My friends and I were talking the other day about the theory that what we call 'neurotypical' today is in fact another form of neurodiversity - but it's the form that most benefits a capitalist society, and our education system's capacity to churn out compliant work units.
yesss! i totally agree. The problem with changing the system,I find, is that we are the lobsters in the pot. So many ppl seem to have given away their auto-powers of discernment, curiosity, engagement and need for an authentic and healthy community. Many ppl are not inconvenienced enough to question the system, as it is bearable for them. Capitalist power hoarding narratives serving few, and dividing many, ignoring the realities that we are facing now, this economic narrative has been adopted and personally integrated by far too many. Personally, i find building community to be incredibly challenging these days. So tricky! It feels far different than what I grew up with and that is quite worrying. I don't mind change, bring on the progressive changes! Not a Luddite, although prefer analogue vibes & am not particularly nostalgic either as am a member of the BIPOC population and yet, it seems in my youth things were working towards more humane collective futures. All energy towards looking where we want to go. I figure micro efforts are all can do. #WhereDoWeGoFromHereChaosorCommunity? #DrMartinLutherKingJr #FreeToBe
yes! Schools support capitalist agendas in ALL ways. I will say, now that I am a parent forced into homeschooling, I will say that I find perhaps that public schools may be worse now, compared to when I was a child. I myself have been "lucky" enough to experience many different systems as my family was very restless and we moved between 3 different countries, many homes and provinces. I say lucky, only because when I returned to public school after attending a private school I saw how stark the difference was between those 2 schools, although neither suited me well. I have experienced homeschooling, grassroots community schooling, public schooling and private schooling. I am now a parent and have also worked in many different schools and school systems. It is a terrifying conundrum. I see how the wealth gap is being widened, particularly for bipoc and lower-income children. As well I see how imaginations are being limited and the body-mind, community rapport building has been terribly disrupted. Some things have improved of course, learning differences perhaps and also less conventional and controlling attitudes towards definitions of gender, but sadly the progress has not been evenly distributed I find. I just read a few pages of your book when I was waiting somewhere and it was available for me to read. The passage I read was the one describing your experience with your 9 year old son and the school. I had such a similar and horrific and frightening experience with my son's school refusal. So extreme! Although I found how your son acted out to be full of a beautiful wise cheeky humour. I can't wait to read the whole book! thank you so much for sharing your experiences. More to write but this is an essay already lol.
I hated school for this reason, and now I have a child who hates school and tells me, "I would love school if we could just play with our friends all day. But its like torture because our friends are around us but we can't talk to them or play with them". They only get 15 minutes recess and 20 mintes lunch (half of which they are forced to sit down and eat). He is a good student but very bored and angry at the end of every day, and has a generally negative attitude towards the teachers, even the good ones. I'm tempted to keep him at home but he is very social and gets bored, and there are few homeschoolers in our area. I wish someone would reform school over night so our kids could start enjoying it!
You should educate him at home then! There are plenty of ways to interact with people as a home school student. Socialization is not just about playing with your friends. One of the key benefits of home school is that children learn to interact with all ages and stages; they are not limited to only being nice to people who are within 1-2 years of their own age. A good student will get his work done in 2-4 hours (depends on age) and then he can do some of this creative play that this substack likes to talk about. :-)
Great article. I agree with everything and also included this history in my book, Navigating the Shock of Parenthood. Most parents in the US go into parenthood with no conscious awareness of why we do what we do. When we shed light on the origins of things that affect parenting then parents can make more intentional choices for their kids.
Love the point of how "willfulness" was once a virtue that led to exploration and internally motivated growth.
I have a few things to add. First, as you note, the workers rights and children's rights movements pushed kids out of factories and some farms and into schools. But another thing has occurred since then that has had a profound effect on how we school. That is fear based politics. The Cold War, Sputnik, the rise of Japanese auto industry, the economic rise of China...all these and other things have created a political fear of "falling behind." This fear has been pushed off onto the shoulders of children who are supposed to out compete "foreign" children to the betterment of the US. It is important for parents to understand that these fears are adult problems that we should not be pushing off onto the shoulders of kids.
There are two other issues I think we need to talk about when attempting to change and improve how childhood education occurs. As the mother of 15y/o twins, one of my most important jobs has been to protect their love of learning. This has required endless investigation of schools, moving my kids when places were bad, private Montessori when they were young, and the good fortune of having found a public school that is fully project based with both school and student chosen personal projects. I've never regretted pulling them from a bad environment and getting them some where good. When you watch that love of learning reblossom in your kid it sticks with you. Now, that said...
First, when we talk about schooling for all kids we need to remember that the human brain is hardwired to learn spoken language but not written language. And 20% of all kids have dyslexia. 5-20% have dysgraphia. 5-20% have dyscalculia. These kids can be taught to read, write, and do math but it won't come "naturally" to them. So while I believe in unleashing the innate desire to learn within each child, I also think we, as the adults in the room, need to be aware of these potential issue, screen for them, and support kids who need it.
Second, I think there is something to be said for balance. When I look back on my college courses some of the very best of them were ones I took to fulfill basic requirements. They included: Controlling Stress and Tension, On Death and Dying, an amazing Art History class, the Physics of Light, and Life in the Oceans. The last one ultimately led me to my self designed major in Underwater Cinematography. (Not practical, but led to a great education) My point is that being exposed to things we didn't know would be interesting can be deeply enriching to both adults and children.
Right now the US is stuck on building education through an "accountability" goal. We need to drop kick that whole perspective right out of the stadium. Instead we need to focus on a "nurturing the love of learning" tree. Freeing the love of learning. Joy in learning. It doesn't fit with the patriarchy, or religious dogma, or political fears, or endless efforts of the powerful to control the less powerful. But it is the only way we will truly unleash the potential of kids. Because right now they are largely on a very tight leash.
I write on special education and fixing public education on my free substack site: Kathleen Cawley for Navigating Modern Parenthood
Thank you Peter Gray! I've been following you for many years and your book helped give me the validation to fight for my kids love of learning.
Training (apprenticeship), indoctrination (religious, political, cultural), education (independent thinking). Each has important domains of application, unfortunately the factory school system focuses almost exclusively on training & indoctrination (the stark case of the muslim madras where exact repetition without any interpretive deviation of the Koran is permitted.)
Surprisingly, naval & military academies actually have done a creditable job blending the three modalities over many decades, —most services require officers with working brains.
From what I can recall from readings decades ago on the Prussian school system, it was very effective and eschewed physical punishment.
Lastly, after 39 years of naval service I lasted 3 months teaching in a US public school, not because I didn't love the youth I was working with, but because I couldn't stand the depressing feeling of being a jailer. (& that's saying a lot from someone that spent years at sea, for as Boswell put it, "Being on a ship is like being in jail, with the possibility of sinking.")
Ricky Lanusse has an interesting post wrestling with the idea that our teach-to-the-test education system is systematically snuffing out minds that might otherwise have become world-changing geniuses:
He asserts that many geniuses of yore had expensive private tutors - and he provocatively entertains the idea that AI may now be on the verge of being able to serve as an inexpensive tutor. It's an attractive hypothesis. If I picture myself simply being turned loose with Perplexity at age 10 I'm only able to imagine society would have gotten a lot more utility out of me. My most vivid memories of fourth grade are from weekend library trips and home experiments where I learned about barometric pressure, fungal spores, and nuclear reactors. Even if self-directed exploration didn't turn me into a more useful citizen, at least I would have been a much happier human being. I would never have tortured myself with learning to divide fractions or memorizing the dates of military battles, but I would certainly have discovered the life stories of some of the more obscure members of my personal pantheon of scientific, economic, and political heroes at a much younger age.
Do you share the sense that AI tutoring might provide a new way to finally start liberating kids from this unsinkable jail we've constructed for them?
I’ve worked as an educator for 12 years in public, private, and out of school programs. What I think is so important about this history is that even “good” schools are rooted in it and follow the indoctrination approach. “Good” schools are so primarily because they have fewer issues with obedience, and most parents are totally oblivious to that fact. If you are sending your kid to a traditional school of any kind, there is no way around that. As challenging as it is, the way to change this is to begin shifting what we place value on as parents and teachers - rather than obedience, kids following their own path and interests.
Your history of education doesn't take into account education in Roman times, as well as Indian schooling that persisted in a similar form for at least 2500 years until the British came and dismantled it in the 18th century. I have documented the dismantling and what it was like prior to it in a series of posts here: https://lila.substack.com/p/the-beautiful-tree-indian-indigenous
But in short:
Children in India were sent to village schools starting at 5, and continued to be educated till they were 13-15. It seems like some kind of ability grouping was what was used. In some areas, schools went from dawn to dusk, even (with a long break in between for lunch and naps). Schools were free and open to everyone in the village. The teachers came from the village, and the school was funded by land grants (so, property taxes). There was specialized higher education after primary schooling, and that often took the form of living in a teacher's home and learning from him. Even higher education was also there, and involved going to major universities far away. They involved entrance exams - literally administered at the entrance of the university, and students came from Cambodia, Indonesia, and Thailand to study at these places.
Most people didn't go into higher education. Most people did do vocational education, but they were taught the basics in school, including accounts, record-keeping, basics of money, math, science and technology, and other subjects the villagers thought was relevant to their children. There are accounts of many children becoming financially independent by age 14 despite living at home, but until then, they were supposed to stay in school.
Those who went into higher education did so to study medicine, law, and administration, as well as philosophy and other deep research subjects.
Prior to conquering India, the British didn't have schools that scaled, and the average British child had about 1 year of schooling. In the 16th and 17th centuries, schools were shut down because too many people were learning to read who had no business doing so, and they were reading the Bible, taking it literally and rioting, so reach wasn't good.
What the British noticed in India was that teachers would have the brightest children instruct the rest, and this enabled one teacher to scale teaching to a much larger number of students. This was called the Madras method, and there is actually a school in Scotland called the Madras College that pioneered this method in British schools. This enabled them to scale up education.
Christian notions about children and the nature of good and evil seem to be at the core of why education in the west was so despised by children. I used to think it was a uniquely Indian or Asian thing to hit kids for not learning fast enough, but after talking to American boomers in Catholic schools, and studying the history of Native american boarding schools, the patterns are quite clear to me - religious teachers beat the shit out of children for not complying, and called it discipline. I wonder sometimes if the issue here is the monks and nuns who ran these schools didn't have any experience of parenting, and hence thanks to their religious conditioning, saw children as imperfect, evil things that needed the evil beaten out of them rather than as full human beings. Most Indian sources about teaching seem to involve the teacher conducting themselves respectfully and being like a parent to the children. Even today, the kind of respect accorded to teachers is something else, we have a whole festival dating back to ancient times involving honoring teachers.
Even in times of war and destruction, it has been noticed that parents in India in the 18th century were trying to create a schooling pod much like during the pandemic, and hire tutors to teach their children. So school has been quite important and valued in the East, even if not in the West historically.
After delving into the history of education in India in contrast with that in England and Scotland, and their rise and fall, I've come to the conclusion that you need to have children in some kind of organized education during their formative years. Free universal public education is important for every child to have a chance in any kind of advanced society. Especially if you want to have qualified doctors, vaccines and rule of law, or want to build specialized things like ships and cotton looms. These topics can't be absorbed by playing. Instruction is the easiest way to learn these things. Ability grouping solves a lot of problems rather than age-wise grouping.
I also watch a lot of unschooling influencer videos, and... there are a ton of illiterate children there. My own experience trying to educate my child has me convinced that you need direct instruction. Maybe 1-1 instruction, but instruction nonetheless. Kids don't happen into reading and writing. It requires a lot of concerted cultivation.
Most people don't want no schools, they just want better schools. Look at this post and the discussions on there https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/what-if-school-is-bad-actually It seems like most kids' problems with school would be solved by a higher caliber of teachers and ability grouping.
One of the most mindblowing things I'm finding is that education and early childhood education majors consistently have the lowest IQs and SAT scores of everyone in college. I had my kid's kindergarten teacher ask me 'what is that word, a-p-p-a-r-a-t-u-s, what does it mean?' just last week. Seems like the stupidest people with no other options are becoming teachers these days. You can only coast on social skills and warmth for so long, you need a high IQ to figure out how to solve your students' problems with learning and how to manage the classroom.
Kids need to be around high-IQ people to actually learn. Direct instruction is most efficient, but if you want your kids to learn by playing, you need them to play with smart people. That's not happening in public schools these days and isn't happening for the kids of unschooling influencers.
Peter, thank you for walking us through the history of education. As a scientist and a parent, I’ve often felt that something is deeply off in how we think about education, but your writing gives it structure, clarity, and urgency.
I see it in my own daughter. At just three years old, she’s bursting with questions, play, and imagination. And yet I worry how much of that will survive once school tells her learning is “work” and play is a reward.
That’s why I recently started a publication, Playful Brains, to help other parents protect that spark, and to show that kids learn best when we stop trying to control every part of the process. In fact, my research showed that parents only have very limited time (4.3 yrs waking time and 1.3 yrs play time) with their kids throughout their whole life! (https://playfulbrains.substack.com/p/you-only-have-13-years-of-playtime)
Your work has been a huge inspiration.
The line about how school teaches kids the difference between work and play hit me hard. What if we raised a generation who never learned that false split?
Thank you again for giving us the history, the vision, and the courage to imagine something better.
I would like to add an ancillary but related phenomenon. Freemasons originally operated as one of the earliest trade unions. As such, they hoarded their special knowledge according to rank, and as such they were an educational institution as well. We don't think of them as such, but given their privileged position, the "free" part, they arguably also comprised the earliest known middle-class as their projects were granted mostly by ruling elites in various localities, with wealth spread according to rank.
I have only recently begun to explore the history of Islamic education, but so far it looks and smells a lot more like unschooling than anything I have seen from the west, and I find that interesting on many levels.
I wish your views were more widely known and appreciated which is why I read and share regularly even though I'm mostly out of the ed game. But I'm sure indoctrination and control will continue to be primary motivators even among the alt ed crowd.
Compulsory ed has always been about indoctrination in some religion or other, still is. That's obvious and I guess to be expected. But sadly many, maybe most homeschools have the same motivation. I kept my sons out of school till they wanted to go in order to pursue specific training. (They are currently studying accounting and engineering while still living with us.) We used no curriculum. They had lots of free play time though mostly supervised at least loosely which I regret. I should have let them roam the woods more. But they certainly were not indoctrinated at least I didn't think so. However most of the homeschoolers and even the unschoolers we occasionally encountered were just swapping one form of indoctrination that they didn't like for their preferred indoctrination.
Talking to my sons just now, they both assure me they had way more freedom than their peers and never felt compelled or indoctrinated "except maybe to be good humans." They also just said they will definitely let their kids play alone in the woods. Does this not seem like a form of indoctrination? The doctrine of play? Are we no different than the 'other' we criticize?
Love your contributions, professor Gray. Keep at it.
My friends and I were talking the other day about the theory that what we call 'neurotypical' today is in fact another form of neurodiversity - but it's the form that most benefits a capitalist society, and our education system's capacity to churn out compliant work units.
yesss! i totally agree. The problem with changing the system,I find, is that we are the lobsters in the pot. So many ppl seem to have given away their auto-powers of discernment, curiosity, engagement and need for an authentic and healthy community. Many ppl are not inconvenienced enough to question the system, as it is bearable for them. Capitalist power hoarding narratives serving few, and dividing many, ignoring the realities that we are facing now, this economic narrative has been adopted and personally integrated by far too many. Personally, i find building community to be incredibly challenging these days. So tricky! It feels far different than what I grew up with and that is quite worrying. I don't mind change, bring on the progressive changes! Not a Luddite, although prefer analogue vibes & am not particularly nostalgic either as am a member of the BIPOC population and yet, it seems in my youth things were working towards more humane collective futures. All energy towards looking where we want to go. I figure micro efforts are all can do. #WhereDoWeGoFromHereChaosorCommunity? #DrMartinLutherKingJr #FreeToBe
I've never thought of it this way - so true!
yes! Schools support capitalist agendas in ALL ways. I will say, now that I am a parent forced into homeschooling, I will say that I find perhaps that public schools may be worse now, compared to when I was a child. I myself have been "lucky" enough to experience many different systems as my family was very restless and we moved between 3 different countries, many homes and provinces. I say lucky, only because when I returned to public school after attending a private school I saw how stark the difference was between those 2 schools, although neither suited me well. I have experienced homeschooling, grassroots community schooling, public schooling and private schooling. I am now a parent and have also worked in many different schools and school systems. It is a terrifying conundrum. I see how the wealth gap is being widened, particularly for bipoc and lower-income children. As well I see how imaginations are being limited and the body-mind, community rapport building has been terribly disrupted. Some things have improved of course, learning differences perhaps and also less conventional and controlling attitudes towards definitions of gender, but sadly the progress has not been evenly distributed I find. I just read a few pages of your book when I was waiting somewhere and it was available for me to read. The passage I read was the one describing your experience with your 9 year old son and the school. I had such a similar and horrific and frightening experience with my son's school refusal. So extreme! Although I found how your son acted out to be full of a beautiful wise cheeky humour. I can't wait to read the whole book! thank you so much for sharing your experiences. More to write but this is an essay already lol.
Also, I don't know if you mentioned this as I read your article too quickly. The school system particularly took off after slavery became illegal.
Industrial Revolution & the American school system
https://montessorium.com/blog/industrial-revolution-and-american-education
I hated school for this reason, and now I have a child who hates school and tells me, "I would love school if we could just play with our friends all day. But its like torture because our friends are around us but we can't talk to them or play with them". They only get 15 minutes recess and 20 mintes lunch (half of which they are forced to sit down and eat). He is a good student but very bored and angry at the end of every day, and has a generally negative attitude towards the teachers, even the good ones. I'm tempted to keep him at home but he is very social and gets bored, and there are few homeschoolers in our area. I wish someone would reform school over night so our kids could start enjoying it!
You should educate him at home then! There are plenty of ways to interact with people as a home school student. Socialization is not just about playing with your friends. One of the key benefits of home school is that children learn to interact with all ages and stages; they are not limited to only being nice to people who are within 1-2 years of their own age. A good student will get his work done in 2-4 hours (depends on age) and then he can do some of this creative play that this substack likes to talk about. :-)
Great article. I agree with everything and also included this history in my book, Navigating the Shock of Parenthood. Most parents in the US go into parenthood with no conscious awareness of why we do what we do. When we shed light on the origins of things that affect parenting then parents can make more intentional choices for their kids.
Love the point of how "willfulness" was once a virtue that led to exploration and internally motivated growth.
I have a few things to add. First, as you note, the workers rights and children's rights movements pushed kids out of factories and some farms and into schools. But another thing has occurred since then that has had a profound effect on how we school. That is fear based politics. The Cold War, Sputnik, the rise of Japanese auto industry, the economic rise of China...all these and other things have created a political fear of "falling behind." This fear has been pushed off onto the shoulders of children who are supposed to out compete "foreign" children to the betterment of the US. It is important for parents to understand that these fears are adult problems that we should not be pushing off onto the shoulders of kids.
There are two other issues I think we need to talk about when attempting to change and improve how childhood education occurs. As the mother of 15y/o twins, one of my most important jobs has been to protect their love of learning. This has required endless investigation of schools, moving my kids when places were bad, private Montessori when they were young, and the good fortune of having found a public school that is fully project based with both school and student chosen personal projects. I've never regretted pulling them from a bad environment and getting them some where good. When you watch that love of learning reblossom in your kid it sticks with you. Now, that said...
First, when we talk about schooling for all kids we need to remember that the human brain is hardwired to learn spoken language but not written language. And 20% of all kids have dyslexia. 5-20% have dysgraphia. 5-20% have dyscalculia. These kids can be taught to read, write, and do math but it won't come "naturally" to them. So while I believe in unleashing the innate desire to learn within each child, I also think we, as the adults in the room, need to be aware of these potential issue, screen for them, and support kids who need it.
Second, I think there is something to be said for balance. When I look back on my college courses some of the very best of them were ones I took to fulfill basic requirements. They included: Controlling Stress and Tension, On Death and Dying, an amazing Art History class, the Physics of Light, and Life in the Oceans. The last one ultimately led me to my self designed major in Underwater Cinematography. (Not practical, but led to a great education) My point is that being exposed to things we didn't know would be interesting can be deeply enriching to both adults and children.
Right now the US is stuck on building education through an "accountability" goal. We need to drop kick that whole perspective right out of the stadium. Instead we need to focus on a "nurturing the love of learning" tree. Freeing the love of learning. Joy in learning. It doesn't fit with the patriarchy, or religious dogma, or political fears, or endless efforts of the powerful to control the less powerful. But it is the only way we will truly unleash the potential of kids. Because right now they are largely on a very tight leash.
I write on special education and fixing public education on my free substack site: Kathleen Cawley for Navigating Modern Parenthood
Thank you Peter Gray! I've been following you for many years and your book helped give me the validation to fight for my kids love of learning.
Training (apprenticeship), indoctrination (religious, political, cultural), education (independent thinking). Each has important domains of application, unfortunately the factory school system focuses almost exclusively on training & indoctrination (the stark case of the muslim madras where exact repetition without any interpretive deviation of the Koran is permitted.)
Surprisingly, naval & military academies actually have done a creditable job blending the three modalities over many decades, —most services require officers with working brains.
From what I can recall from readings decades ago on the Prussian school system, it was very effective and eschewed physical punishment.
Lastly, after 39 years of naval service I lasted 3 months teaching in a US public school, not because I didn't love the youth I was working with, but because I couldn't stand the depressing feeling of being a jailer. (& that's saying a lot from someone that spent years at sea, for as Boswell put it, "Being on a ship is like being in jail, with the possibility of sinking.")
Ricky Lanusse has an interesting post wrestling with the idea that our teach-to-the-test education system is systematically snuffing out minds that might otherwise have become world-changing geniuses:
https://medium.com/the-quantastic-journal/the-decline-of-genius-where-did-all-the-world-changers-go-774068b2d243
He asserts that many geniuses of yore had expensive private tutors - and he provocatively entertains the idea that AI may now be on the verge of being able to serve as an inexpensive tutor. It's an attractive hypothesis. If I picture myself simply being turned loose with Perplexity at age 10 I'm only able to imagine society would have gotten a lot more utility out of me. My most vivid memories of fourth grade are from weekend library trips and home experiments where I learned about barometric pressure, fungal spores, and nuclear reactors. Even if self-directed exploration didn't turn me into a more useful citizen, at least I would have been a much happier human being. I would never have tortured myself with learning to divide fractions or memorizing the dates of military battles, but I would certainly have discovered the life stories of some of the more obscure members of my personal pantheon of scientific, economic, and political heroes at a much younger age.
Do you share the sense that AI tutoring might provide a new way to finally start liberating kids from this unsinkable jail we've constructed for them?
I’ve worked as an educator for 12 years in public, private, and out of school programs. What I think is so important about this history is that even “good” schools are rooted in it and follow the indoctrination approach. “Good” schools are so primarily because they have fewer issues with obedience, and most parents are totally oblivious to that fact. If you are sending your kid to a traditional school of any kind, there is no way around that. As challenging as it is, the way to change this is to begin shifting what we place value on as parents and teachers - rather than obedience, kids following their own path and interests.
Your history of education doesn't take into account education in Roman times, as well as Indian schooling that persisted in a similar form for at least 2500 years until the British came and dismantled it in the 18th century. I have documented the dismantling and what it was like prior to it in a series of posts here: https://lila.substack.com/p/the-beautiful-tree-indian-indigenous
But in short:
Children in India were sent to village schools starting at 5, and continued to be educated till they were 13-15. It seems like some kind of ability grouping was what was used. In some areas, schools went from dawn to dusk, even (with a long break in between for lunch and naps). Schools were free and open to everyone in the village. The teachers came from the village, and the school was funded by land grants (so, property taxes). There was specialized higher education after primary schooling, and that often took the form of living in a teacher's home and learning from him. Even higher education was also there, and involved going to major universities far away. They involved entrance exams - literally administered at the entrance of the university, and students came from Cambodia, Indonesia, and Thailand to study at these places.
Most people didn't go into higher education. Most people did do vocational education, but they were taught the basics in school, including accounts, record-keeping, basics of money, math, science and technology, and other subjects the villagers thought was relevant to their children. There are accounts of many children becoming financially independent by age 14 despite living at home, but until then, they were supposed to stay in school.
Those who went into higher education did so to study medicine, law, and administration, as well as philosophy and other deep research subjects.
Prior to conquering India, the British didn't have schools that scaled, and the average British child had about 1 year of schooling. In the 16th and 17th centuries, schools were shut down because too many people were learning to read who had no business doing so, and they were reading the Bible, taking it literally and rioting, so reach wasn't good.
What the British noticed in India was that teachers would have the brightest children instruct the rest, and this enabled one teacher to scale teaching to a much larger number of students. This was called the Madras method, and there is actually a school in Scotland called the Madras College that pioneered this method in British schools. This enabled them to scale up education.
Christian notions about children and the nature of good and evil seem to be at the core of why education in the west was so despised by children. I used to think it was a uniquely Indian or Asian thing to hit kids for not learning fast enough, but after talking to American boomers in Catholic schools, and studying the history of Native american boarding schools, the patterns are quite clear to me - religious teachers beat the shit out of children for not complying, and called it discipline. I wonder sometimes if the issue here is the monks and nuns who ran these schools didn't have any experience of parenting, and hence thanks to their religious conditioning, saw children as imperfect, evil things that needed the evil beaten out of them rather than as full human beings. Most Indian sources about teaching seem to involve the teacher conducting themselves respectfully and being like a parent to the children. Even today, the kind of respect accorded to teachers is something else, we have a whole festival dating back to ancient times involving honoring teachers.
Even in times of war and destruction, it has been noticed that parents in India in the 18th century were trying to create a schooling pod much like during the pandemic, and hire tutors to teach their children. So school has been quite important and valued in the East, even if not in the West historically.
After delving into the history of education in India in contrast with that in England and Scotland, and their rise and fall, I've come to the conclusion that you need to have children in some kind of organized education during their formative years. Free universal public education is important for every child to have a chance in any kind of advanced society. Especially if you want to have qualified doctors, vaccines and rule of law, or want to build specialized things like ships and cotton looms. These topics can't be absorbed by playing. Instruction is the easiest way to learn these things. Ability grouping solves a lot of problems rather than age-wise grouping.
I also watch a lot of unschooling influencer videos, and... there are a ton of illiterate children there. My own experience trying to educate my child has me convinced that you need direct instruction. Maybe 1-1 instruction, but instruction nonetheless. Kids don't happen into reading and writing. It requires a lot of concerted cultivation.
Most people don't want no schools, they just want better schools. Look at this post and the discussions on there https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/what-if-school-is-bad-actually It seems like most kids' problems with school would be solved by a higher caliber of teachers and ability grouping.
One of the most mindblowing things I'm finding is that education and early childhood education majors consistently have the lowest IQs and SAT scores of everyone in college. I had my kid's kindergarten teacher ask me 'what is that word, a-p-p-a-r-a-t-u-s, what does it mean?' just last week. Seems like the stupidest people with no other options are becoming teachers these days. You can only coast on social skills and warmth for so long, you need a high IQ to figure out how to solve your students' problems with learning and how to manage the classroom.
Kids need to be around high-IQ people to actually learn. Direct instruction is most efficient, but if you want your kids to learn by playing, you need them to play with smart people. That's not happening in public schools these days and isn't happening for the kids of unschooling influencers.
Peter, thank you for walking us through the history of education. As a scientist and a parent, I’ve often felt that something is deeply off in how we think about education, but your writing gives it structure, clarity, and urgency.
I see it in my own daughter. At just three years old, she’s bursting with questions, play, and imagination. And yet I worry how much of that will survive once school tells her learning is “work” and play is a reward.
That’s why I recently started a publication, Playful Brains, to help other parents protect that spark, and to show that kids learn best when we stop trying to control every part of the process. In fact, my research showed that parents only have very limited time (4.3 yrs waking time and 1.3 yrs play time) with their kids throughout their whole life! (https://playfulbrains.substack.com/p/you-only-have-13-years-of-playtime)
Your work has been a huge inspiration.
The line about how school teaches kids the difference between work and play hit me hard. What if we raised a generation who never learned that false split?
Thank you again for giving us the history, the vision, and the courage to imagine something better.
I would like to add an ancillary but related phenomenon. Freemasons originally operated as one of the earliest trade unions. As such, they hoarded their special knowledge according to rank, and as such they were an educational institution as well. We don't think of them as such, but given their privileged position, the "free" part, they arguably also comprised the earliest known middle-class as their projects were granted mostly by ruling elites in various localities, with wealth spread according to rank.
I have only recently begun to explore the history of Islamic education, but so far it looks and smells a lot more like unschooling than anything I have seen from the west, and I find that interesting on many levels.
I wish your views were more widely known and appreciated which is why I read and share regularly even though I'm mostly out of the ed game. But I'm sure indoctrination and control will continue to be primary motivators even among the alt ed crowd.
Compulsory ed has always been about indoctrination in some religion or other, still is. That's obvious and I guess to be expected. But sadly many, maybe most homeschools have the same motivation. I kept my sons out of school till they wanted to go in order to pursue specific training. (They are currently studying accounting and engineering while still living with us.) We used no curriculum. They had lots of free play time though mostly supervised at least loosely which I regret. I should have let them roam the woods more. But they certainly were not indoctrinated at least I didn't think so. However most of the homeschoolers and even the unschoolers we occasionally encountered were just swapping one form of indoctrination that they didn't like for their preferred indoctrination.
Talking to my sons just now, they both assure me they had way more freedom than their peers and never felt compelled or indoctrinated "except maybe to be good humans." They also just said they will definitely let their kids play alone in the woods. Does this not seem like a form of indoctrination? The doctrine of play? Are we no different than the 'other' we criticize?
Love your contributions, professor Gray. Keep at it.