Peter Gray: So the computers became a saving grace, saving kids from what adults had done, which was to deprive them of the opportunity to be kids. Now they had a new way. Kids are very clever. Mm. They figured out how to do it.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. There they are going to the, the stream to fish. Yeah. Now, right? Oh, then the woods got cut off.
Okay. This is, this is how we can connect. This is how we can play. Right.
Peter Gray: Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: And then what happened?
Peter Gray: So why did it go back up again? Yeah. So again, you know, as you probably know, there are some people who claim it went back up again because of the iPhone and social media. It was really, it is true that it’s around 2010 or so that most kids now had not just computers at home that they could use, but they had this thing that you, you could carry around with you.
Right? Yeah. So you went far away from it. Yeah. And so, and so, it’s a tempting argument and Jonathan Haidt has made this argument in his book that’s has been so popular that it’s that something about the use of this has caused kids to, to become anxious and depressed. Maybe throw social comparison through a, there’s various kinds of arguments, Jonathan Haidt is wrong. He’s absolutely wrong on this and there’s no question about what he’s wrong. Everybody who has done the real research in this says he is wrong with one exception, and that’s one person who’s done very little research. But there are dozens of review articles looking for correlations between the use of iPhones and social media and mental disorders.
No evidence of clinically significant correlation overall. Moreover. This did not occur everywhere. The, the kids in Europe and the European unions were not deprived of cell phones and social media. They were glomming onto it, just like kids here, no increase in anxiety, depression, suicide among over be beginning in 2010 for kids in the eu.
So what happened in the United States? It didn’t happen in the European Union. The thing that I’ve come up with that happened is Common Core. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. The common Core state standards, which dramatically changed schooling. Schooling had continued to get more and more oppressive and anxiety provoking, but with Common Core, which really limited what teachers could do in the classroom, and insisted that teachers be basically drilling kids for standardized tests.
School became far by everybody’s assessment. Who’s been, who’s looked at school, became far less fun and far more stressful than it was before. And so to test this hypothesis that is common core, I’ve looked at a couple of other countries that made similar changes in their schooling system. One is the uk, which made their change.
We made our change between 2010 and 2013. They made their change between 2015 and 2016 in the uk. The spike in anxiety depression began to occur in 20 15, 20 16, and went up. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Sweden made a change about the same time that we did. They also had an increase in mental disorder around that same time.
So we’ve got some further evidence. So those countries that where schooling became more oppressive, more. More anxiety provoking than, uh, it was before. That’s where the increases in anxiety and depression. The other thing is I, you know, I believe, I’ve always believed, if you wanna know what’s bothering somebody, ask them.
Right? We’ve got all these people making inferences about what distressing kids, what if we ask them? So it turns out there are quite a number of studies that ask them. So one of ’em was a study done in 2013, which would’ve been after basically all the states had adopted Common Core or something similar in the United States, a study called Stress in America by the American Psychological Association.
They do this periodically, and usually it’s just adults. But in 2013, they included teenagers. Teenagers turned out to be the most stressed out people in America. Oh. And in response to the question, there was a checklist of things you could check that are major sources of stress far and away the most frequently thing checked with school.
83% of kids checked school. Mm-hmm. Now, here is the kicker. The la, the previous time they did this, they did, included teenagers with the same checklist was 2009. That was before states had adopted Common Core. The A PA wasn’t studying the effect of common Core. This is just coincidence that they had done it a year before Common Core and a year after most states had it in 2009.
It was also the case that kids checked school more often than anything else, but it was something like 47%, not 83% who checked school.
Mm-hmm.
So the. Almost a doubling of the number of kids who were basically saying, school is really stressing me out. So nobody wants to say this. Nobody wants to admit, everybody wants to blame those evil social media companies.
That’s a lot easier to point our fingers at that than to point our fingers at ourselves for promoting. Very toxic school system.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, you say oppressive and, and I can just picture like it’s pressing, it literally is pressing down. It’s trying to press down earlier, academics earlier for children.
Right. I mean, if we go back to our earlier conversation about play, like it’s the children, you know, finding what they, who they are and what they need and what they’re interested and being with, you know, it’s like this kind of grow growth this way, but here it’s like it’s pressing down and it feels like because of the pressure that schools have been feeling, that they’re eliminating the fun stuff, arts and music and you know, recess and stuff that, like, that does bring the joy that does connect to more the spirit of, of the child because they schools themselves are feeling pressure of meeting the grade and all that.
Peter Gray: Exactly. Yeah. So this is, uh, I mean if you think about it. It should not be surprising that changes in schooling systems would markedly influence mental problems. The mental health for kids, kids spend more time in school than any place else except at home, in school, they are basically locked up. Mm-hmm.
There’s no way, there’s no, there’s no kind way of saying it. They’re basically imprisoned. They’re locked up. They are micromanaged. They’re told exactly what to do. This would be highly stressful for anybody.
Mm-hmm. Anybody,
no adult that I know of would accept a job that’s anything like being a student in school where you are told exactly what you have to do.
You are judged regularly. You are constantly compared to your workmates for who’s better, who’s worse. You have to ask for permission to go to the bathroom. You get a 15 minute lunch break, which is common in many schools today. 20 minutes is the norm almost, and that’s it. Right. This is child abuse, in my opinion.
And we should not be, this should be the first place people would look for the reason for anxiety and depression, not the last place. Hmm.
Rusty Keeler: You know, one, one thing is like. What if school was fun? Like, what if it was, you know, that that pressure that they’re all feeling, the administration, the teachers, they feel pressure.
They, I think I, I, there’s probably been studies of how they feel about education and their level of stress.
Peter Gray: Absolutely. There are studies and there’s no question about, especially early on, there were studies, there were, and teachers objected very much to it. There was increased pressure. There’s, there’s reports, uh, by teachers about the increased pressure on everybody in school.
There’s reports by school psychologists about the increased pressure on everybody that came with Common Core. Uh, there was no secret about it. You know, the irony is the whole purpose of Common Core was to improve academic scores on standardized tests like the pe, the international piece of tests. So we were embarrassed like some other countries were that, that Chinese were so outscoring us on the pizza test.
Nobody was talking about the fact that Chinese kids were committing suicide at rates way higher Oh. Than in our country. Wow. But, but they were oppressed that they were doing well on those p tests. So we wanted to improve P scores. So we thought, we gotta, we gotta make our schools more like the Chinese schools.
Right? We gotta do something. We gotta, we gotta, we’ve been too lax with these kids. So that was the reasoning behind it. That was also the reasoning behind why Sweden made their change and the UK made their change. So, but here’s the kicker. The, despite this. The evidence is that ever since Common Core, the scores are, those international tests as well as national tests of reading and mathematics, which are primarily the subjects that we’re supposed to be focused on have gone, gone down, but ever since Common Core have gone down.
Yeah. They
were actually trekking up a little bit, gradually up for something like a 20 year period prior to Common Core. Then they started going down. I’ve written about why that might be, but basically. We’re burning kids out. Yeah.
Yeah. We’re
burning. You don’t improve test scores by making school no fun.
You don’t improve. Cramming it. Cramming it, you know, and the, and what’s even worse is one of the, the pur main purpose of common core was to increase everybody’s score, but also to reduce the so-called gap between the wealthier and non-well. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Turns out the gap has increased over the course of common core.
Ah, it’s the, the kids at the lower end of, uh, of the achievement spectrum have been dropping faster than the kids at the upper end. And again, that’s not surprising when you put pressure on people for whom it’s a struggle, the tendency is to just drop, drop out. Even if you’re not dropping outta school, literally leaving school, you drop out mentally.
This is just not for me. Yeah. And a lot of kids have learned they’re gonna pass me anyway, because part of what’s happened with No Child Left Behind is schools don’t fail anybody because it looks like you’re leaving somebody behind when you fail somebody. So nobody fails anymore. You can do nothing and you’re still going to pass.
And there’s a certain number of kids who’ve learned that those are not the high achievers. Those are not the ones headed off to Harvard and Yale. They’re the, they’re, they’re the ones who, who basically are saying, you know, this is, I’m the hell with it. I’m, this is, this is too much work. This is too, I’m, I’m doing badly anyway.
Why try?
Rusty Keeler: Gosh. And, and so, okay, so this is this system, right? Yeah. By adults, right? For children. And so it’s a system and you know, I always think like, well, okay, it’s well-meaning on, on some level it, they, they, they have their goals or what they’re trying to do. And yet it goes counter to what we were talking about initially about the instinct to play, the instinct to find out your passion, your gifts, your, you know, the skills that you have and how you wanna be in the world.
That what’s what comes from the child, right? And I can just see that the education system often squashes that because of their goals to get there, uh, what they think that you need to get through to be a successful. Adult when really, maybe it’s that listening, it’s it’s listening to the call or being encouraged having adults that are, you know, and, and I know schools, right, it’s a huge system.
We got millions and millions sends of millions of children that need to, you know, somehow get through. But there’s, there’s different models that, that model like listening to the child, to the call, to the instinct and what if schools were like that?
Peter Gray: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s, it’s really, I mean, school has become, first of all.
Public education is largely a monopoly. It’s, uh, some people of course, couldn’t afford to take their kids out and for homeschooling or something else, and more and more people are doing it, but it’s largely a monopoly, so it doesn’t really have to appeal to its audience.
It’s,
and if you have, and the other thing about it is the purpose of school.
There, there was a time when you could argue that the purpose of school was to train young people for life. And that meant, you know, that part of that justified having a lot of recess, having a lot of creative kinds of activities, having time to discuss ideas. Having civics classes and, and having, and having shop and home Mac.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh, it’s too bad that they were sex segregated. You should have had everybody doing Home Mac and everybody doing shop. We understand that now, but, but we used to have those classes. Right. Which had to do with life real. Yeah. Real skills. Right. The skills that you could use at home.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. You know?
Peter Gray: Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: My mom is a home and careers, home ec home and careers teacher, and she said, what I’m doing is like the real life stuff with every kid writing a check. Right. Frying an egg. So went on a button. That’s right. Yeah. So
Peter Gray: school became, at some point it became all about getting kids into college. It became, everything became the academic track as if everybody is supposed to be an academician and a very narrow understanding of what it takes to get you, I mean, into college, which is to get high scores.
On these certain academic tests, and to some degrees, the colleges have abided by that. They look at these high scores and they make a decision partly based on that. And so every parent now wants to get, or almost every parent, certainly every middle class and above parent, wants to get their kids into not only a college, but a selective college.
And so they’re pushing for high scores, they’re pushing their kids for high scores. They’re even pushing the teachers. I, I hear from some, some private schools in particular where the private schools really do have the possibility. They don’t necess, they don’t have to follow common core. They could do what they want, but they get pressure from the parents to have less recess.
They get pressure from the parents for that. And so I’ve been invited to speak at. Fair number of those kind of private schools where parents are paying $50,000 a year to send their kid to kindergarten, let alone to, to 12th grade. And, and the, the staff or the administrators are inviting me to speak to the parents.
’cause they’d like to get the parents to calm down a little bit about this. Right? That’s right. Relax, relax, relax a little bit about it because they get it. The parents are on the, on the cases all the time of the teachers these days to be sure that they’re, they’ll argue with a low grade, parents will argue with teachers about a low grade.
Oh man. You know, and a low grade might be a b plus these days. Yeah. In these schools, right? Yeah. So that’s, so we’re in a cycle. That is objectively absurd. It’s just plain absurd. But in a way it’s a trap. I mean, in some senses I’m sympathetic with the parents. The parents are hearing all the time about how important it’s for their kid to get into school.
They want the best for their kid.
Yeah.
And they believe that the best for their kid is going to be to get into a selective school so they’ll get a good job. So they have a good income and they, and they’ve bought the idea that to get into that selective school, they’ve got a. Not only do they have to get high grades in school, but they also have to do the right extracurricular activities.
They’ve gotta do, they’ve gotta do volunteer activities, work for charities. I think it’s great to do things for charities if you’re doing it with a charitable disposition, not if you’re doing it to improve your resume, but this is what kids are being pushed to do is all this stuff, and they have no time.
Mm-hmm. Left for play or leisure, very little time. And, and what time they do, you know, uh, they, something you can do kind of in snatches and little bits of pieces is playing on, on this thing. And so I don’t blame them for doing that. Right? Mm-hmm. It takes time. It takes more time to get up something else.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. Right. That is like their little, the phone is like their little bit of freedom.
Peter Gray: Yeah, exactly. Their own
Rusty Keeler: world. Like away from away from the adults.
Peter Gray: Exactly. They can do this even while they’re on the school bus. They can do it when they’re in between things. They can do it. If they’re sneaky enough, they can do it in a boring lecture where they’re not getting anything from the lecture anyway, so.
Rusty Keeler: Well, that’s wild. Right? So it is, it’s like this secret world through, through the web, through the internet, right. Of like, oh, here’s like the kids’ world. Is this, is this invisible met network.
Peter Gray: Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm.
Peter Gray: People used to talk about the culture of childhood, and there was actually sociologists who would study the culture of childhood back in the 1950s and sixties and even before.
And what they would do, they’d go into any given neighborhood and you’d find, you’d find children had sort of their own world, their own culture was an outdoor world. You’d play games, you, the games played varied from neighborhood to neighborhood. There were different kinds of social norms and expectations that were really entirely separate from, in some sense, entirely separate from the adult culture.
But what people argued is in some sense was preparation for the adult culture. You’re learning the norms of a group of people. You’re learning or you’re learning to follow rules. You’re learning. This is how you become part of a culture. Well, we, we have destroyed that, that, uh, culture of childhood to the degree that exists outdoors.
But kids have recreated it online.
Rusty Keeler: Hmm. Their secret world, right? Yeah. Their culture, their language.
Peter Gray: Right. You know, like there’s these abbreviations. Um, POS means parent over my shoulder. You better be careful what you’re, be careful what you say.
So they really do, they’ve got their language.
Rusty Keeler: Oh my gosh. Huh. Well, it’s interesting ’cause then that takes me back to, like you said about children and the instinct, you know, flowing like water to find. Still that spark of their freedom or their, you know, their, their companions, their creativity. Right. So you’ve studied Sudbury
Peter Gray: schools.
I really got started in this area when my son became a student at the original Sudbury school, the Sudbury Valley School. And, um, and at that time, partly because I was concerned about what this might do for his future, I, I studied, did a study of the graduates of the school. This is a long time ago. I mean, this is a school where, as you know, I.
There’s no nothing. All the trappings of school are just not there. There’s no assigned, you know, your, there are kids, there are typically most Sudbury schools kids there from age four on through high school age, but they’re not, they’re not assigned to separate spaces. They’re not called kindergarten kids or high school kids, just kids who are there.
They’re not segregated from one another. They’re not confined to separate spaces. They can go anywhere they want in the buildings or outta the buildings. All the rules of the school are made by a school meeting where everybody, every student and every staff member has a vote if they wish to show up and have a vote and vote.
And, but none of the rules have anything to do with, um, with academic learning. They all just have to do with the kinds of rules that. Would be necessary for any large group of people to get along with one another. Um, rules, like if you take out a piece of equipment, you’ve gotta put it away. Like no, you know, no bullying.
There’s a, there’s a rule called the personal rights rule that if you are doing something to somebody, no matter what it is, and they say, stop, I don’t want you to do it anymore, you have to stop. Or you’ve violated their personal rights. So you could, it’s kind of their version of an anti-bullying rule rules about, uh, littering rules that, so there, so it’s, you know, it’s not anarchy.
There’s definite, it’s a place rule by law, but the law is created democratically. The rules are created democratically. So. The intent of the original founders was that, that, uh, was to produce democratic citizens, so mm-hmm. In a, in a democracy. The belief on part of the founders of the original Sudbury Valley School, what Sudbury School was, we wanted raise democratic citizens and, and yet our schools in America are the least democratic institutions.
We have,
geez. Yeah. They’re the most
autocratic institutions we have. How do we expect to raise people who have a real appreciation of democracy if they don’t have the opportunity to experience democracy as they’re growing up? And so the idea was that they had was that a school should be a place where.
Children have all the rights and privileges and responsibilities of democratic citizens. Um, the, and they believed education will take care of itself. We don’t have to worry about that. It’ll take care of itself. And this, so this was way back in 1968. The school is still going on. There are now many schools modeled after it.
There are hundreds and hundreds of graduates out there in the real world. So my first study was a study of the graduates, uh, long ago, and found that they were doing very well in life. And so I could relax about my son being there. Yeah. And, but, but more than that, it really triggered my interest in.
Everything that I’ve been studying since my interest in, well, if they’re, somehow they’re becoming educated in this setting, even though they are not being taught in the kinds of ways that you see at school. The staff don’t call themselves teachers, at least not at the original school. They call ’em, they don’t even call themselves facilitators.
They’re just staff members. And, uh, if you ask them why they don’t call themselves teachers, they say, well, we don’t, we don’t do any more teaching here than anybody else does. Everybody kind of teaches one another, uh, in the normal process of just living together and doing things together. At any rate, that got me interested.
How are, and so I, along with a graduate student who did his dissertation, graduate, his, uh, PhD dissertation on this, we did a lot of observations at the school. And that’s when I became really impressed.
Rusty Keeler: Do you wanna see a few pictures of a Sudbury school? Sure. Yeah. You know, I’ve, I, I’ve been lucky with, with my work designing, you know, natural play spaces that, you know, it’s kind of a self-select group of people that bring me in, that they want that kind of thing, and they will like free play and, and all that kind of stuff.
So I’ve gotten to see some really interesting schools. And before I get to the Sudbury, there’s, there’s this one, uh, outside of Boston, the ASRA School. Have you, have you heard of that? I haven’t, no. I learned this term. It, it’s for. Twice exceptional children. So I learned that to mean they high IQs, but also might be like neurodiverse, A DHD or on the autism spectrum, dyslexic, different kinds of things.
So maybe a typical school wouldn’t work, but there are highly, highly intelligent and creative and everything. So it was some of the best facilities and projects I’ve ever seen at a school where they, the incredible wood shop, they’re building boats, they’re building, you know, house models, all this incredible stuff.
They’re doing like electronic music on computer. Uh, and they have like the Berkeley School of Music people coming in that are professors to help them that like specialize in that kind of stuff. And so they’re really able to like dive into really what, what fascinates them, what they’re interested in, and have these kind of experts help them.
But the outdoors was like rough and tumble adventure playground like. Wild, you know, digging holes and, you know, lumber and, and all this kind of stuff. And it just felt like, okay, these, that’s good for these chi kinda children, but it’s good for all children. Yeah. All children need that kind of thing.
Right, right. And so then I was inspired by a Sudbury school. Um, so this is interesting because I got a call one day and it was from an adult, but it was be to bring me in to do some actually building with children out in their woods. And it was because, so. Sudbury school where the children had been doing research, they wanted, they wanted to do some, you know, construction in the woods.
And they found me, the kids did in their research. Wow. So then they, they had their guide, the adult like, give me a call and invite me in. So I was doing construction with them and, and of course, you know, the school has, its, has a nice building and, you know, there’s all sorts of classrooms and art, art rooms and game rooms and couches and, you know, there’s video game rooms.
But it was a, you know, two of ’em have choice of, you know, kind of just a playful, playful space. But they have choice of what they wanna do. This is kind of what you’re saying. Follow your instinct and find your passion. And, and so they were, you know, they have all the materials at hand. And then, so here’s some of the kids.
Peter Gray: Well.
Rusty Keeler: Rough and tumble group there, but so then we were just building stuff out in the woods and you know, I had this aha moment. So it was a school that there, nobody’s really forced to do anything. You know, it’s kinda the opposite of the public school. So when I was out there, even in the beginning of the day, certain kids were out there because there were some that were gung-ho, like they’re the ones that called me in and they wanted to build all this.
And then there were some that were sort of interested, so they’re coming and going. And then there were other kids that couldn’t care less, so they didn’t come out to talk to rust tequila. They talked to me, you know, or whatever. They, they’re doing their own thing in the, in the classroom, in, in, in the building.
And I remember, you know, walking through, maybe I was getting a drink of water and, and a little break or something. I saw them and it was like, wait, they’re supposed to be out with me. And then of course it was like, wait, that’s the beauty of this.
Peter Gray: Yeah, they
Rusty Keeler: can be if they want to, but if it was a public school everybody would be rounded up and everybody would, right, right.
But here they had the freedom and, and so then this was just interesting, just they were tasked to like wash tires.
Peter Gray: Mm-hmm.
Rusty Keeler: But this really changed my mind about tires. I used to be just nature play, but then suddenly every time I came by they were like building all these great contraptions and cool stuff.
Peter Gray: Right.
Rusty Keeler: And then this idea of like, oh, they wanted to do some stuff in rope. So you know, they get out the book of knots and start learning some stuff. So it was very interesting to see a school that had a different model.
Peter Gray: Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: And then there were some kids who were, yeah, they were somewhere else in the woods just doing their own tea party and they had, you know, games Gaga pit.
Peter Gray: If you really look at children’s play. It no longer becomes surprising that they become educated, even if they’re playing almost all the time, play. When you really see what they’re doing, when you look, when you see the sophistication that is involved and the intelligence and the exchanges that are occurring when they’re playing and exploring together, um, it becomes no longer surprising that they would grow up to do well.
But that’s that interesting
Rusty Keeler: thing again of like, it’s coming from the child, that it’s coming from them, from the inside out.
Peter Gray: Right, right. You know, the difference between a child who’s decided they wanna learn something and the child who’s being forced to learn something is night and day. And this is true for, and this is true for what we think of as the.
Main initial functions of school. As, as anything else. Children at Sudbury schools learn to read. They learn to write. Or in this day and age type, they learn to use numbers to the degree that numbers are important in their life. And nobody has to teach ’em this stuff. They learn it, they, and they learn it at different ages, but they learn it when they get interested.
There are kids there as far as I can tell, uh, with all the years of Sudbury Valley School and the staff members tell me this is so, there has never been a child who didn’t learn how to read, including many children who’ve come to the school with a diagnosis of dyslexia. Came from public school, couldn’t read, got a diagnosis of dyslexia, came to Sudbury Valley where nobody was particularly teaching reading, but you could ask for help in reading if you wanted from somebody.
Uh, and they all learned to read. So the difference has to do with in reading, but everything else is when you, when you want to do it and the pressure is taken off of you, so you’re doing it because you want to do it and not because you’re trying to perform in somebody in front of somebody else who’s judging you.
Learning becomes way easier.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. And then there might be joy.
Peter Gray: Absolutely.
Rusty Keeler: Joy and curiosity and interest.
Peter Gray: Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Yeah. Very inspiring. And Peter, you are very inspiring. Oh, thank you. Thanks for taking some time and, um, I know I’ve got some serious new nuggets and things to, to think about. And kinda the, the in instincts, the instinctual, the instinct to, to explore the instincts, right.
That. Instinct to practice instinct, the
Peter Gray: instinct to practice instincts. That was, that was actually gru’s language. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rusty Keeler: You know, and even while some of this stuff is a little depressing, the kind of the crushing nature of education, there’s still the hope. You know, it kind of has, that instinct is still hopeful.
Like there is that spirit that is, that is trying to find its way in in all children.
Peter Gray: Right. Exactly.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yay. Okay. Well thank you. Thanks so much, Pete. It’s been a pleasure. Yeah. Bye-bye. Bye.
