Free to Learn

What is it with kids these days? They can't sit still - but obesity is on the rise. Their days are filled with activity - but more often than not, they're bored and restless. Childhood should be a time of unbridled joy, play, and learning. Instead, we have pushed our children into an abnormal environment, where they are expected to spend the greater part of their day under adult direction, sitting at desks and taking tests. We call this imprisonment schooling. What free time they have we fill with supervised instruction: team sports, tutoring, homework. As a result, we are heading toward an unprecedented crisis, with skyrocketing rates of childhood anxiety, depression, and suicide. As developmental psychologist Peter Gray explains, children come into this world burning to learn, but the enduring lesson of school is that learning is work, to be avoided when possible. In "Free to Learn", Gray shows that we can reverse the harmful effects of modern schooling and promote learning, self-reliance, and curiosity in our kids by returning to our hunter-gatherer roots. School is an artificial construct, a relatively recent invention in our evolutionary history which arose with the development of agriculture. But as Gray points out, children's minds and their natural instincts to learn were shaped when humans were living as hunter-gatherers. In hunter-gatherer societies children were left to play freely - and over time they absorbed the practical skills they needed to survive by watching their elders, and developed social skills by having to negotiate with other children while playing. The counter-cultural movement known as "unschooling" is growing as more and more parents and teachers are coming to realize that anxiety and competition in the classroom inhibit learning; rather, self-chosen and self-directed play are what engage the mind as effective learning tools. As Gray argues, education and learning should call upon the core aspects of our human nature - curiosity, playfulness, and sociability - instead of inhibiting them. A brave, counterintuitive proposal for freeing our children from the shackles of the curiosity-killing institution we call school, "Free to Learn" shows that it's time to stop asking what's wrong with our children, and start asking what's wrong with the system.