#29. Childhood Freedom, Play, and the Development of Passionate Interests

In today’s world, passionate interests are best developed by children who are free from the constraints of conventional schooling.

Dear friends,

In Letter #28 I discussed how the spirit of amateurism—that is, how involvement for the sheer love of the activity—provided the engine, historically, for many great scientific insights and discoveries. As illustrations, I used the examples of Charles Darwin’s insights about evolution, Thomas Edison’s inventions that precipitated a new age of technology, Albert Einstein’s reformation of theoretical physics, and Jane Goodall’s discoveries about our chimpanzee cousins and development of new ways of observing and describing the behavior of animals in nature.

I pointed out that all four of these scientists were pursuing passionate interests they developed in childhood play. Young Charles played in nature, observing and collecting flora and fauna; young Tom played with electricity and gadgets; young Albert played with numbers and mental manipulations of symbols; and young Jane played with live animals and visions of African adventures found in stories. Reading and study was a big part of this childhood play for all four of these future great scientists, but none of that was school induced. It was self-chosen, self-directed reading and study, derived from interest, not coercion. It was part and parcel of their play.

Now, in this letter, I pursue the idea that childhood play can still underly the development of children’s passionate interests, in cases where schooling does not absorb their time and thwart their interests. I begin with a story about my youngest brother, Fred Carlson. His last name is different from mine because he has a different father, but we grew up in the same household with the same mother.

My Brother Fred

Fred is 12 years younger than me, so he started first grade in public school the year I started college. He lasted there through fourth grade. Around that time our mother became something of a hippie and moved onto a Vermont commune with my two youngest brothers. Fred left public school then and attended a little free school, which my mother helped to start. The school had no imposed curriculum and he could do there whatever he wished.

That school wasn’t certified as a high school, however, so, at age 14, he enrolled in 9th grade at the local public school. On his second day there the principal told him, “We don’t like you hippie types around here.” So, he left and never went back. Then, with no school, he hung around the commune for a couple of years and helped to build a house. He got interested in wood and carpentry. He also got interested in music, which he had much time to pursue, and developed a fascination with stringed instruments.

When he was 16, he enrolled in a publicly supported program designed for high-school dropouts. The guy who ran the program asked him what he’d like to do, and he said, “I’d like to build a banjo.” Nobody there knew anything about instrument building, but the head of the program helped Fred find a local person, a guy named Ken, who had a woodworking shop and knew a little about banjo building. And so, with Ken’s help, Fred built a banjo. After that, Fred used the small sum of money his father had saved for his education to take a 6-week course at a guitar-building school and to purchase the equipment he needed to set up his own shop. The rest is history.

By the time Fred was 21 years old, one of his beautiful guitars was on display at the Smithsonian Museum. Ever since then he’s continued to make one instrument after another, each one different from any of the others, each one an invention. He is famous among luthiers for his artistry, creativity, and craftsmanship. For one example, see the inserted photo; for other examples, see his website. Fred believes, and so do I, that if he had stayed in school, he would never have found his passion.

Fred with one of his inventions

Self-Directed Education as the Pursuit of Passions

I’ve spent part of my academic career researching the outcomes of Self-Directed Education—that is, outcomes for people who did not go to a curriculum-based school, but, instead, educated themselves by pursuing their own interests. This research includes a study, many years ago, of the graduates of the Sudbury Valley School, in Massachusetts, where students, from age 4 through late teenage years are free all day to pursue their own interests (see here); and, more recently, a study of grown unschoolers (here). Unschoolers are people who for legal purposes are registered as homeschoolers but are not bound by a curriculum and are continuously free to pursue their own interests.

The most interesting finding, for our concern now, is that a high percentage of these young adults were pursuing careers that were direct extensions of passionate interests they had developed as children in play. Here are a few examples (for elaborations and more examples, see Gray & Chanoff, 1986; Riley & Gray, 2015):

• A girl who loved to play with boats went on, as a teenager, to apprentice herself to a ship captain and then became captain, herself, of a cruise ship.

• Another young girl played with dolls, as many girls do. Then she started making doll clothes, In her teens she began making clothes for herself and her friends. At the time of our study, she was head of a pattern-making department in the high-fashion dress industry.

• A boy was passionate about all kinds of constructive play. He would make whole villages and factories, to scale, out of modeling clay. As a teenager, he’d hang around local garages and learn about automobile mechanics by asking and watching. At the time of the study, he was a much sought-after machinist and inventor.

• Another child fell in love with science fiction. Through that, he discovered mathematics and became passionate about it. As a teenager he pored through advance math texts He went on to become a math professor.

• Another—who had consistently failed his courses in public school before enrolling at Sudbury Valley at age 13—became obsessed with computers and programming as a teenager. At the time of the study, he was 22 years old and founder and head of a very successful software development company. Among his clients was the school district that had failed him.

• A girl fell in love with circuses when she was 3 years old and began training to become a performer at age 5. By the time she was a teenager she was performing professionally as a trapeze artist, and from age 19-24 she and her best friend founded and ran their own contemporary circus company.

• A boy became passionate about making YouTube videos with friends at age 11. In his teens, he began to study filmmaking. His experience and passion led him to be hired, at age 18, as a production assistant by a major film company. At age 20, at the time of the survey, he was working with a famous director in Los Angeles on the production of a major film.

• A boy by age 15 was pursuing three passionate interests—wilderness hiking, paragliding, and photography. At age 21, at the time of the survey, he was successfully pursuing a career as an aerial wilderness photographer, thereby combining all three of his passions.

• A girl who had attended a traditional public school until age 13, in a spirit of rebellion refused to continue there and became an unschooler. She then developed passionate interests in revolutions and wildlife. At the time of the survey, at age 28, she was a full-time Greenpeace activist, fundraiser, and manager.

These are just some of the many examples documented in our research. All these people were able to discover and pursue their passions because they had left, or had never enrolled in, a school that forced a curriculum on them. Without school, their curiosity and playfulness remained intact or recovered and they had ample time to learn about themselves and to discover and become good at what they most loved to do.

How Schools Thwart Passions

Passionate interests develop when children are allowed to play and explore to their heart’s content. They play in many ways, at many different things, and in the process, they discover what they most love to do. Schools prevent this natural discovery by taking up so much of children’s time and also by:

1. Requiring everyone to do the same things at the same time. It’s not possible for all the children in a room to be passionately interested in the same thing at the same time (or even mildly interested in it).

2. Replacing intrinsic motivation with extrinsic motivators, such as grades and honors. To pursue a passion, you must focus on what YOU want to do, not try to impress others.

3. Threatening students with failure or embarrassment, which generates fear. Fear freezes the mind into rigid ways of thinking and negates the possibility of passionate interest.

4. Teaching that there is one right answer to every question, or one right way to do what you are supposed to do. That’s a surefire way to nip any possible emerging interest in the bud.

5. Teaching children that learning is work and that play, at best, is just recess, a break from learning. But anyone with a passionate interest knows that play, learning, and work are one and the same while involved in the activity they love.

So, if we want our children to grow up with passionate interests, we must find alternatives to coercive schooling. Or, at least, we must reduce the role of schooling and school-like activities in their lives and increase greatly their opportunities to discover and do what they like to do—that is, to play.

Final Thoughts

These letters are, in part, a forum for discussion. I’m always interested in readers’ stories and thoughts, including those that may run counter to mine. Questions, comments, and thoughtful disagreements add to the interest of these letters, for me and for other readers. So, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts and questions below. I’m particularly interested in stories you might have about activities in your own childhood that may have generated passionate interests you continue to pursue today.

If you are enjoying these letters, please recommend them to others who might enjoy them. If you are not yet a subscriber, please subscribe. If you have a free subscription, please consider upgrading to paid—at just $50 for a year. All funds I receive through paid subscriptions are used to support nonprofit organizations I’m involved with that are aimed at bringing more play and freedom to children’s lives. The organizations these funds helped support in 2023 are Defending the Early Years, the Alliance for Self-Directed Education, Let Grow, and the National Institute for Play. Also, paid subscriptions remind me that you value these letters and help motivate me to continue.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

References

Peter Gray and David Chanoff. Democratic schooling: What happens to young people who have charge of their own education? American Journal of Education, 94, 182-213, 1986.

Gina Riley and Peter Gray.  Grown unschoolers’ experiences with higher education and employment:  Report II on a survey of 75 unschooled adults.  Other Education, 4(#2), 33-53, 2015.

Note: This letter is a modified version of the transcript of a TEDx talk I delivered in 2018.