#162 Dr. Peter Gray: What Schools Get Wrong About Learning

What if the biggest problem with education isn’t your child… but the school system itself?

In this episode of the Homeschool How To Podcast, Cheryl sits down with Dr. Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn, to talk about what schools get fundamentally wrong about how children actually learn.

They discuss the hidden history of schooling, why shame and obedience are still built into the system, how kids learn to read and do math when they’re actually ready, and why self-directed learning may be far more effective than most parents have been led to believe.

If you’ve ever wondered whether your child is really “behind,” whether school is preparing kids for life, or whether there’s a better way to learn, this conversation will challenge the way you think about education.

In this episode, we discuss:

•  what schools were originally designed to do 
•  why forced learning often backfires 
•  reading without a rigid timeline 
•  math anxiety and real-life math 
•  why motivation changes everything 
•  how children learn when they’re trusted 

About Dr. Peter Gray:
Dr. Peter Gray is a research professor, psychologist, and author of Free to Learn. His work focuses on self-directed education, play, and the ways modern schooling conflicts with children’s natural development.

Resources mentioned:

• Free to Learn by Dr. Peter Gray 
• Dr. Gray's website: https://www.petergray.org/
• Check out Dr. Gray's Substack
• Cheryl’s eBook- The Homeschool How To: Complete Starter Guide

If this episode encouraged you, be sure to follow the show, leave a review, and share it with a parent who needs to hear this.

Transcript

Why I Chose Homeschooling

SPEAKER_01 0:02

I didn't plan to homeschool. I started asking hard questions, but realized how little control parents actually have, and made the hard decision to leave a government job to homeschool my kids. Now I interview other homeschooling parents to learn how this all works. I'm Cheryl, and this is the Homeschool How-To podcast. Let's learn this together. Welcome and with us today, I have the pleasure of having Dr. Peter Gray with me. Peter, thank you so much for being here.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Thank you for inviting me.

What Schools Get Fundamentally Wrong

SPEAKER_01 0:32

This is such an honor because your book, Free to Learn, specifically, is one that was given to me when I first was starting to think about homeschooling. And I now have it in my free guide to like what you need to do in your first 30 days of homeschooling, which actually involves no curriculum at all, as I'm sure you'll get into with us. But it's part of this deschooling process I talk to people about is like we have to change our thinking about what education is supposed to look like and give ourselves the permission to really let our kids be kids and understand that they are learning in that process. So I'd like to start out by asking you first, what do you think the school system is getting wrong today? And is it just today or has it been this way the whole time and we never knew?

SPEAKER_00 1:17

So that's a big question. I think that my answer to that question is that the school system is fundamentally wrong about how children learn and become educated. It's been wrong from the beginning. And in fact, uh, in in my book, Free to Learn, I talk a little bit about the history of schooling. When schools started, there was no actual pretense that this was for education, broadly speaking. The first sort of mass schooling came out of the Protestant Reformation. The one purpose that was kind of related to what we think of as schooling today was that everybody should be able to read, because uh the Protestants, unlike the Catholics, believed that people need to get the Word of God directly from the Bible rather than indirectly through a hierarchical chain. So the Protestants developed schools. You know, way back in the 18th, even in the 17th century, developed schools and in many communities, children were required to go to those schools. But the purpose of the schools, aside from teaching reading, was very limited. It was to teach the Bible, to indoctrinate children in the Bible, and to teach obedience. So the schools that were set up then, if you trace the history of schooling, it's a direct line from those schools to the schools we have today. It's not that anybody stopped doing it that way. It just evolved. The Protestant schools were taken over by states, they became public schools, but the method was the same. And the method was designed to teach, to indoctrinate and teach obedience. That's what it was designed for. And it was pretty good at that. The way you indoctrinate is you repeat something to people and make them repeat it back. And that's kind of the way our schools work. You know, you're told what the lesson is and then you have to recite it back, and then that means you've learned it, right? It doesn't necessarily involve any real thinking. And the idea is indoctrination is if you get people to do that enough, then they begin to believe whatever it is that you're getting them to say. And obedience training was maybe the real large purpose of it. The Protestants at that time believed that we are all born in sin, that children are natural, sinful, naturally sinful, that play is the work of the devil. Uh you look at the writing and it's very clear. This they say this explicitly. The the early church leaders who wrote manuals for for schoolmasters to follow were very clear. In my book, I quote one of them who says, you know, if your primary job, he says, is to teach obedience, to beat the willfulness out of children. And of course, in the early days, beating was taken literally with a s with a, you know, with a cane. Their children were caned. Not j not just for misbehavior. They were caned if they didn't learn their lessons. They were so that the point was to teach people, teach children to be subservient to the schoolmaster, and that was largely also meant to teach them to be obedient to their own father, to be obedient to the leaders, to be disobedient ultimately to God in their view. We are meant to be sheep, followers, and that's what school was set up for. Well, this reached its highlight in in the Prussian in the German state of Prussia. And then in Prussia, as the church began to decline in influence and the and you began to have a national government, the government began to take it over. In the United States, you have a similar thing. In the colonial days of America, you had Protestant schools, and in many communities, children were required to go to those schools. It wasn't as long a time as school today, so in that sense it was better. But uh but they were the the reader that children learned from was called the Little Bible of New England, the schools in in New England. It was all, you know, little religious ditties like in about how, you know, if you if you disobey your father, you'll go to hell. You know, I mean literally those are the messages that are being taught in those schools at that time. And there are records written about those schools in in colonial times about children being regularly beaten for now. So ultimately, though, however, as religions declined in authority and as we became less and less uniformly Protestant, the state took over schools. And but it didn't change how schooling is done. It changed the curriculum. So now it it became not about the Bible, it became more about initially more about national pride, more about, you know, the the doctrine now became wherever whatever country you lived in, the doctrine of the schools in that country were that this is the most wonderful country on on earth. These are our leaders are the greatest people on earth, our the race of people living here are the greatest race of people on earth, and so on and so forth. Sometimes rather explicitly early on, and became more implicit as time as time went on. Now we don't have those narrow curriculum, we have a broader curriculum now. We believe we see school as the place for children to learn all the things supposedly that they need to know. Of course, of course, for that we've really still got a very wrong curriculum, but that's kind of the goal. And but the method is the same. We don't beat children with sticks anymore. There are actually still some some school districts in the United States where hitting children is legal in the school, sadly to say. But generally speaking, that's been that you know that's very uncommon in most schools and and not and outlawed in most schools. But we punish them in a way that it's arguable whether this is any better than beating them with a stick. We shame them. We're constantly comparing children with other children. We're constantly letting them know, are you better or worse? Are you failing? Are you we're we are making children feel uh high pressure because they are so afraid of feeling ashamed if they don't score up to what is expected of them. And for some children, that's an A. Anything less than an A is a failure. It's to be ashamed about. For other children, it's literally failure, would be it would be what you would feel ashamed about. So that's so we have our sch the schools we have today do not come out of any science of children's learning. They are simply a product of history. They were developed for a purpose, for a particular purpose, and they're good at that purpose, which is indoctrination and obedience training. So think about it. Think about schools today. What do you have to do to pass? Really, the only thing you have to do to pass is to do what you're told to do. Yeah. Show that is to obey. Almost the only way you can fail in our schools today is to not do what you're told to do.

SPEAKER_02 8:44

Yeah.

The Hidden History Of Schooling

SPEAKER_00 8:45

So basically, anybody who's kind of a rebel, who is not willing to do things that seem stupid to them just because the teacher says you have to do it, that person is in trouble in school. Whether they're rebelling consciously or unconsciously, whether there it's just their nature, I just really detest doing something that I have no interest in that doesn't seem to be very valuable to me, but to do it just because somebody is saying, I have to do it. So that's the kind of educational system we have. And the system in one sense got better in the sense that beating with a stick, you know, it went away. But in another sense, it keeps getting worse. And that is that it's taking up more and more of children's time all the time. It's really usurping children's lives. So when I was a child a long time ago, and now you'll know how old I am, when I was a child in the 1950s, we had school and the basic methodology of school was not that different than it is today, but there was a lot less of it. The school year was five weeks shorter in the 1950s than it is today. The school day was at least a little bit shorter, but most but the main difference is that well, two main differences. One is at least the elementary schools I went to had we had six hour school days, but two of those schools were outdoors playing. We had a half hour recess in the middle of the morning, a half hour recess in the middle of the afternoon, a full hour at lunch. We were never in school in our seats more than an hour at a time. Now we expect children to sit in their seats, which is the last thing children are designed to do is to they're not designed for sedentary activity. And we diagnose them with ADHD if they if they won't or can't do it. So, you know, we act as if it's a mental illness if they can't sit in their seats and do boring work for long periods of time without getting distracted and disruptive. I think when I was in school teachers understood that this is kind of unnatural for children and so they'd and then I remember very well even in fifth and sixth grade, sixth grade then was still part of elementary school, the teacher would say, even during that hour, you know, it was sort of between recesses when we were in school, she would say, Oh, I see you're all restless now. You know, get up and play. And she had this was we weren't little kids, we were fifth and sixth graders. She had hula hoops in the room, she had things we could play with, get up, you know, dance around, you know, and then we could sit back down and do our work. So teachers were kind of an authority then in a way that they're not allowed to be an authority now because they're controlled by a hierarchy above them that wouldn't allow teachers to do this kind of thing today. But it at that time, if you had a teacher who cared about kids, and a lot of teachers did, they they would make adjustments to make the school day far more human and bearable for children and even fun for children than than teachers are even allowed to do today. So we also, the other thing I wanted to say is at least in elementary school, there was no regular homework. We did not carry worksheets or books back and home back and forth from home. Once in a while we would be asked to do something that was actually kind of fun, like write a poem and bring it in to share, or write a story to bring in share. Or sometimes even in elementary school, we were asked to to write a book to read a book of our own choice. The teacher had to look at it to see it was a real book. Uh read a book and write a book report on it. These are kind of fun. No, you get to choose what book you're writing and there's something creative about it. But these kinds of assignments have gone by the wayside because now the focus is on drilling for tests. Um that means like instead of reading books, you're reading little passages, which is very boring, and answering multiple choice questions about them because that's the way the tests operate. So in that sense, school has gotten much worse. More of it, more tedious, less interesting assignments, and much more homework so that it's taking over children's lives, at least the lives of those who take it seriously.

Shame Tests And Sitting Still

SPEAKER_01 13:05

You are right. You are right. And I'm I was just now thinking back to when did I start getting homework? Because I had an older sister, she was six years older, and I used to be jealous that she had homework, and I'm in fifth grade, and I don't have any. And it they did give you like um do a diorama. That was like the fun project in fifth grade, you know, where you you get a shoe box and cut out figures and things and make a little scene. But that was like the homework in fifth grade. It was not every night worky, worky. And I hadn't even thought about that until you just mentioned that. And I, you know what it made me think of too is when you said the school year is five weeks longer. It's like, well, what was happening around that time? The women's movement and getting like a lot of the moms were home back in the 50s. And so it didn't matter if the summer was eight weeks or 12 weeks or 13 weeks because they were home. And it didn't matter if it was nine to two because they were home to get you there and get you back, or at least, you know, for you to be home after school when you were young. And nowadays it's well, sorry, mom's at work at eight. She doesn't get back until five. And I did it too. I worked for the government for 16 years and I carted my son off the daycare, and I didn't think anything of it. You know, I was like, oh, this is sad. But until I started talking to homeschoolers and really stepped out and decided we're gonna do this and took him out. Now that I've been home with my daughter since she was born, I see all the things that I miss and all the things that they need you for throughout the day. And I'm like, why do we do things? And just because a society says this is normal, and that's exactly what sending our kids into the school system is. We do it because everybody else does it. We were all indoctrinated from the same system.

SPEAKER_00 14:43

Yeah, I think I think you make a good point that that perhaps one of the reasons for the increase in the school year is uh to serve a babysitting function. That um yeah, so uh parents want parents want uh and maybe in some senses need their kids to be watched by somebody during the day when they're working, if both parents are working or if there's a single parent who's working. But you know, there are a lot there are other ways to solve that problem that would be a lot less expensive. Very true. What it would make a lot of sense to have recreation centers where children can spend the day and play and explore and do interesting things and not have to sit in their seats so long. Have it designed to be more child friendly and to serve those purposes. You could have some you could you could have books, you could have things for kids to do that were quote academic, whatever that means. But the uh but but but it could be a humane place where the kids would want to be. You know, so as you probably know, I've studied schools and learning centers where children are free to play and explore and they they cry when summer vacation comes. It's like the end of camp. You know, they want uh they their friends are there, they're doing all these fun and interesting things. They don't they don't want to go home at the end of the school day and they don't wanna they don't wanna have to not have school during the summer. They they love it there. So we can create places that are really good for kids and and solve the babysitting problem that way.

SPEAKER_01 16:16

Absolutely. I have had a few different people on my podcast who have created things like that, and it's so nice to see parents stepping out of the mold and creating something new. I hope that that continues. Why don't you talk to us a little bit about what got you to this realization? You know, I know that you went through the process with your son and were very skeptical at first. So why don't you how did you go from someone that you you I think you started out with your kids in public school, right? Or private school?

SPEAKER_00 16:44

Yeah, so I well I I tell this story near the beginning of my book, Free to Learn, but I um I got interested in this. I had been doing a very different kind of research, laboratory research, studying the binding of certain hormones in the brains of rats and mice. Um interesting research, but I wasn't terribly passionate about it. But I was doing well, publishing articles, getting grants, and so on and so forth. But during my early years as a professor. But meanwhile I had a son who was rebelling in school. He went to what is what was regarded as a perfectly good suburban public school, you know, in a suburban area that not a wealthy area, but not a poor area either. Typical suburban public school. And and he fought that school system from day one all the way through fourth grade when finally he won the fight. And, you know, he would tell me every day, almost every day, when he went off to school, you know, you're sending me to prison. And he was quite serious, you're sending me to prison. I now agree with him, it was prison. It is prison. It's in some ways worse than prison. The only or the only redeeming feature compared to an actual prison is that you come home at a certain time and you're not there all the time. But the but while you're there, you are micromanaged, you are n not at all free, you're told exactly what to do, you're not you what we think of as the basic human rights are taken away. You are a puppet while you're there, largely speaking. And he couldn't stand being a puppet. And it just ran so strongly against his nature, and I would argue with him, and the teachers, each year the teachers would call his mother and me, and you know, and here I was a professor, right? But I'm sitting in this little seat and the teacher is up there looking at me, and clearly she thinks somehow it's my fault. And maybe it was, maybe it was. I mean, we always treated our son with a lot of respect. We always treated him, we always took him pretty seriously, and we recognized we recognized he had a lot of abilities and he had a lot of good ideas, and we let him go with those. And and so maybe he thought the same thing could happen at school, but it wasn't happening at school, and he just wasn't settling for it. I remember I would tell him, I I would I would sit him down and I'd say, now look, you're just really causing a lot of trouble for yourself, for your whole class, for your mom, and for me. I would try to I would say, look, it's not that hard. Just do it. Do what they tell you to do. You can do what you want to do when you're home, but while you're school, do what they tell you to do, please. And he would just say, I'm not going to. And so he and he had these, I uh I'll leave it to people to read it in my book, there's various ways of rebelling, but he had various really ways of rebelling that were different from just being naughty. He would deliberately felt the rules in somewhat subtle ways. And so ultimately, though, it would became clear that um this was not working out. And I describe again this scene in the book, but there was this scene in the principal's office where the we big adults were all there to tell him on no uncertain terms that he had to do what the teachers were telling him to do. And he looked at us all his mom, me, the school principal, the assistant principal, the teacher, the a psychologist, school psychologist who had brought brought, and he looked at us all big adults, and he said, Go to hell. And you know, I laughed now.

SPEAKER_02 20:19

Right at the time, probably.

Childcare Versus Real Learning Spaces

When School Feels Like Prison

SPEAKER_00 20:22

But but that's when he won the argument. My wife and I looked at each other, and we could see we both had tears in our eyes, and we both knew that he had just won that argument. We were going to take him out of that school, and we were going to find something different. This was long before homeschooling was very popular, and we were not a good family for homeschooling for a variety of reasons. So we sought an alternative kind of school, and the only school that we could find that he thought was not a prison was a school located about two miles from where we live, as it turned out. It wasn't that far. And you know, back in at that time, two miles was was a fairly easy walk for a nine-year-old. Nowadays you would probably be arrested if you allowed a nine-year-old to walk two miles. Right. But back then it was common. He could ri bike or he could ride his or he could walk to school, so it wasn't hard to get to. It was a private school, which means there was tuition, but it was far lower tuition than most private schools, and it was a tuition we could afford. So he went there and uh and immediately, you know, he became my son again. He became he he changed from being angry and rebellious to being bright eyed and happy and enjoying life and learning and at a very rapid pace and the things that he wanted to learn. And but still as a parent, I had some concerns. So I was delighted that he was happy. And I wasn't even worried about his learning. He was always learns. But what I was Concerned about is what if he stayed at this school all the way through high school? The school takes kids from age four on through high school age. It doesn't grant anything like a diploma. There's no academic training at the school. There's no courses even offered, although kids, if they want to get together and create one, they can. The staff members don't regard themselves as teachers. They don't even call themselves facilitators because that would imply that part of their job is to get kids to learn stuff. And they don't see that as their job. They believe that everybody learns from one another through common everyday interactions, that the kids learn at least as much from one another as they do from the staff. And so if the staff are called facilitators, everybody should be called a facilitator. So but that was would seem a little silly, so they just avoid terms like that. So they the staff are just the adults in this democratic community. So that's the way school works. There's lots of rules in the school. This is not anarchy, but the rules are all made democratically by vote of uh of all the students and staff together. And of course, there are way more students than staff, so if it were ever students versus staff, the students would and but it doesn't turn out that way in a school like this. There's not that kind of antagonistic relationship. So the um so that's the school he went to. Now the main concern I had regarding my own son there is what if he decided at some point in his life he wanted to go to college? That maybe he wanted a career that required going to college. We've got things set up in in this country and actually in many parts of the world, most parts of the world, that for certain kinds of careers you can't just go into them unless you've got a college college degree. So I began asking about the graduates, and there was one other thing I was I was a little bit concerned about. And so if you walk around a school like this, the prominent thing you see, partly because it's very visible by its own nature, is that you see a lot of music and art. You see kids playing guitars and you know, you see kids painting and making clay. And of course you see kids outdoors doing all kinds of outdoor things, but in terms of aside from outdoor things, the things you see is music and art. And that doesn't mean other things aren't going on, I realized later. Music and art are more visible. You can see people doing this stuff. You don't know what's going on in people's heads, you don't know so much what they're talking about in private conversations and so on and so forth. But you can see very clearly and they're good at music and art, you know. Not surprisingly, kids when they're free like to engage in music and art, and not just little kids. In our society, little kids regularly engage in art at least, but then it's like you get too cool to do it when you are a certain age. Uh but in that school that doesn't happen. Kids continue to do it and they become good artists in various kinds of ways. So I was a little concerned about do the graduates all become starving artists and musicians living in their parents' basements. And I love my son, but I did not want him living as an adult in my basement. I was a little concerned about that. So I wanted to know what happens to the graduates. So along with a person who was a part-time staff member at that time who could help me identify the graduates of the school, I did a study, a systematic survey of the graduates of the school. That was when I really began to change my career. This was a very different kind of research than I'd done before. And that study of the graduates really ultimately changed my career. First of all, it satisfied my concern as a parent. The graduates were in all walks of life. Some of them were musicians and artists, but they were good enough actually to be making a living at it. Some of them were um some of them were in um the way I look, the way I I talked about it at that time, and it was really true, is there were graduates of that school in basically every realm of life that we value. There were graduates who were in the helping professions, there was a lawyer. There was not at that time any doctors, but there are now. There were nurses. There was even a professor. Will per this was early on. He was on his way to becoming a professor. He was a graduate student at MIT and in uh in um physics. So it didn't seem to limit people's interests, and it certainly didn't seem to stop people from going to college. Everybody who wanted to go to college, as far as I could tell, went on to college. And they got in even to good colleges. You know, that we all are led to believe that you can't go to college unless you take all these, not only do you have to get a high school diploma, but you've got to take certain courses. You need, you know, I don't know what the rules are now. You need two years of a language, you need to take math through at least through advanced algebra or you know, all this stuff. There's kids who had done none of it. None of it, absolutely none of it. And yet they got into college, including, including, in some cases, rather prestigious four-year colleges. It's just not true. They they say you've got to do all that stuff, but when it comes right down to it, if you give them a good resume and you and they're interviewing, and you're an interesting person who seems to really want to go to that college and you've got good reasons for doing it, you don't you stand out as kind of different from the typical person who's just going it because like this is 13th grade and I've got to go. You know, these are people who, if they're going to college, they've got a good reason for going and they can articulate it. And that's a big step up in getting admitted to that college.

SPEAKER_03 27:44

Yeah.

A Democratic School That Works

SPEAKER_00 27:45

Because people who are going to college who really want to go, and they've chosen your college because that they've decided that's the college for me, and they can tell you why, in words that are different from the from from the publicity brochures that the college sends out. Those are those are valued students. So that's one way that they got into college. There are other ways they got into college. Not everybody did it that way. Some kids went on to community college. Everybody can go to community college, and it's relatively cheap. There are a lot of kids, as pr as I'm sure you and your listeners know, who are homeschooled, who start community college at maybe 15 or 16, because they take a course or two that's interesting to them, and then that's college credits, and they can use that to transfer to a four-year college. They've now got a transcript, they've got grades, but they're taking the course because they're interested in it. But in some cases, in this case, they're taking a year or two at community college as a as a step towards then going to a more prestigious four-year college. So at any rate, that's a long story, but that's uh that's the story of how I got interested and involved in this. And once I once I realized that these graduates of this school, where they're just sort of playing and exploring and do what they want to do, are becoming educated by any reasonable definition of education. Then I got interested in, well, what's actually happening there? Well what what are they actually doing? I mean, they're quote, just playing, they're just doing what they want to do, and yet somehow this is leading them to become educated people.

SPEAKER_01 29:19

And that it's so interesting. It I just said to my son about two hours ago, we were outside, he's seven years old, and I said, You know what? If you want to stop all the curriculum for the spring, and instead, I'm gonna give you a project, we'll research together and you will build a um mountain bike track on our property because he used to take mountain biking, but then it kind of changed hands and he didn't he kind of you know fell in and he didn't enjoy it anymore. And I said, You know, we can build that. You know, we but I said I'll teach you how to research, which is gonna help him learn how to read better if he's gotta type in things and you know, uh I said you don't have to do math, you don't have to do reading anymore, but we'll just directly like take a few months and research this and and plan it out on paper and you know, see what you what you have to buy, what you have to build, we'll give you a certain amount of money, and it all goes towards that, and that'll be your project. And you know, I just worry because I'm like, oh geez, he was already like technically a year behind because he's should be in second grade because he's seven, but I have him in the first grade reading program. And I'm like, oh, this is gonna push him back more. But I'm like, is it really? Is it really because if he's researching some stuff, he's going to be learning reading in that it's just not in the way that the curriculum has it laid out in it. Even me researching, you know, education for three years. I had to stop myself and say, of course I'll be fine. Who cares if he is a year, two years, five years behind in the reading aspect that is so arbitrary? And like you said before, it is not scientifically backed because like in Finland, they don't even start any formal reading anything until they're seven years old and they have like one test their entire time from from the start of school till graduation, whereas we have over, you know, a hundred here and they're happiest. Finland is like one of the happiest countries.

SPEAKER_00 31:05

The thing that people need to understand is there's no critical period for learning anything except learning your native language without a la without without an accent. Anything else, it doesn't matter when you learn it. You can learn it just as fast. Generally, you can learn it faster if you're older. My belief is the time to learn something is either when you need to know it, because what you're doing requires knowing it, and then you learn it because you want to learn it so you can do what you want to do, or when you're just so curious about it, so motivated about it, that nobody has to prompt you to do it. They can't stop you from doing it. You just want to do it.

SPEAKER_01 31:46

After three years of interviewing homeschooling families, I realized how overwhelming it can be to piece everything together. So I took the best advice, tips, questions, and resources that I've learned along the way and put them into one practical ebook. If you're looking for a clear starting point, you'll find the link in this show's description.

Reading Without A Timeline

SPEAKER_00 32:07

The time to learn to read, everybody in our culture, you can't live in our culture without realizing at some point I want to know how to read. Now that realization comes to different kids at very different ages. There are always some kids, and I've been I've studied this a little bit by by looking at the other research, but also by observing my own son. My son could read well by the time he was three. Now that leads me to believe, and I had a younger brother who also was a precocious reader, so I looked into precocious reading. There are a lot of kids who learn how to read before they ever start school, and they are not taught to read. They pick it up, they make use of adults to help them learn to read by asking them. Like my son would we would carry him around in a backpack. We were living in Manhattan, and the stroller is useless there. So we'd carry him everywhere we went on on our backs and he could see where we were looking. So he before he was two years old, he would point to a sign and say, What's that say? I swear his first words were, What's that say? And and so I would say, exit. So among the first reading words were exit. He would then point to signs and say, Exit, stop, so on and so forth. And then we'd be we'd be eating breakfast and he'd point to words on the cereal box. What's that say? So he basically taught himself to read. And at some point, I don't know how he did it, but he had developed this huge site vocabulary, and at some point he inferred the phonics of it so he could read new words that he'd never seen before. I think kids pick up reading, some kids pick up reading the same way you pick up language. We all learn how to speak our language, and in and we learn the grammatical rules of it, the phonetical rules of language. We learn it without consciously being able to tell you what those rules are, but yet we speak properly. I think kids in the same general way, when they're motivated to learn to read, pick it up that way. And I've made a little bit of study of reading among unschoolers. So homeschoolers, as you know, are people who homeschool but they don't provide a curriculum for their children. Rather, what they do is they support whatever the child is interested in doing. They provide the opportunities for the child to do what they're interested in doing, but they don't provide a curriculum, they don't test the child, they don't uh they don't act like they're doing school at home. It's called homeschooling, but it's not actually like school. It is really, some people call it life learning. It's learning through life and it's following your own interests. So I've been interested in that and I've done several research studies of unschooling families. Not surprisingly, what you find among unschooling families is a huge range of age at which children learn to read. Sometimes within the same family, one child can read at four, and another child reads, can't read at age 10, but begins to read at age 11. I think the oldest I've seen is 14. But even that 14-year-old learned to read very quickly when he decided that he really was time for him to learn to read. I think that, you know, in some in some cases, I think this is less common today than when I did that study. And I think the reason it's less common today is kids are actually, because of the computer, and because kids are on the computer a lot, they're picking up reading earlier than uh they used to. My son, who is actually now a staff member at the school he used to be at, tells me that kids are learning to read on average much earlier than they used to because they're dealing so much with the written word in the natural course of their play than they than they would have in the past. In that study, there's this huge discrepancy. There's also a study of homeschoolers, forget your name or last name is Pat Patton, finding similarly huge range of age, but by the time a few they're a few years older than that, and they both can read, and they've both both been reading for a time. If if you got kids in the same family, as one mother said, you couldn't tell that you wouldn't be able to tell which one was the late reader and which one was the early reader. They're they're equally interested in reading. So so by one of my observations is that kids who learn to read, when they are ready to learn to read, whatever age that that is, tend to be big readers because they only associate reading with things they want to do. They don't associate it with shame or pain or being forced to do something that they don't want to do.

SPEAKER_02 36:47

Yeah. And like a like a test score.

SPEAKER_00 36:50

The other thing besides reading that gets homeschoolers sort of hangs people up is concern about math. Like like we think of reading and math, those are the two big things. We can be loose on everything else, but somehow we've got to make sure that our kids and we feel embarrassed, necessarily embarrassed, if our kids can't read by a certain age or if they don't know the multiplication tables by a certain age or something like that. But um again, I've sort of done a study of the learning of math. I think first of all, my my observation is when you look at the great majority of people in the real world, regardless of age, the math that they know and the math that they need to know is math they've learned in life and use regularly. They did not learn that math in school. They learned it in life. They've learned how to make change back when we used change. They've learned how to measure boards if they need to measure boards. They've learned how to cut recipes in half if they're involved in cooking. So they learn what fractions are because they're involved in that. They learn what division is if they have to divide up desserts equally among six kids. They learn what, you know, so k so people learn math in life, and that's the math they need to know. The math that's being taught in school is largely forgotten if it isn't the same math that they would be learning and using in life anyway. And one reason I know that is because I used to teach statistics to social science majors at Boston College. And even though these young people were only a year or two out of high school, they had forgotten all the math they learned in high school. I couldn't assume they knew any of that. I had to start at the beginning. I didn't, you know, like so every high school student learns what it means to divide one fraction by another fraction. I kind of make a sport of asking adults, what does it mean to divide one fraction by another? What does it even mean to do that? A lot of them can remember learning how to do it when they were in high school, and some of them even remember the way to do it. You invert one of the fractions, you multiply the numerator and the denominator, and the but they don't know why that's the answer.

unknown 39:07

Right.

SPEAKER_02 39:07

And they don't ever use it.

SPEAKER_00 39:10

They don't know when they would ever use it. So, you know, there's maybe there's maybe one out of a thousand people whose career requires being able to do that. And yet we make everybody learn, quote, learn that. They're not really learning it, they're memorizing a procedure for doing it. And nine times out of the ten, the teacher who taught them how to do that doesn't understand why you would do it that way or when you would do it. They just know this is on the curriculum and I've got to teach it to you, and you've got to learn it to pass the test. So I'll so we are wasting children's time when we teach all this stuff. You know, it's not some people say, well, it's improving their it's improving logical reasoning, it's improving their thinking abilities to have to do this stuff. But if they're just doing it by memorizing it, which is basically what they are doing, it's not improving critical thinking. You improve critical thinking by getting truly immersed in critical issues that you are interested in. That's when you think and when you get into discussions and arguments with somebody else about it and they're challenging your thinking. That's what kids do naturally when they're in groups of other kids. They're arguing about the rules of the game, they're discussing what's fair or not fair, they're planning some project and they have to figure out things about the project, and they're discussing it. That's critical thinking, and that's how children develop critical thinking, not by memorizing procedures for solving mathematical problems.

Math Anxiety And Real Life Math

SPEAKER_01 40:41

Yeah, and it's funny too, because all those years that they teach us the tedious math that we never use, they never stop and teach us about like compound interest on a credit card. Because they don't want us to know that stuff. They want to easily give you that card because and and they make you think that you know that$1,000 item that you purchased, you're just paying a thousand dollars and then maybe there's an eight percent interest charge. But how that compounds month after month and what that actually amounts out to and the life of the the card, stuff that would actually impact your life. But I mean, my mind now thinks of it as, well, they don't want us to know that because they want us to keep charging and putting people in right.

SPEAKER_00 41:21

No, no, it's a good point. I mean, if there was any rationale for any kind of required math course, it should be the practical math of living. What are the things, what are the mistakes people make? You know, people people are the most stupid thing people do is they rent up their credit card and then they're paying interest. And and they're not calculating how much money they're wasting by doing that. If you just just economize a little bit, don't allow yourself to be starting to pay interest. And as you say, people don't realize the value of investment. I mean, here's something that that I think a lot of people ought to think more about. Think about the cost. Suppose you're a middle class person and you're not poor enough to get financially needy so that your child will get a scholarship to college and all expenses paid. So you've got to pay that tuition. And you think it's a good investment to pay that tuition because your child will make more money as a college graduate. But what if you took that money and you invested it, as you say, maybe even better than compound interest, something some kind of a balanced portfolio that's gonna give you 7 or 8% uh returns over the course of time, historically. By the time that child, so everybody looks at, so the college graduates on average, by age 40, are making a certain amount of more money than at age 40 the non-college graduates. But if instead of spending that money on college, you invested it by age 40. That's a heck of a lot of money.

unknown 42:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:57

That might be a million dollars. And so, you know, I haven't cal done the calculations, but there's a good reason to know how to calculate compound interest. Now, of course, there are formulas to do it on the internet. You don't have to know how to do it. You could just put it, plug it in. If I'm getting this much interest, how much will it be in 20 years? People people but people don't think that way. And so there are there are life lessons that are would be very valuable for people to think about. I think it should be parents' responsibilities partly to help children understand these things before they set off in life and make all these same mistakes that so many people make.

SPEAKER_02 43:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:36

Well, and I and I think that they, you know, we don't sit down at the beginning of the year with teachers and say, What are you teaching? and what what should I be teaching? And and part of that is probably by design. You know, they busy us so much. It's like get your kid off to school in the morning and then see him for a little bit at night, but we have also given them homework and then they're doing their sports and and then TV and social media and all that. So it's I can I can see how. it snowballed and the parents did just drop the ball because they thought schools were doing it.

SPEAKER_00 44:05

Well I I think I think what has happened also over time is the school has become more and more divorced in its lessons from from outside of school life. It's become more and more a s self-contained system. So it has become more and more oriented not for training you for life but for training you for what the school people believe and I've just argued it's a misbelief but believe you need to know to get into college. Everybody's supposedly on an the schools act now as if everybody's on an academic track. Everybody's going to go to college. So you ask if you ask and I've done this if you ask uh it's not totally true but it's largely true. If you ask somebody in kindergarten so why are you teaching this curriculum in kindergarten? You know they'll say well it's to prepare them for first grade. And so if you ask first grade it's to prepare them for second grade. You ask elementary school teachers generally it's to prepare them for middle school. You ask them for middle it's to prepare them for high school and you ask high school teachers it's to prepare them for college. There's almost no pretense this is preparing them for actual life. This is just preparing them for what they see as the next step in this sort of self-contained chain that we call school. You're going from one step to another and I don't think there's even much thought about is this actually helpful to the person outside of school? It's only thought is this is this what the child what we all believe the child needs to know to go into the next grade. But even that is mistaken as we see I I've just described how kids can start college. They've skipped the whole previous chain and they can go to college and they can do fine. I've seen kids who've been unschooled who decide at some point they want to go to school for very uh they've got good reasons they want to go to school. Their friends are going to school they want to be on a real sports team at school they want to and sometimes in high school they they want to go to school because there's people there you could date you know they want to go to prompts they want to do the they want to be part of the cultural ritual of school. So they'll say to their parents who sometimes are disappointed to hear this that I want to go to school and so the of course you would be a kind of mean parent to say you can't go to school. That would not be freeing to the child. So you say but you say something like here's an actual case I know of somebody who wanted to go to school and this was a boy who if he went to school by age he would be going into the fourth grade. He was old enough for fourth grade but he couldn't read and so the mom said how could you go to if you go to school they'll put you in kindergarten or they'll put you in first grade. You'll be with the little kids and he said well why is that because you have to be able to read to be in fourth grade. And so according to the mom he said okay I'll learn how to read. He learned how to read and then he went to fourth grade and did fine.

SPEAKER_01 46:57

Wow all on his own pretty much on it.

Learning Fast When Motivation Hits

SPEAKER_00 47:00

He might have I don't know if he asked for help or not in this case but that what I have found is when somebody decides that they want to learn something they can learn it very quickly. And I'll give you another example so we have this belief regarding mathematics that mathematics kind of builds over the years. You have to do first grade mathematics why we even call it it used to be called arithmetic now people call it math. You have to do first grade arithmetic before you could do second grade before you could do third grade before you as as if it sort of builds in that kind of way. I've seen at this this school that my son went to and where he's a staff member so kids are there who've never in any formal sense studied math. They've never cracked a math book they've never done a math worksheet. They have reached the stage in life they're maybe 16, 17 years old, where they're ready to leave the school and they want to go to a college that requires the math SAT and they've never studied math and they want to apply that year to the college so they want to take the math SAT test that year. They can prepare the math that they need to know to do well on the SAT test in six weeks of not very hard work. And the way they do it at this particular school there happens to be one staff member who's very good at math. He's an MIT graduate who studied math he's very good at it knows how to explain it. I ask him so how do you help them prepare for the SAT? He says first of all there are a lot of kids who don't need my help. They could just go right to the SAT prep books and understand it themselves. But some people go to the SAT prep books and they say you know this is Greek to me I don't understand it and so I need some I need some help to get up to the level of being able to even understand the book. So he offers a little course he meets with them one hour a week for six weeks six classroom hours compare that to how many how many hours kids are being taught math in school right so six hours and he gives them an hour or two of homework. So at most we're talking about you know six plus twelve eighteen total hours of effort on the part of the kids. And in that process he says they can learn everything they need everything that they would have learned in typical in their typical schooling everything that they need to know in order to now be able to read the SAT prep book and go from there on their own. And it's happened over and over and over again. Kids will get they don't necessarily get the highest possible score but some of them do actually they get really into it but they get a good enough score to get into the college that they want to go to. How part of the reason they're able to do that is because they're motivated to do it. Even if they're not you know they're going on to college to study art history or whatever. They don't need math. This is all irrelevant to their life. But we've got things set up that to get to that college where they believe that has the best art history department in the world they've got to take this stupid SAT test with math. So they're going to learn the stupid math they need to learn that's kind of the attitude they have and work at it and they do it and they go on. So it's just another story about how the time to learn something is when you've decided that for whatever reason even if your m mind it's not a good reason it's imposed upon you by the society but it's a reason that's there that you don't want to block the life that you want then you learn it.

SPEAKER_01 50:40

Yeah. And it just goes back to what you said by how much time are we wasting of a kid's childhood.

SPEAKER_00 50:46

Right.

SPEAKER_01 50:46

And why don't as as we roll up on the hour here, why don't um I I'd love to know did you think that free to learn would be as popular as it became I mean you wrote this in 2013. It was published in 2013. This is now 13 years ago and it's is it even more popular now than it was then? And did you expect that?

SPEAKER_00 51:07

Well it's very interesting. I'm not sure what I expected. I think I probably didn't have any expectations. You know I was I've been writing a blog for Psychology Today uh a literary agent um contacted me and said I've been reading your blog I think you've got a book there or more than one book. And I said oh that's interesting and so she suggested that I write a book and so I wrote a book got a contract I didn't know much about and and and the literary agent didn't kind of lobby for the best possible contract but I got a decent contract from the book publisher. The book publishing company you know sometimes if a book publishing company thinks this is going to be sell a million copies and make them millions of dollars they'll really advertise the book and push it. I think they I think they did not push the book. They did not particularly advertise the book. The head of the company told me and I was pleased to hear this he said this probably isn't going to be a bestseller right from the beginning but it's going to have a long shelf life he believed and and that turned out to be true. That turned out to be true. So for the first I looked at for the first something like 10 years of the book's life almost up until the last one or two years it sold more every year than it did the year before. It also was I don't think anybody anticipated how many other countries wanted a translation. So it's been translated now into nineteen other languages. I don't even know how many copies it sold in those other languages. I don't get those reports but it has it has been a worldwide book and it's had a lot of influence because a lot of people I hear all the time from people say you know I s I uh my son thanks you or Mike because it gave me the courage to take him out of school or I've started this alternative school cur encouraged by your book and so on and so forth. And I keep I keep you know I hear from somebody who says you know your book changed my life and I always freeze up a little bit okay I I hope it changed it for the better. I hope you but of course they probably wouldn't be telling me if it didn't change it for the better.

SPEAKER_01 53:16

You would have gotten a lawsuit.

SPEAKER_00 53:17

That would have been your books let me tell your listeners I got a new book coming out finally that's going to be published in September. It's not a sequel to Free to learn it's a it's a very different book but on some of the same theme. It's called Restoring Childhood and it's really about how over many decades we as a society have taken childhood away from children. That there we have taken away from children the opportunities to do what children are biologically primed to do and what they really need to do to be psychologically healthy and what it is that we need to bring back how we need to alter what we're doing in our society to make to bring childhood back again to to to our world.

SPEAKER_01 54:07

Yes. I just interviewed someone a couple weeks ago um Spencer Taylor and he created a film called The Death of Recess and it really gets into how we're educating in America, how other countries are doing it. This is you know he does talk about taking away the recess, but it's even much more than that. It gets into the funding the NEA the the teachers unions and the funding behind that and what I mean even some pharmaceutical companies are investing in the teachers unions and the it's like they shouldn't have any place there. And I had to kind of laugh because as you're saying oh the the publishing company didn't really push my book I'm thinking well you have sort of a controversial topic which is probably why they were probably told you're not pushing this because we have so much money riding on the public school system because we know the teachers aren't getting the money. I mean they don't make enough they don't make as as much as they should the schools are understaffed they are underfunded but yet they I mean I know we pay six thousand dollars a year in New York or where I am to our school. I'm yeah you mentioned being in Manhattan I'm I'm up near Albany. You know so it's like where is the money going? So there's gotta be something else going on.

Free To Learn Impact And Waste

SPEAKER_00 55:16

If you figure it out there's a lot of waste in the school system. The schools are always crying for more money. They're always talking about being under underfunded. But you know in the in the Boston area if you add up all the tax money count counting the money coming federal government from the state and from local income taxes it's about$20,000 per student. Think of what you could do with$20,000 to educate help educate your own child. So instead of studying French in class you could go to France. You know you could hire the best tutors that you want you know you're not paying that$20,000 for education. You're paying that to support you know the teachers may not be paid well but there are well paid administrators in that system and there's a lot of waste. I've heard from teachers who will admit and you know they complain about it. They try to change things you know that the school at the end of the year says oh we've still got all this money in our budget. We have to spend this somehow let's buy this or buy that so that we can otherwise they're not going to give us as much money next year. I have to confess it's like the departments in universities do the same thing. You know this is this is the way people operate. So you always are looking for more money and then you've got to find some way to spend it.

SPEAKER_01 56:32

I worked in government for 16 years. Yes I can vouch for that oh my goodness and my husband does commercial HVAC so he's always contracting with schools and jails and hospitals and it's the same thing. Hey we got to spend this money so can you come in here and fix this up meanwhile I had a teacher on my podcast say and she had left teaching to homeschool her child but say that you know they they needed a rug because they said that they didn't have enough classrooms for a teacher so they stuck them in a basement but all the kids' voices everything was echoing. She just wanted a rug and they were putting in a new rug in the principal's office or some administrator's office and they said just give us your old rug that's all we need is the old no we can't do that. It's not in the contract but we just wanted the old rug to help the voices we can't hear the kids and the teachers no they wouldn't do it. And it's so angersome but um Dr. Gray I invite you back when your book comes out to tell us about that and promote the book because I love that topic and it's I'm passionate about it. So I hope you'll come back in September, October and promote that. And I'm going to put the links to everything in the show's description. So I'll have you give me the links for any way to contact you, any way to find the book free to learn anything else that you're working on your blog and we'll include that in the show's notes. So head there to click on that. Anything else that you would like to say before we round out the hour?

SPEAKER_00 57:50

No, I've probably said enough so I just thank you for for inviting me. Nice to meet you and I do look forward to after my book comes out please do invite me again.

Closing Thanks And Next Steps

SPEAKER_01 58:00

Absolutely thank you Peter Greg this has been so awesome to talk to you. Definitely a highlight of mine. Thank you for listening to the Homeschool How to podcast if today's episode helped you please be sure to follow the show and leave a review. It's the best way to support the podcast. And if you're just getting started or need a reset head to thehomeschoolhow2.com and grab my free 30 day homeschool quick start guide. Until next time keep learning keep questioning and thank you for your love of the next generation