103: Peter Gray | Rethinking Education: The Power of Play and Self-Directed Learning

Jesper Conrad: 0:10

So today we have the big pleasure of being together with Peter Gray. First of all, welcome.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 0:16

Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. Very happy to be here.

Jesper Conrad: 0:19

For the people out there. The last time we were together with you was two years ago, where we had the pleasure of recording our first episode with you, and now we are almost 100 episodes down the line. So we have learned a lot, a lot of inspiration and a lot of questions. So are you ready?

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 0:41

I guess I am.

Cecilie Conrad: 0:44

Where do you want to start?

Jesper Conrad: 0:46

Oh, there's so much things we can go into depth with, and on our podcast, which is called Self-Directed, we are talking about self-directed educations, but one of the questions that could be fun to go into is talking about what is education.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:02

Yeah, I was reading your article about the future of education and I just thought, yeah, but really, what do we mean? What is it? What's?

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:12

the goal mean.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:13

What is it?

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:14

What's the goal? Yeah, you know. I mean in our culture today we tend to equate education with schooling. So if you ask somebody you know how much education have you had? They'll tell you how many years of school they've had or what degrees or diploma they had. That's a pretty shallow definition of education. I think we all know people who have had a lot of schooling and we wouldn't particularly say they're well-educated, and we probably also know people who haven't had a lot of schooling and we would say, on the basis of who they are, what they seem to know, what they seem to do, this pretty well-educated person.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:52

So I define education. I actually have two different definitions which I use depending on the audience. Usually, when I'm talking to parents and teachers and the like, I define education in a way that I think is meaningful on a day-to-day basis in our personal lives. That education is everything that a person learns or knows that helps them in their life, everything that is useful. We learn a lot of stuff that isn't useful. We learn trivia, we learn things that are wrong, we learn bad habits. I don't count that in the category of education, but everything that we learn that makes our life better in some ways or allows us to contribute to the world in a better way that I count as education, no matter how you learn it the world in a better way that I count as education, no matter how you learn it. So if you think of education in those terms, I think most people, if they reflect honestly on their lives, would say that most of their education has been self-directed, no matter how much school you've had. I mean, I've been in school my whole life and yet I would say that most of my education is not the things that I learned in courses or from teachers, but rather the things that I got interested in, the things that I did. Everything you do, you've got to learn something in relationship to what you're doing. That's what life is all about. You're continuously learning as you do new things, and even as you do, you've got to learn something in relationship to what you're doing. That's what life is all about. You're continuously learning as you do new things, and even as you do old things in new ways, you're always learning. So that's my definition.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 3:48

When I'm talking we don't want to get too much on a tangent on this, but when I'm talking to groups of anthropologists, much on a tangent on this. But when I'm talking to groups of anthropologists, I define education as cultural transmission. I point out that we, which every anthropologist knows that we are the cultural animal. We're the animal that survives by making use of the ideas and material things, the mores, that were developed by our ancestors. We don't create life anew. We take what was previously developed, previously invented. This is the unique characteristic of we human beings. This is why we have language, so we can pass along. It helps us pass along ideas and share what we human beings. This is why we have language, so we can pass along. It helps us pass along ideas and share what we're doing.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 4:40

So I say, I argue that education, from an anthropological perspective, is cultural transmission. It's the whole set of processes by which each new generation of human beings acquires at least some of the skills, the knowledge, the beliefs, the mores of the previous generation. And then I point out that this has always occurred. As long as we've been human beings, each generation has educated itself. We've only had schools in a mass kind of way for at most 200 years, but we have been human beings, depending on how you count, for at least 50,000 years, some would say a million years, and we've been passing along and each generation has been building on the previous generation, and that's one way to think about education.

Cecilie Conrad: 5:54

When you say education, it's hard not to think parents and children. And then I start just spinning a little bit on the idea that with the school system, we're trying to make this transition happen. Not in that relation. We're taking the children away from the parents and giving them up for strangers to educate them, and that responsibility is no longer the parent's responsibility. Do you think there is?

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 6:30

Well, I would say there's some truth to that, but I don't think that education is primarily parents' responsibility. Education is the child's responsibility. Children are born knowing that their job is to educate themselves. They come into the world with burning curiosity, all kinds of questions. They come into the world designed to play and explore in ways that result in their education.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 7:00

Now, throughout most of human history, when we were all hunter gatherers, parents were not the primary educators. Parents were not the primary people that kids interacted with. Kids interacted with everybody in the band. Everybody was involved and they interacted with one another and they explored and they engaged in activities. Kids throughout.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 7:26

You know, anthropologists who studied children in indigenous cultures and even in other non-Western cultures say that children educate themselves much more through their interactions with other children than with adults. They play in age-mixed groups. They acquire higher ideas. They engage in more sophisticated activities by playing with children who are a little older than themselves as well as children who are younger than themselves. This is the normal child environment throughout most of human history. Now that environment got disrupted as we went into agricultural times and we had more isolated families and children weren't so connected to other children, and so we developed an idea that parents you know the role of parents took on.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 8:25

Parenting took on a bigger role two or three years ago in my Psychology Today blog about studies of certain indigenous groups where they would ask the mother sort of what is your responsibility for your child? And the mother would say, basically my responsibility is when the child is four. You know I have to that little child. That little child really needs me. But by the time the child is four I'm free from that child. That doesn't mean I don't love the child I'm putting words into this woman's mouth here but that doesn't mean I don't love the child. Care about the child, but that is not my child anymore. That child belongs to the universe. That child belongs to the whole culture. That child is learning from everybody, not just from me.

Jesper Conrad: 9:21

But when I look at where we are today with the nuclear families, then I'm questioning how the culture supports that learning you're explaining.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 9:35

Yes, so I'm old enough that I was a child in the 1950s. In the 1950s, children were spending more time outdoors during the daytime than indoors. They were away from parents more than they were with parents. That wasn't true just for me. That was true for many kids, if not most kids. Your group, you were out playing in the neighborhood. You were out from age four or five on you were.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 10:11

When school wasn't in session, you were out doing things with other people. So I, for example, you know I was into fishing, among other things. I spent huge amounts of time fishing. A huge part of my education came from fishing. Who was I fishing with? Not adults. There were no adults involved with us fishing.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 10:32

It was kids, some of whom had been fishing much longer than I was, and I learned a heck of a lot from them about not just about fishing, but whatever you get into deeply sort of expands on to all sorts of other aspects of life. So I think in our culture, in our culture, we put too much onus on parents and we have taken away the opportunity for children to be learning from people other than parents or other than the school, because we don't allow them the freedom to play and explore outside of the home with other kids. We pretty much isolate kids from other kids. Almost the only way they can do it these days is online, through computer play or through social media through sharing videos, and they do that and they learn a lot from that. But it would be a lot nicer if they could also do that in the real physical world, and that's what we've deprived kids of.

Cecilie Conrad: 12:23

So we are from Scandinavia and a difference I've noticed between our culture and the American culture is that our children and teenagers are way more independent and way more free.

Cecilie Conrad: 12:40

We had a lovely American family living with us in Denmark last summer, and so that was a very easy way to see the contrast, as I could talk with the other mom about what she saw.

Cecilie Conrad: 12:53

And you have here children down to the age of seven taking the train for several hours to the other end of the country all by themselves. They have the payment card in their back pocket and the phone and they know what to do if they get lost and they just take their little backpack and go to see granny or a friend or they walk the streets, they, they do their after-school activities or just go to a museum or library by themselves and they are self-organized, that they make the plan, um, and they are allowed, uh, of course they. They make an agreement with the responsible adults around them, but, but they do these things, and for the American friend that I had here, that was deeply shocking that you could have such young children on their own understanding too, and I've written about both Finland and Denmark as places where children are pretty close to as free as I was in the 1950s in the United States.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 14:01

We could do all those things then, but beginning around sort of the mid-1970s, and certainly by the 80s, those opportunities began to be taken away from children in this country. And that's also around the beginning of the mid-1970s to early 1980s is also when we began to see a steep rise in anxiety, depression, suicide among school-aged children. And I've written an article published about a year ago in the Journal of Pediatrics arguing that this restriction on children's freedom, where they're not allowed to do the things that naturally bring children pleasure, the sense of independence, independent play, and where they're not developing the kinds of skills and the kinds of mental attitudes and characteristics that make you resilient, you learn that I can get into trouble and find my way out of trouble. I can get lost and find my way home. Of course today with the cell phone it's impossible to get lost, but it used to be fun to get lost when it was possible.

Cecilie Conrad: 15:21

One of ours actually got lost last year in Barcelona because the cell phone ran out of battery.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 15:28

So that's great and it was raining she was pretty lost. For real, that was an educational experience.

Cecilie Conrad: 15:36

Yes.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 15:38

That's great. So I hope that you hold on to this and you don't follow the path that so many other countries and the UK is every bit as bad as the United States and some of the other European countries are moving in that direction also.

Jesper Conrad: 15:57

Oh I think it is starting.

Cecilie Conrad: 15:58

The Scandinavian countries. It's going downhill. It's going downhill, it's not. I mean, I hope that we can. We're having this discussion right now about children's freedom and maybe, hopefully, someone's listening and maybe hopefully, someone's listening. It is harder. When I was a child in the 80s, we would also have the you come home from school and you go out and play kind of situation, Whereas you know, the streets would be full of children, the parks would be full of children, we would play with balls and play hide and seek in the gardens and there would be this. And I don't see that any longer. I see a lot of after school being organized by adults and being these organized activities that replicate school. You have a goal and you have a teacher and you have a timeframe and a little bell, and I think we all and I would be interested to hear what you have to say about how do we fight against it?

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 17:05

I mean, I don't know exactly how you do it, but what I keep trying to do is to get people to understand the value of truly free play and independent activities. This is how children grow up. This is how they're designed to grow up. This is how, when children are playing, they are practicing being adults. When children are playing away from adults, they have to be the adults. They have to be the ones who decide on the rules. They have to be the ones who decide if something is safe or not. They have to be the ones to negotiate with their playmates about how they're going to play together. They have to figure out how to deal with bullies. This is all part of growing up.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 17:52

When we quote, protect them from all of that by doing it for them, we're not allowing them to grow up. We're not allowing them, as I would say, to educate themselves. We are putting up and we are also and this is so obvious in this country and we are also and this is so obvious in this country we are also in some sense teaching them that they're incompetent. We're teaching them you know you can't do these things yourself. I need to do them for you. You are unsafe, you're not trustworthy out there. I need to be with you when you're out there. That's the message that we're sending and it leads to a kind of emotional fragility that doesn't go away.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 18:45

Even young adults in this country college students are having mental breakdowns all the time whenever something stressful is happening, because they're not used to dealing with stressful things. Every life has some upsetting things that happen in them. But if you've always been protected from those upsetting things as you're growing up, then you don't know how to deal with them and you have a breakdown of depression or anxiety, and it's interfering even with higher education. In this country this has been true for some years now. You hear more and more that you know professors feel they can't give certain assignments because some of the kids will have breakdowns, or they can't give a low grade because some kid will fall apart if they get a low grade. I've never gotten anything less than an A before. I can't get anything less than an A. It's been years since I've taught and this was just beginning at the end of my teaching career at university, but now I hear that this is very, very common, these kinds of things. Students used to say I can't do the test because you know my mother died or because I've got this serious disease or something. Now they say I can't take the test because I'm anxious. You know that's so. You have to give me a. You have to wait until I'm not anxious. These things are literally happening in the university level because we haven't allowed kids to grow up and learn how to deal with their anxiety, how to deal with stress, how to deal to feel confident. You know, I can face difficult situations. I've faced them before and I can handle them and I can handle them.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 21:11

Among the most important kinds of play that we deprive children of increasingly in this country is risky play. Kids everywhere like to play in risky ways. They climb trees higher than their parents would want them to. They dive off of cliffs into rivers, of cliffs into rivers. They skateboard down banisters, depending upon the culture, and they like to play with fire. They like to play with dangerous tools. This is universal with kids and there's a good reason for it. Other mammals also play in dangerous ways when they're young. Why do they do it?

Cecilie Conrad: 21:54

It's because that's how they develop courage. That's how they learn. I can feel a certain amount of fear and I can handle it, and also I can assess what is dangerous and what is so dangerous I should maybe not do it.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 22:03

That's exactly right. And the other thing that parents don't realize. So Mother Nature, which is my personification of natural selection, endowed children with this desire to play in risky ways, but she also endowed children with a pretty good understanding of what their capacities are. Even little children, even three-year-olds two and three-year-olds have a pretty good understanding of what their capacities are. Even little children, even three-year-olds two and three-year-olds have a pretty good sense of how high they can jump off of something and not hurt themselves. And by the time they're five or six, they have a pretty good sense. How high can I climb in this tree and still manage things? They really have a good sense of that, and other animals do too. If they didn't have that sense, we would not have survived as a species. They all would have killed themselves growing up.

Cecilie Conrad: 23:02

I have all the tree climbing in my mind right now. The friend of our kids who would always climb a tree with his rubber boots on, which is the worst tool for you to wear while climbing trees and then he would go higher and not be able to come down, but knowing that his oldest siblings and parents were inside the house. And I also remember our oldest daughter climbing up.

Jesper Conrad: 23:33

And not being able to get down.

Cecilie Conrad: 23:36

But he always came down. Yeah, it's just, it's funny, it's one of these things they climb high and they go fast, and I also think I've really seen the more risky they play. I mean, they have different temperament. All the children that I've known in my life and some are pretty risky and also like the physical challenge of something and they like that. But if they do that, they also have more of that, what you said exactly more of the okay, but where's the line? How far can I take this?

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 24:13

Right, I think that's right. And there's an occasional kid who really does need to be sort of controlled. You know, I had a friend when I was probably 10 years old and this kid would break some part of his body every single summer and he eventually actually broke his neck and survived it. He lived for a couple of years. He went for a couple of years with a big brace around his neck.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 24:38

I mean, that was a kid who didn't seem to learn from experience, but that's rare it is rare, that's rare and most kids, you know they'll break their arm and then next time they'll be a little bit more careful when they're doing something that's dangerous.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 24:54

I also think there are differences in temperament, and while I say that risky play is very important, I want to quickly add that doesn't mean you should push your child to do risky things. Mean you should push your child to do risky things. That what it means is, to the degree that your child wants to do risky things and is ready to do risky things, let your child do it. It doesn't mean, oh, my child should be diving off the high board. And so you put the child on the high board. The child is standing there, shivering, frightened out of his skin. That terrifies the child. That's not how the child develops courage, and everybody's different.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 25:41

To be honest, I was a kind of a timid kid. I've always been very cautious, but I was lucky that I actually described this story in my book Free to Learn. I had a friend, a girl across the street who was just a little older than me, smaller than me but definitely braver than me, and she would show me how to climb the tree and encourage me to climb the tree, and I would try to emulate her and climb as high as she did, or at least almost as high as she did. But that would be very different from if an adult, some authority figure, would say well, you really ought to be able to climb the tree this high. That would be shaming to me and it would not be a good growth experience.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 26:25

I think one of the worst things that happens in physical education classes in schools, at least in this country, is when they require you to climb the rope to the top of the gymnasium. And of course there are some kids that can do it and they're showing off and they feel great about doing it. And then there's other kids who this is the worst condition to do it You're doing it in front of other kids who might be, whether they're making fun of you or not, you believe they are. You're feeling shamed by the gym instructor that you're not able to do what he thinks you're supposed to be doing right now. These are not good learning experiences.

Jesper Conrad: 27:25

It's when children take their own initiative, and all children take their own initiative, I believe, to varying degrees. For some children this means skiing down a steep mountain. For other kids it means diving off the low board in the pool. Peter, how powerful it is for children to be able to explore by playing and how controlled they also seem to be by parents who have fear, and by the school system and about the now it's called extracurriculums, like whatever they do in their free time almost yeah, free time. Almost yeah, free and free.

Jesper Conrad: 27:54

Then one of the big attractors for many children is the computer, where there isn't often the parental supervision they are. You can say, free to play on the computer and as powerful as that is, then sometimes I am questioning the value of being free to play on a computer when there is a monetary goal from someone else that have created the play. So maybe there's difference on the games people can play, or there can be difference on what kind of game it is and how strong the algorithms are to get people to do a specific thing. But I'm super much as a parent in doubt about the whole computer thing sometimes because part of me can see the attraction of oh, here I have freedom to play as I want to, but then the game has been created by someone to earn money, and that's why I'm like how much control is it?

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 28:53

yeah, that's a good question. I think that to the degree that they're playing for money or they're kind of being continuously, you know, provided with motivation to spend money to get to the next level or to get something in the game, I guess I as a parent would say you know, I'm not giving you any money for that. There's lots of ways to play computer games that don't involve any money, and once you've got money involved it's no longer so fully play, and you know it becomes a little bit more like gambling. Or becomes a little bit more you know it's not so fully play and you know it becomes a little bit more like gambling. Or it becomes a little bit more, you know it's not so fully play. Play is free, both in the sense of free activity and not costing anything. You know sometimes you pay something for the opportunity to play. But I really think that that does disrupt.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 29:52

I think that I don't know what things are, how people feel in Denmark. In this country there has been for some years kind of a panic about panic, moral panic, as I call it about computer play, all kinds of dangers people believe about it which just the research absolutely does not support. I mean, this is real play. The kids are getting out of it, everything they get out of play except that they don't get fresh air and outdoor exercise and physical strength from it. But it certainly is much more playful than board games because there's more creativity in it, there's more different things you can do with it, there's more of you being invested into it and most of the games today that really attract kids are very social. They're playing online with other kids. They're learning how to cooperate. So you know, if you run through what my defining characteristics of play computer play meets all of that.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 30:58

But I agree with you. I'm not an expert on this, but it certainly could be destroyed by monetary incentives. It's very similar in that sense. In that sense, when I played sports as a kid baseball or touch football or anything else it was just a bunch of kids getting together and playing it on the vacant lot, no adults involved, and it was for fun. We didn't care that much who won. We might keep score, just for the fun of keeping score, but by the next day nobody remembered the score and the teams were different every day.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 31:36

So now at least in this country, kids are not doing that anymore. Instead they're playing sports directed by adults, where the goal no matter what the adult, the adult coaches might say oh, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it's whether you enjoy the game or not. But they don't mean it and the kids know they don't mean it. The kids know that they want them to win and the kids want and the parents want the kids to win, and the parents are there cheering them on. That's no longer play. That's now doing something for an external incentive, that's doing something for a reward outside of itself, which is that championship or the congratulations you get from your parents for doing so well. And this is really replaced in this country free play to a large extent, and it's not for the good of the kids.

Cecilie Conrad: 32:35

I wanted to circle back to exactly that you said truly free play and I think it would be interesting to hear what exactly is that.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 32:46

So I have a definition of play and um, and what I mean by play is free play. To me it's kind of a redundancy to call it free play, because if it's not free it's not play. But in my definition, in my way of thinking, but I define play as an activity that has these four characteristics. The first characteristic is that it is freely chosen and directed by the players themselves. So it's the initiative for it and the direction for it comes from the kids, if we're talking about kids playing. But the same would be true if it's adults playing. So if the initiative and direction is coming from an adult, that means right off it's not play, at least not fully play. So if a teacher stands up in the front of a classroom and says now children are all going to play this, it's not play, because that was initiated by the teacher and not by the kids.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 33:48

The second characteristic, which is the one that I just referred to with regard to how rewards can spoil play, is that it is intrinsically motivated. It's something that you're doing for its own sake, it's something that you're doing because you enjoy doing it. There may be goals in it, but the goals are intrinsic to the game itself. You're trying to accomplish something, but you're trying to accomplish it just for the sake of accomplishing it, the pleasure of accomplishing it. So when I said that I used to do a lot of fishing, I wasn't so much fishing to get fish, I was fishing for the great fun of catching the fish. If an adult came along and said oh, you can stop all your fishing now I'm going to give you all these fish you can take home to your family, that was disappointing, right, I needed to catch the fish myself. It was no fun to just have the fish. I felt good about bringing home fish to my family, but that wasn't the primary point of it. So play is something you're doing for itself, to the degree that it has goals. You're trying to catch fish. You're trying to score points. Whatever it is you're trying to do is with, or you're trying to build the most beautiful sandcastle that you can imagine, knowing that it's going to be washed to the sea when the next tide comes in. You're putting a lot of effort into doing something beautiful. And well, not because you want that thing, not because you're going to keep that thing, not because it adds in any material way to your life, but just because you want to do it well. That's one of the evidences. The purpose of play is learning. The purpose of play is to learn how to catch fish or build something or score points or get along with your playmates so that you can have a good game. So that's the second characteristic. Those are the two most important defining characteristics. Those are the characteristics that are most frequently destroyed when adults intervene. Adults take control of the play, and that destroys point number one, and adults turn the play into competitions with rewards, which destroys characteristic number two. The two remaining characteristics are the third one is that all play has rules, and that surprises a lot of people.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 36:41

Why would I say that free play has rules? It's not free. So when kids decide to play, they are voluntarily putting themselves into a situation where they're not free. But they have voluntarily put themselves into that situation and they can step out of that situation at every point, every form of play. When I say rules, you know it could be guidelines. It could be conceptions of what you're supposed to be doing, be guidelines, it could be conceptions of what you're supposed to be doing. So you know you're.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 37:20

Imagine kid, imagine a couple of boys and having a play flight. You know it looks like really wild activity. They're chasing one another around, swinging sticks towards one another, pushing one another down really looks wild. But if you watch for a while you realize this behavior is governed by very strict rules no kicking, no biting. If you are the bigger and the stronger of the two, you have to self-handicap in some ways. You can swing the stick at the other person's stick, but not at them. You can push the other person down, but it has to be on something soft. They don't even have to state the rules. The rules are intrinsic. Everybody who play fights understands those rules. If somebody, either accidentally or on purpose, violates a rule, the one who's violated will immediately say hey, no kicking, I'm out of here if you keep doing that.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 38:20

So all kinds of play. You're building a sandcastle. You're not just randomly piling up sand. There's structure here to what you're doing. The rule is you're using sand. That's the medium and you're creating something that fits your conception, and maybe your shared conception with your playmate, of what this sandcastle is going to look like. It's very controlled behavior.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 38:43

Play, among other things, is how children learn to control their impulses. It's how they learn to control their behavior towards the end that they're working for within the context of play. So that's the third characteristic. And the fourth characteristic is that, even though play has rules, the rules are never so rigid that play is not creative. Play is always creative. Every move in play is creative. You always have choices to make, or it's almost every move. Play is always creative. Every move in play is creative. You always have choices to make, or it's almost every move. You've always got choices to make and especially for little kids, play is almost always highly imaginative.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 39:26

You're putting yourself in an imaginary world. You're putting yourself in a hypothetical world. You're putting yourself in a what-if world. What if that kitchen table is a bridge? What if there's a troll under the bridge? How should we behave, given that there's a bridge with a troll under it? And then somebody says well, we should give the troll a cookie so it doesn't eat us.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 39:50

So this is hypothetical, deductive reasoning which children, even little children, are practicing in play, because they're putting themselves in an imaginary situation and behaving in accordance.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 40:55

If you're willing to stretch the idea a little bit, you can make the case that all play is imaginative. You're putting yourself even a formal game like chess. You're putting yourself into a hypothetical, different world where bishops can only move on the diagonal. In the real world the bishops can go wherever they want, but in chess they can only move on the diagonal. So you're behaving within this set, this set of hypothetical constructs that are different from in the real world, and that means you've got to think logically about what those hypothetical constructs mean. What can you do and not do within this context? So just from the definition of play, you can see the amazing things that children are always practicing and learning in play. They're learning how to initiate and direct their own activity. They're learning how to negotiate with their playmates to direct the activity. They're learning how to follow rules and create rules. They're learning how to be creative and they're learning how to think hypothetically, because almost all play requires hypothetical reasoning.

Jesper Conrad: 42:10

Peter, thank you for the definition, and one of the things you have said during our talk is that the main goal of playing is learning. And then, with this definition you ran through, I find it a little difficult to look at a school and see it tick off those boxes you just mentioned. So what is school if this is how you learn?

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 42:39

Yeah. So school, the way I think about school. When schools were first developed, schools are the model that we have now. They had little to do with learning. Even the rhetoric about them had little to do with learning. It had much more to do with control.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 43:01

Initial schools were the schools that we still developed, the model that we still follow, were developed in Prussia and even as far back as the 17th century, but certainly by the 18th century, by Protestants, and they were Protestant-run schools and they had clear protestant goals. Now, protestants at that time, uh, believed that we're all born in sin. Children are natural sinners and you've got to train the sinfulness out of them. And the manuals for school masters because they were generally men then and called masters were very clear on that. Now, they did have the function of teaching reading at a time when many kids couldn't read, reading at a time when many kids couldn't read. And the Protestants believed that it's every Christian person's duty, every human being's duty, because they all should be Christian to read the Bible themselves. So reading was an important lesson and the Bible was the primer. Reading was an important lesson and the Bible was the primer, or little verses taken after the Bible, so the children would learn their ABCs where A stands for Adam, in whose fall we, adam who reached for the apple and in whose fall we all fell, or something like that, and it goes all the way to Z in that way. So every lesson is a catechism. Every lesson is about is to instill the fear of God and, indirectly, the fear of all authority figures in children. The primary motivator for children was the stick. They would beat children, literally beat children, if they didn't learn their lessons. But this was the model, and so the very clearly stated purpose was to teach obedience and to indoctrinate the child in Christian doctrine. Those were the stated purposes of it.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 45:30

Now, eventually, those schools in Prussia were taken over by the state. As the power of states increased, the power of government increased and the power of religion declined, states took over the schools and they didn't change the way schooling was done Still done in the same way Kids sitting in rows, listening to lectures, reading assigned stuff, feeding it back word for word, to the degree possible, being tested on it. This was the model then and it's still the model now. This was the model then and it's still the model now. This is an excellent model for teaching obedience and for indoctrination, but that's all it's good for.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 46:13

You can't be creative in that context. You can't be a critical thinker in that context. It's not a context for developing a love of learning. It's simply a context for being brainwashed, and that was the purpose of it. That was the designated purpose of it. Of course, they didn't call it brainwashing. They thought of it as imparting the truths to children who were otherwise not going to understand the truth and imparting obedience to children who are naturally sinful. So that's how schools got started and they never changed in terms of their structure.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 46:51

Now, today, I don't know any teachers. I think most people who go into teaching are very wonderful people. They care about kids and they really believe they want to go into teaching and teach in school to, you know, bring the best out of children, to foster a love of learning, to promote creativity, critical thinking, all this. But then they go into a school and what are they faced with? 20 to 30 kids or more sitting there in rows, a system where their main job is to prove that the children are learning whatever the curriculum says they're supposed to be learning. That's the new dogma. It's no longer the Christian gospels they have to be learning, but it's whatever was decided.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 47:42

Some arbitrary slice of everything we know in the universe is said to be that curriculum, and the teacher's job is to make sure that these children learn it.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 47:51

There's no conceivable way that all those children could be interested in that lesson at the same time.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 47:57

That's not possible. So you can't possibly allow any kind of real self-direction to occur within that context, as much as the teacher might want it. And that's even more true now today in our schools than it used to be, because in the past teachers had a little more say. When I was in school, teachers had more say in the classroom than they do today. If you had a really nice teacher, she could kind of judge what we're interested in and move it in directions of what we're interested. They can't do that anymore in most schools in the united states, ever since what we call common core, where every, every classroom is supposed to be on exactly the same page as every other classroom, learning the same stuff, taking the same tests and so on. So teachers have lost this ability to adapt what they're doing, and so the old ideas that the pietists came up with in Prussia in the 18th century are still are ever more present today in our schools than they were when I was in school.

Cecilie Conrad: 49:08

Well, we have the same thing going on here. We have a common core, similar thing been going on for a long time in the public school system. Yeah, that thing I think is very widespread, and the Scandinavian schools are often judged to be the better schools, and maybe they are, but they are still bad. It's still the same basic idea in the same structure and I was thinking what has happened since schools were invented in Germany a long time ago? Have we copied that model into the rest of the time the kids have, more or less the parenting, the free time they have when they go home from school? Is that being invaded by the same ideas about how to handle childhood? There's, of course, the homework, which is an invasion of the free time, but what about all the other time the kids have.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 50:15

Right, that's a really good point. I think you put it very well that the sort of school ideas has invaded the rest of our interactions with children, and I think that's become more and more true over time over my lifetime. So when I was a kid, first of all the other thing that's happened, of course, even in those Prussian schools, thank goodness the kids weren't in school that many hours. They weren't in school for nine or ten months out of the year. They were in school for a few weeks and for a few years, but not for 13 years. So school was terrible, but it didn't. It didn't monopolize their lives. It wasn't like a full time job.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 51:10

We've turned school into a full time job, you know, the irony, as I often point out, is, you know, in the United States and this is true also in much of Europe at the same time that we declared that full-time work, child labor for children is illegal, we turned school compulsory school into full-time work for children Worthless full-time work. They don't even have the pleasure of thinking they're producing something and it's, for children, the worst kind of work. It's sedentary work. Children would rather be working in a factory. I mean, that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but at least they're on their feet, at least they're doing something physical which children are designed to do. They're not designed to be sitting in their seats doing worksheets hours and hours a day. We adults have difficulty handling that, but kids, that's just not what they should be doing. So that's part of the irony.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 52:11

School has monopolized children's lives and done so increasingly. With every passing decade, at least in the United States, school year gets longer, school day gets longer, less and less recess, less and less breaks during the day. Lunch hour used to be an hour, it's now at most 20 minutes. Kids barely have time if they have to go to the washroom and then stand on line. They barely have time to gulp down their food before. I mean, what we're doing in the schools is horrendous. It really is horrendous. I'm amazed that parents aren't up in arms about it. They're rebelling about it, but I think because it's been gradual. The change has been gradual and so with every generation the parents think well, this isn't that much different than when I was a child, than when I was in school, and it's not that much different. But if they were to go back and look at the difference between when their child today is in school and when I was in school in the 1950s, if you suddenly made that change, if you suddenly said we're going to reduce recess to 20 minutes a day we had a total, counting lunch hour, of two hours of freedom to play outdoors when I was a kid. If you suddenly said we're going to take that away and they're only going to have 20 minutes and they're going to 20 minutes to eat lunch and maybe another 20 minutes in elementary school, but not in middle school to go out and have recess and it's going to be a very controlled recess, parents would have rebelled. If you had said you know, we're expecting high school students to spend three or four hours a night doing homework, parents would not have stood for it. That would have been too big a change. But the change has been gradual over time.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 53:53

And you know, I know the story about the frogs. You know, putting them into ever hotter water is apocryphal. That's not a true story, but it's an analogy that fits here. You make the change gradual and people get used to it that this is how children need to be raised, and then what other thing that has happened is what I call a schoolish philosophy of parenting, a schoolish philosophy of child development, the idea that children develop best when they're carefully guided and directed by adults. And so you begin to get these messages.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 54:36

Mothers are constantly bombarded in this country with messages about all the things they're supposed to be doing for their child. You know, goodness gracious, even before your child is born, you're supposed to be talking to your child or playing classical music or whatever the belief is. And then, and then you, and then you. You know somebody figured out. Well, middle-class parents spend say a certain number of words per day to their child. So everybody and middle-class kids tend to do better in school, so every parent is supposed to say a certain number of words every day to their child.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 55:13

I mean, this is so artificial, and so parents have these responsibilities and duties. So not only are you supposed to be protecting your child every minute from any possible danger, including psychological dangers God forbid, your child doesn't get invited to somebody's birthday party. So not only are parents supposed to do that, but they're also supposed to be teachers. They're supposed to be regularly teaching their child stuff, and so the idea that so children are never free from school, even when they're not doing schoolwork at school or at home, in some cases, they're being taught.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 55:57

And then this whole thing of putting them in adult-directed activities, that's a continuation of that. They believe that you know you play this sport, whether it's baseball or soccer or whatever it is. You play it with an adult league and you're learning something, you're being taught something. When you're just doing it on your own, you know that's just random stuff, that's just you know. That doesn't count. So I think that there is, we've developed this attitude that children, children grow by being guided and taught, not that they grow like every other organism on earth from an internal plan that tells them what to do, that makes them grow, that makes them use the resources around them. So children in self-directed education yeah, they need adults. They need all this stuff because they use it. This stuff because they use it. They use their parents to help them learn. They use their friends to help them learn. They use books when they want books to help them learn. These things don't have to be imposed upon them.

Jesper Conrad: 57:17

Peter, we are a very self-directed family. Besides, our kids don't go to school. We have been traveling full time as a family for the last seven years, so we are very free and also work from wherever we are. So we have also taken the going to the office out of the equation. Part of me can look at the rest of the world from the outside and think that looks kind of weird. I don't know why you're doing what you're doing, sending them to school while you're going to work. Maybe it would be better to just close down the schools. But then, on the other hand, I'm like but there's no culture left to support them. So the idea of let's just tear it down kind of rebellion part of me can have. I'm like, well, that wouldn't work right now because the parents are not there for them. That's not culture. Yeah, I can't see it.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 58:16

No, I agree completely, and so it's why I think that this is not a revolutionary process. It's an evolutionary process, and some people think I'm overly optimistic, but I think that the change is already beginning to occur in interesting ways. So in this country, fewer and fewer kids are going to regular schools Every decade. Fewer kids are going to regular schools Every decade fewer kids are going to regular schools. There was a sort of jump in leaving schools during the pandemic, but many of the people who took their kids out of school then didn't send them back Already. There was a movement Homeschooling already before the pandemic. About 5% of American school children are being homeschooled already before the pandemic. That went up to 11% by the end of the pandemic. Many of those have gone back, and I don't have real we don't really have real numbers for the United States as a whole, but reports from homeschooling organizations in individual states suggest that a good guess would be that something like 8% of American school children are being homeschooled now. That's a huge amount, and you know, people who talk about social change say that change occurs gradually at first, and then it begins to accelerate and then it reaches a tipping point where everybody knows somebody who's doing this thing in this other way and if this thing in this other way makes sense, it really leads to something better Then the change occurs gradually. I mean I give examples in my lifetime of how this occurred.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:00:11

So there were decades and decades of gays and lesbians in America having to live in the closet, gradually some of the brave ones coming out, some of the brave ones saying we're gay and we're okay with that, we're proud, we're even proud of it Marching in the street. They took a lot of ridicule, they took a lot of risk for that, but they came out and that encouraged a few more people to come out. And then at some point we reached the tipping point where everybody it didn't matter what religion you had, whether you were a Republican or a Democrat, a conservative or a socialist didn't matter. You knew people personally who were gay and you could no longer with a straight face say that person is a sinner or that person is mentally ill. You had to begin to accept you can be gay and be normal. Now that doesn't mean that everybody's going to become gay, because you have to have a biological predisposition for that. But the acceptance everybody essentially everybody now under the age of 40 in the United States accepts this as a normal and acceptable way to live. That's a sea change that occurred very quickly after a long period of very, very gradual change with setbacks.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:01:56

I predict the same thing with schooling. I think, maybe when it's 10%, maybe when it's 15% of families that are basically doing some version of self-directed education or something in that direction, that then the schools will empty out. They won't empty out all of a sudden, but then the schools either they're going to become complete, the public schools are either going to become completely irrelevant or they're going to have to change dramatically in order to accommodate what people want. So far, for the large extent, people have not believed and for many people, maybe the majority of people, this is true that they don't have a choice. They have to send their kids to school and they've also been convinced that this is good for their kids. But the truth of the matter is the school system public school system, or even if you combine it with the private school system that operates in basically the same way as the public school system but with more money that this has had a monopoly. And whenever you have a monopoly, you don't feel a need really to serve the needs of your clientele because they don't have a choice. Because they don't have a choice. And monopolies are always oriented towards increasing, becoming bigger, increasing their authority, increasing their power, and the school monopoly is no different from that. But if people leave it, then this attitude changes. They don't have a locked-in set of customers and if they're going to survive they're going to have to change. Either way works out okay.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:03:55

I think that at the same time that people are leaving public schools, organizations that support children and provide an environment for self-directed learning are developing. So we have more and more, as there are more and more, homeschoolers in the United States we have more and more learning centers, or I would even call them learning and recreation centers for homeschoolers, organized by homeschoolers, where kids can get together and play with one another, where they can be during the day. So if you got two working parents or a single parent who has to work, they can still homeschool because the kids are at this center for a good part of every day, or many of the days. So you develop accommodations.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:04:46

In this country, many libraries are learning that among their biggest customers are homeschoolers, so they're learning to accommodate homeschoolers.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:05:00

They're learning to get the books homeschoolers want. They're learning to say it's okay if your homeschooling kid stays here all day, even though they're only eight years old, and we normally have a rule that you have to be 12 to be here. They're learning to accommodate because libraries, like every other institution, want to continue on and the traditional uses of libraries are no longer as called for as in the past. You know, uh, you don't really need to go to a library to find information. You can get it online. You don't need to go fewer, as, as books become so cheap and easy to buy, you don't need to necessarily go to the library to borrow them. Libraries are becoming increasingly finding new ways to meet needs in their community and they're seeing homeschoolers as a source of those needs, one of several sources of those needs. So I think that changes as more and more people take their kids out of school. There will be continuous changes to provide the kind of environment that those kids and families need.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:06:25

I really hope you're right. Yeah, I hear so. It is different in the US because you have such a huge percentage of the population home educating. It's very, very different. In Scandinavia it's still a very small movement though it has it's maybe 10 times as many people in denmark now compared to when we started 12, 15 years ago. So it is growing, it's just it started from a very low point.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:06:59

Um, I just think, of course, very few people can make a lot of change by consistently going in one direction and then it grows and grows, and I really hope that this tipping point will happen. I just think I also see a process of I don't know if this resonates with with from your perspective, but the young people. So now I'm looking at the older teenagers and maybe the younger college students um, being very, very ambitious, being very, very. They have a lot of the system internalized. They are so serious it's almost scares me. And I think about my high school years. I got through, I got nice high grades so that I could get into university, but I also had a lot of whiskey and a lot of fun nights and a lot of days where I didn't show up, and what I see is a different style now that they are so focused that it almost scares me.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:08:11

Right, as I agree with that. You know, basically, by depriving children of play, we've driven the playfulness out of them and they are feeling strong pressure to achieve. They're feeling strong pressure from various sources. They're feeling pressure from their parents. They're feeling pressure I'm talking about the United States, I don't know to what degree the same is true but they're feeling pressure from their parents. They're feeling pressure from the schools. They're feeling you've got.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:08:38

I hear from kids who say, and sometimes from parents who say about their kids if my kid gets anything less than an A, my kid feels like a failure. The kids say their parents are making them feel like a failure or the teachers are making them feel like a failure. They believe that they should be getting perfect grades, that they should all be getting into Harvard or one of the elite schools, and that they're failures in life if they haven't. And it's interesting also, there's really good data. The spearhead of this research is Sonoya Luther, who died a few years ago, much too young, but who had been doing research comparing kids who are at what she calls the high achievement schools, which could be public schools in wealthy neighborhoods, where the school prides themselves in the high test scores that kids get and how many of them go on to elite colleges compared to kids in schools that are less achievement-oriented by those measures, whether they're public or private and finds that the rate of suicide, the rate of all of anxiety, depression, every measure of mental disorder, is two or three times as high in those high-pressure schools as it is in the general population. This is well-established research. But what we've done with Common Core is to some degree we've turned all schools into high-pressure schools and what we've done in the indoctrination of parents in a sense the parents are afraid not realistically, this is to some degree myth that the economy is such that if their children don't go on to college and ideally an elite college, their children might end up homeless. Their children might end up in poverty without a job. People at all economic levels are worried about that.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:10:57

There's actually a relatively recent book by two economists I can't remember their names offhand, I wrote a blog post about it not long ago but I still can't remember their names right now who had documented both cross-nationally and over time that the parents push on their children for high achievement in sort of the superficial sense of doing well at school, doing all the things you're supposed to do, developing a good resume that this increases when there's a big disparity between rich and poor. And so in theory that pressure is less in Denmark and in the Norwegian countries, where you have a more socialist kind of situation, more equality among people, than in the United States. And so he argues this is one of the reasons that places like the United States you see much more of this kind of pressure than you do in those places, united States, you see much more of this kind of pressure than you do in those places. But he also points out over time that as we go through, when we go through, as we, you know, during the time when I was a kid, where we had, you know, after the Roosevelt years, and we had a good social network and labor unions were strong, strong and you could be guaranteed, almost guaranteed, a job and job security, you know I grew up in a working class family. My parents hadn't gone to college. I had uncles who were all except with one exception who became a lawyer, but the other uncles were all working. One of them worked in a factory, one of them became a carpenter, they all had blue collar jobs but they also, with one income, could support a family and could even own a home and have a little cottage in the country, all on the wages they were getting from a factory job. You can't do that anymore and, moreover, no matter whether you are relatively wealthy or relatively poor, you realize there's no such thing as job guarantee and anybody could fall at any time.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:13:18

And so parents believe they're protecting their children for the future by making sure that they are quote well-educated and have the right kinds of competitive skills. That a major reason that parents put their kids early on into competitive sports is not because it's important to them that the child learns how to do the sport, because it doesn't matter what sport they put them in or it could be competitive chess or competitive dance or whatever they're putting them in because they want to teach the children the qualities of competition. They believe we're in a very competitive society and they want children to learn how to compete, the desire to win, the pleasure of beating somebody else. Interestingly, in that same research, when she interviewed the children, they were more interested in making friends and they felt bad when they beat their friend. So this is what we're facing. This is the kind of thing we're facing, but at the same time and this is what gives me optimism.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:14:39

What I've just described, that's pessimism. But what gives me optimism is that more and more families in the United States are opting out of that. They're saying we're going for self-directed education. My children are playing as my children can, as we can find a community of other people who have this belief and they're interacting and the evidence is that this is no sacrifice to their future. The kids doing this are doing very and this is part of my own research following kids up who've been educated this way and they're doing well out there Not necessarily well in becoming rich, but they're not that interested in becoming rich. They're supporting themselves by doing things, finding careers that are meaningful to them and are joyful to them. They're sort of extensions of their childhood play. This is a new way of a much more healthy way of living and within our present culture, kids are doing that. Young adults are doing that successfully. Kids are doing that. Young adults are doing that successfully.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:15:52

We're also seeing in the United States a sharp increase in apprenticeships. More and more businesses are realizing college doesn't. There's no reason for me to require a college degree for employees, because the college isn't teaching them anything that helps them in this job. I'm better off hiring kids right out of high school who are eager to learn. We'll start off at a lower salary but work up to a higher salary and glad to be learning on the job. And so there's more and more apprenticeships, more and more internships, and there's even a decrease within the last three or four years, actually since 2011.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:16:26

In the United States, college enrollment peaked in 2011, and it's been going down ever since, partly because the number of college-age people has been declining, but not entirely because of that. Also because more and more people are deciding I don't really need college, especially men are. The colleges are dominated by women. Available tend to be, from a stereotype point of view, male. Jobs Tend to be jobs in the construction industry, jobs like plumber, electrician, carpenter and so on, and even engineers of the type that don't require it. There tend to be stereotype male, but more and more women are catching on to this. We had a female electrician come to our house recently. One of my stepson's girlfriends was a plumber. This is beginning to change.

Jesper Conrad: 1:17:37

Peter, when we started on this journey of home educating, self-directed learning, many, many years ago, plus 10 years ago, it felt strange for me, as it was like Cecilia's project and I wasn't on board in this start. And I'm imagining there's a lot of people out there who are getting curious and reach a point where they get interested in it. But how to start for a parent who are curious about learning through play and self-directed education because it can seem very terrifying when you have been used to growing up in a culture of school was good enough for me. So of course it's good enough for my child. You know all these things. I had that mentality. I've grown out of it. But but where should you start? As a parent who who sees this open window when the neighbor's kids are running around having fun and you're like what to do?

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:18:39

yeah, that's a good. That's a good point. So when it wasn't too long ago, I would say quite genuinely, it took quite a lot of courage to do what you decided to do a school for self-directed school although, to be honest, I didn't have a choice. He wasn't going to let me send him anyplace else. But so how did I adapt to it? At that time? This was almost 40 years ago, and so how did I adapt to it?

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:19:20

The first thing that was important for me to know was to kind of assure myself or determine whether I was going to be okay with his staying in this school, where they don't teach any lessons, you know, and he's just playing all day long with other kids and following his own interests. I wanted to see some adults who had already done this, and fortunately there already were some adults, and I began by just meeting a few of them through the school. But then, being a scientist, I didn't want just a few adults, I wanted all of them. So I did a formal study of the graduates of the school at that time, and then, since then, I've done, along with Gina Riley, a formal study of grown unschoolers to see what they're doing in life. And so I think one thing for people who are thinking about this is to understand this is no longer a radical experiment.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:20:19

This is something that's been going on for 100 years. I mean Summer Hill was started over 100 years ago. It's been going on for 100 years. I mean Summer Hill was started over 100 years ago. It's been going on and still going on. Sudbury Valley in Framingham was started almost 60 years ago and going strong, and there have been people doing unschooling since the 1960s and so this is not new. And so if you really want to know what happens, look at what happens. There's data on what happens. So that was part of the point of my book. Free to Learn was to show people that there's data on this. There's now even much more data on it. You can't imagine how many cases there were when my book first came out of moms telling me I knew that I needed to take my son out of school or my daughter out of school, but I can't convince my husband.

Jesper Conrad: 1:21:18

I tried that Been there.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:21:20

Yeah, but your book seems to be helping Because basically I say so, here's this professor. It's a professor with a PhD who's saying this is okay and he's done research and you can read this research, and so it becomes a little bit harder for that stubborn man to say no, this would be too dangerous. So I've heard that story many times. Believe it or not, I have a theory as to why it's moms who get involved.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:22:00

I used to think, well, maybe there's just something intrinsic about moms that they're sort of more in tune with their children's needs than fathers are.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:22:09

But I also think that maybe the more real reason is that traditionally, and still today, it's usually the mom who is more responsible than the dad for the day-to-day activities of the child, and it's the mom who can see that this child is suffering more so than the dad. And the mom, and it's generally speaking, the decisions about the child, even past infancy, are made more by moms than dads. This is not always the case, but generally speaking, certainly in the United States and traditionally this is true. So the mom comes up with the idea of let's do homeschooling or let's, because this is sort of what moms do. They come up with the and then, and then the dad has to be brought along in this. So I think it's not necessarily an intrinsic sex difference in who is the more, who has the more intuitive understanding of their child's needs, as a gender difference in who traditionally is it that makes decisions about what the child does.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:23:27

So maybe the men should listen.

Jesper Conrad: 1:23:30

And I think they are growing and are ready, Peter. I think this is a wonderful place to round up the conversation.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:23:42

You don't want to go any further in this direction.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:23:44

I can tell We'd love to talk more, but we have promised time for that, so let's not push it too, much.

Jesper Conrad: 1:23:55

So besides your book then you also have a sub-stack where you share new ideas, new thoughts. I will make a link in the show notes for it, but can you share a little about what you write and share there?

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:24:13

Well, the name of the sub-stack is Play Makes Us Human, and so I write about the role of play in all aspects of our being human, the role of play in children's of our being human. The role of play in children's development is what I specialize in, but I also write about the role of play in adult life, but the role of play as a vehicle for cultural change, that inventions come out of play, change that inventions come out of play, the role of play in human evolution. I argue that the characteristic that distinguished us initially from the other apes was an expansion of our playfulness, which allowed us to live relatively peacefully in multi-male, multi-female groups, which other apes cannot do. But play overrides the domineering tendencies. It does totally override them, but allows us to live. So I write about that, and I write more recently about a lot of the issues that we've just been talking about.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:25:23

I write about the rise in anxiety and depression and how it relates to the lack of play. I write about how schools have become more and more toxic as a result of Common Core and changes that have occurred in recent times. I write in defense of the Internet for kids, because we have a panic about that right now in our culture that somehow this is destroying children's minds, creating anxiety, depression, getting them addicted and so on, and I've delved deeply into the research and most people really doing this research don't hold to the story that this is damaging children. They see far more benefits to children than harm, while admitting that there are some problems and we need to work on those problems. And so I'm trying to get that message from research out to people who are reading these scare headlines about how their children are addicted to social media and how those terrible algorithms are addicting them and how their children are doing these things that are leading them to compare themselves unfavorably to other people and therefore to feel depressed.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:26:39

All these kinds of stories that we tell all of which there's a certain amount of truth to but only a certain amount of truth and to take the virtual world, the digital world, away from children at this time in history is a very similar impulse to what we did in the United States decades ago of taking the outdoor world away from children because we believed it was dangerous to them. We've got to say, yeah, there are some dangers. Let's teach our children to deal with those dangers. Let's reduce those dangers to the degree that we can without taking the fun of all this away. That should be our adult responsibility. But the knee-jerk response is let's take one more freedom away from our kids, because they're hurting themselves with this freedom.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:27:37

And let's take more or less the only place where they are free and not under adult observation away from them and restrict that it's. It's a bad plan. I agree exactly right. So these are some of the things I write about.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:27:50

one more thing you could link to is I have a personal website it's just petergrayorg where people can download any of my any of many of my academic articles and chapters, which are easily readable. You don't have to be a specialist to read them, so you could. You could read my studies of grown unschoolers if you want. You could read my study of the graduates of the Sudbury Valley School. You could read the chapter I wrote on self-directed education for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Educational Research, which is the first time that this compendium has ever had a chapter about self-directed education. They asked me to write that chapter, so you can find those kinds of things at that website, as well as videos of some of my talks.

Jesper Conrad: 1:28:44

Peter, it has been a fantastic pleasure and I, when you talked about the tipping point coming earlier in our dialogue, I got goosebumps and got all emotional because it has been for us a long journey. We started not alone, but more or less alone, and I would have loved to be in a country where there was so many percentage of homeschoolers. It is growing in Denmark, it is growing over the world and you are one of the big reasons and, as all the moms have said to you during the time, a lot of us men for some reason sometimes need a well-educated man saying it's okay.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:29:28

A little bit annoyed with the fact that I couldn't convince him.

Jesper Conrad: 1:29:34

You're convinced. We have been homeschooling for so many years, so I want to thank you for all your work and for the time you shared with us here today.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:29:45

It's been a pleasure, it's fun to talk to you.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:29:46

It really has been a pleasure, and I also just want to say to the listeners maybe, that I find reading your shorter things. It's like, you know, like having a little chocolate with my coffee. It's whenever I read a little sub stack of Peter Gray. I just find that I have more interesting conversations the following days and I think it's really worthwhile to spend your time reading Peter Gray, if you haven't done it already. So thank you for all the little things that you share.

Peter Gray, Ph.D.: 1:30:11

All right, well, bye, bye, this has been fun.