Free to Learn

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