thing I
suggest to them is you know,over the history of public
schooling, we keep doing more.
We keep adding to the number ofdays of school, the number of
(26:28):
hours, the amount of homework.
We keep reducing children'sopportunities to play and
explore and learn things in thereal world because we are more
and more confining them toschool and even to school-like
activities outside of school.
Recognize that there's a lot ofthings children need to learn
(27:00):
that they're not going to learnin lessons in the classroom.
They're going to learn them inplay.
They're going to learn them inpart-time jobs.
They're going to learn them outthere in the real world,
interacting with people in thereal world, and they need time
to do that.
Children used to have time todo that.
So I was a kid in the 1950s.
School was not the big dealthen that it is now.
(27:21):
It wasn't great, but the largereason it was better is there
was less of it.
We didn't have homework inelementary school.
We had much less homework insecondary school than we have
today.
Most of us could do thathomework during study hall
periods and then we were freeafter school.
So I often say that I had twoeducations as a kid.
(27:47):
I had school and there weresome things I learned in school
that were useful.
But the bigger, better, moreimportant part of my education
is what I call myhunter-gatherer education, which
was the time out of school whenI was playing, exploring on my
own, doing all kinds of things.
That helped me learn who I am,how to make friends, how to keep
(28:08):
friends, helped me developpassionate interests in various
things, which ultimately helpedme decide what I want to do in
life.
None of that occurred in school.
All that occurred outside ofschool.
But now we're not providing,partly because of the amount of
time kids are spending at schooland school homework, but partly
because we're restrainingchildren's lives.
(28:29):
Even when they're not in school.
We're putting them inadult-directed activities.
Instead of allowing them toplay and explore and discover
who they are and what they liketo do, we're putting them in
adult-directed activities.
We're also in a world wherewe're kind of afraid to just let
kids go out and play andexplore, and so children are
(28:50):
more or less and I don't thinkthis is too extreme a statement
more or less imprisoned aroundthe clock.
In school they are told exactlywhat to do, they're micromanaged
, and at home they're kind ofunder home confinement.
They have to.
They almost if children underabout 12 or 13, at least in many
communities are really notallowed out of the house without
(29:12):
an adult guard with them.
So this is a dramatic changefrom the way children have
always grown up in the past.
Children need this time tolearn how to be independent, to
do their own things, to not beconstantly judged and monitored
by adults, to figure out how todeal with their peers, including
when peers aren't necessarilynice to them.
(29:33):
How do you deal with that?
How do you get along with them?
These are really, reallyimportant lessons that we're not
allowing children to learnbecause we are constantly
they're constantly undersurveillance and protection and
direction by adults.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
Amazing, totally like you're throwing out some big
seeds here, peter, to take root,I hope, for listeners, because
I mean it rings true what you'resaying To me.
Anyway, I see this.
I want to thank you, peter.
This has just been reallyfascinating your stories, and I
(30:11):
love the, the thoughtfulness ofyour um language and how you um
have kind of navigated thiscrazy world that we deal with.
Sometimes you feel like justkind of knocking your head
against the wall, um, but Ithink that your books and your
words help inform us better, andmaybe there's change coming.
(30:34):
We'll see.
That dinosaur, though, is big,very big anyway, peter, thanks
so much.
I hope one day we, uh, we canhop on again.
I have so many other thingsthat we I wanted to talk about,
but, um, our time is up.
So thanks again for this.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
I really appreciate it thank you, it's been a
pleasure.
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