Links - Amplifying Peter Gray
Someone whose views you should consider
Peter Gray already has a broad audience—about 60,000 followers and subscribers. So far be it necessary for me to provide him amplification. Nevertheless, I would like to take a moment to do so to my audience.
In part this is inspired by a reader’s request for me to write more on education—specifically what works and what doesn’t. This is one of several pieces I plan to do in fulfillment of that request.
I’ve linked to Professor Gray in the past including to a snippet of the longer interview I highlight below. Long-time readers can therefore be forgiven for their feeling of Déjà Vu.
First I would like to share his recent post on “Helping Kids (and Ourselves) Use Smartphones Safely”.
This is the most thorough and reasonable discussion on smart phone use by children that I have read recently. And I have read a lot on this topic.
In it he patiently walks through 9 benefits and 9 harms. As he argues, this is not a complete list nor does he give a definitive conclusion. We must be thoughtful about this new technology. A luddite’s opposition is as unhelpful as is a completely laissez faire approach. Parents have to engage and fine tune. This is very much in keeping with his philosophy generally.
Second I would like to share his post from July outlining “A Brief History of Education”. From this I will quote at length.
When we see that children everywhere are required by law to go to school, that almost all schools are structured in the same way, and that our society goes to a great deal of trouble and expense to provide such schools, we tend naturally to assume that there must be some good, logical reason for all this. Perhaps if we didn’t force children to go to school, or if schools operated much differently, children would not grow up to be competent adults. Perhaps some really smart people have figured all this out and have proven it in some way, or perhaps alternative ways of thinking about child development and education have been tested and have failed.
…
Children now are almost universally identified by their grade in school, much as adults are identified by their job or career.
Over time, from the early Prussian days to now, certain schooling premises about the nature of learning have remained unchanged: Learning is hard work; it is something that children must be forced to do, not something that will happen naturally through children’s self-chosen activities. The specific lessons that children must learn are determined by professional educators, not by children, so education today is still, as much as ever, a matter of inculcation (though educators tend to avoid that term and use, falsely, terms like “discovery”).
Clever educators today might use “play” as a tool to get children to enjoy some of their lessons, and children might be allowed some free playtime at recess (though even this has decreased greatly in recent decades), but children’s own play is understood as inadequate as a foundation for education. Children whose drive to play is so strong that they can’t sit still for lessons are no longer beaten; instead, they are medicated.
The theories and practices of education began in a most brutal form that included severe beating of children both physically and emotionally. It somewhat evolved into a less physical but still brutal form of forced learning, mainly for the purposes of obedience. One could say, as Gray points out, we have not learned much of how to teach or how we learn, especially in childhood.
From his conclusion:
Schools as we know them began centuries ago as Church-run institutions designed explicitly for obedience training and indoctrination. The curriculum and stated goals of schooling have changed over time, but the methodology has not. We still have today a system well designed for obedience training and indoctrination and poorly designed for anything else.
Think about it. The only way students can pass in school is to do what they are told to do, no matter how stupid and irrelevant it seems; and almost the only way they can fail is to not do what they are told to do. Teachers go into the profession for all sorts of idealized reasons and, generally, obedience training is not one of them. But once in the profession, they are, by necessity, obedience trainers. They reward for obedience and punish for disobedience. We don’t like to think of the school lessons today as doctrine, but when you require students to feed back, unquestioningly, whatever it is you “teach,” then what you are teaching is doctrine. Some great teachers can overcome it, but it takes much effort and cannot be fully overcome as the school structure doesn’t allow that.
Third and last I share the interview with John Papola from his podcast Dad Saves America. Here it is in podcast form and here it is on YouTube. The show’s synopsis sums up well Gray’s philosophy:
Peter explains how we stripped childhood of the one ingredient that actually builds competence: real freedom. We talk about the collapse of free, self-directed play, the fear-driven culture that keeps kids under constant adult management, and how modern schooling turns learning into compliance and metrics—resulting in bad habits and chronic stress. Play isn’t a “bonus” part of childhood; it’s how children learn judgment, resilience, social intelligence, and self-control. The path back to healthier kids starts with letting them take risks, solve problems, and grow up the way humans evolved to.
Gray’s Substack is Play Makes Us Human. There is a lot of wisdom in just that titling. I take from it several lessons.
We shouldn’t take ourselves or the things around us too seriously. This isn’t a lesson of disregard but of humility.
We learn by doing, trying, failing, and trying again. Mistakes are necessary.
The playful spirit of a child is not something to be stamped out. It is something to be embraced. To say, “Though an adult, she had a child’s like curiosity,” is a strong compliment.
There is no single method or formula, no one way. Again, experimentation and the freedom to try is what builds better people and richer societies (richer in all respects).
Play around with his ideas, and you might just learn something new as well as something you instinctively knew all along.