The Fifth and Six Optimizing Conditions for Self Directed Learning and 'What About Math?"

05/19/21 • 54 min

Show Notes

The fifth optimizing condition is free age mixing with children across all ages. Throughout history, children have spent most of their time in the company of other children, not adults. Sudbury Valley School offers this model. Children learn from one another. Kids don’t inherently self-segregate if they aren’t forced to. Age gaps provide learning opportunities for younger children by way of the older children boosting the younger ones up to an activity level they wouldn’t otherwise be at if they were with their same-aged peers. The older children learn how to explain things which cements their own knowledge. They also learn to care for others and lead. Kids even learn to read through games with older kids, because the game demands they learn it. This is a natural motivator for learning to read. It’s important for kids to have older children as models, maybe even more so than having adult models.

Jenna adds that for her, it’s been challenging to provide age-mixing for her kids during the Covid-19 pandemic due to all the restrictions on social gatherings. As a solution, she provided an online self-directed school alternative which allows for age-mixing and guidance from facilitators. You can learn more about Galileo here, or sign up to try it out with the code “Rogue Learner” and get $100 off your first month’s tuition.

The sixth optimizing condition is immersion in a stable, moral, and caring community. Even with the other optimizing conditions in place, if a child doesn’t feel a sense of being part of a larger community of people. They learn that the purpose of life is not just to serve their own selfish needs. It helps them become good citizens later on.

Jenna says that American schools can provide this sense of belonging through school spirit and mascots and ultimately provides validation to those raising questions about socialization and the lack of a sense of community for homeschooled children.

Peter Gray talks about the research supporting how school climate is the most important factor in determining how schools would perform academically, and closes the gap between students who do well and not well in school. Feeling comfortable and accepted in a school was critical.

Jenna points out that after interviewing people from all different backgrounds, she was surprised to uncover a trend in which people felt relatively happy in elementary school, but as they began entering secondary school, they lost their motivation and felt like a small fish in a huge pond.

Peter Gray notes that the pressure and stress put on children is however, happening earlier and earlier. His own half sister resigned after years of teaching in middle school because administrators dictated exactly how and what she taught even though she had evidence to support her methods were effective. Although kindergarten used to be a place of play and socializing, it’s now become drill and practice with worksheets and messages that children are already behind.

Jenna follows up with a question regarding the 3 R’s. If children are given full autonomy over their learning, how do they learn math, reading and writing?

Peter Gray asks, “Why are we so concerned about math in the first place?” Most of the math we need in everyday life can be learned in context by cooking, playing board games, and making change when you buy something. Research of the “summer slide” shows that children’s ability to solve computational calculations decreased over the summer, yet their ability to solve problems involving reasoning and problem solving increased, and increased at a faster rate than that of which it would have in the course of the school year. You can find some of Peter Gray’s blog posts on Psychology Today about math, particularly this article about a survey he did with unschooling families. We live in a numerate world and to the degree the child is being brought up in a numerate world, the child will learn about numbers and will learn to do those calculations that are necessary to do. Any other calculations can be learned at any point in life when the child finds them important to what they want to do in life. There are two times to learn something, when you’re so curious about something that you just can’t stop yourself from learning it, and the other is when you need to know it. There’s no critical period for learning anything other than your native language without an accent. You learn most efficiently when you need to know it.

Show Notes

Jenna follows up with a question regarding the 3 R’s. If children are given full autonomy over their learning, how do they learn math, reading and writing?

Previous Episode

The Six Optimizing Conditions for Self Directed Education with Dr. Peter Gray

Dr. Peter Gray

Peter Gray is a research professor of psychology at Boston College who has conducted and published research in neuroendocrinology, developmental psychology, anthropology, and education. He is author of an internationally acclaimed introductory psychology textbook (Psychology, Worth Publishers, now in its 8th edition), which views all of psychology from an evolutionary perspective. His recent research focuses on the role of play in human evolution and how children educate themselves, through play and exploration, when they are free to do so. He has expanded on these ideas in his book, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life (Basic Books). He also authors a regular blog called Freedom to Learn, for Psychology Today magazine. He is a founding member and former president of the nonprofit Alliance for Self-Directed Education (ASDE), which is aimed at creating a world in which children’s natural ways of learning are facilitated rather than suppressed. He is also a founder of the nonprofit Let Grow, the mission of which is to renew children’s freedom to play and explore outdoors, independently of adults. He earned his undergraduate degree at Columbia College and Ph.D. in biological sciences at the Rockefeller University many years ago. His own current play includes kayaking, bicycling, cross-country skiing, vegetable gardening, chopping wood for his home’s wood-burning stove, and writing occasional sonnets.

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Show Notes

Dr. Peter Gray has spent years researching how children naturally learn. He focused on play and what children are doing when they play and the function of play. He’s interested in play from an evolutionary perspective, children’s nature that comes about by natural selection to serve the function of education.
As Jenna was researching self directed learning, she came upon the six optimizing conditions for self directed education and found it extremely helpful in guiding her toward an environment at home that was ideal for learning.
Dr. Gray developed the six optimizing conditions for self directed learning based on what he studied at The Sudbury Valley School and through surveying ten anthropologists who had studied and lived among 7 different hunter-gatherer communities. He found many similarities between the hunter-gatherer communities and the students at Sudbury Valley School.
The first condition is the social expectation and reality that education is children’s responsibility. Dr. Gray observed that children come into the world biologically designed to educate themselves. Right from the beginning, children are curious and figuring things out on their own initiative. If adults believe that children need to be forced to learn, we can talk them out of the idea that they’re responsibility. We essentially send them the message that their curiosity doesn’t count. The adults in the child’s environment are not conveying the view that the adult is responsible for their education.
Jenna asks where does that that idea come from that adults have to educate children?
Dr. Gray explains that the original purpose for education was to teach obedience. Autonomy was valued in hunter-gatherer bands, but agriculture changed all of this. An hierarchy arose by way of land ownership. This led to feudalism, whereby everyone was dependent on the land owners. It became imperative that Serf parents teach their children to obey for their own survival in this hierarchical world. The original schools were developed by Protestants in Prussia. There were three purposes for schools at that time; reading (as it was very common at that time for average day families to be literate), indoctrination (save children’s souls), teach obedience. Willfulness was sinfulness. Children were meant to memorize content, otherwise they’d be punished. Nobody questioned it. Most teachers don’t have this goal in today’s modern world, however they are entering into a school system which was never designed for that and is incapable of promoting creativity, critical thinking and a love for learning. The only way you can pass in school is to do what you’re told to do and the only way to fail is to not do what you’re told to do. So even today, the goal is still obedience.
The second optimized condition for SDE is unlimited freedom to play, explore, and pursue their own interests. Kids need lots of time to do this, essentially all day. Kids from the age of about four on through late teenage years in hunter-gatherer communities had all day to play and explore. This is the same way Sudbury Valley School models their school. It allows children to exercis...

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My Unschooled Child Wants to go to School

Show Notes

Announcement: Jenna is looking for guest co-hosts to help her with the key takeaways from her guest episodes as she currently does with her husband. You can connect with her here if you’re interested in finding out more information.

Jenna will be giving away 1 book for every 5 reviews given on Apple Podcasts. If you leave a written review and want to win a copy of Changing Our Minds by Naomi Fisher or Free to Learn by Peter Gray. If you’ve left a review, just send an email to [email protected] letting me know the screen name you left it under and the address where you’d like to have the book shipped. A copy of the book of your choice will be mailed directly to you if you win!

Jenna and Chris want to share some changes happening with their family in the hopes that by sharing how they’re dealing with difficult or challenging circumstances, it will help others who may be going through the same thing.

Our daughter recently requested she go back to school. During the pandemic, she found it challenging to meet her academic goals alone. Although we don’t love the idea, we are open minded and support our children’s wishes to learn in a way that best suits them.

Jenna points out that the pandemic played a huge role in the social side of things this year. Moving to a new country and the precise timing that the pandemic started made it impossible to develop life-long relationships and build friendships.

Their daughter likes having her schedule dictated for her, which Jenna feels is a result of having been in school for so many years. She finds it challenging to self direct her learning, because she’s never practiced it before. Jenna would love to hear feedback from the listeners to find out if any children who’ve always been unschooled develop this need for structured learning.

Over the next six months, they plan on having a lot of dialogue back and forth with their daughter to make sure being in school is still the right choice for her. They have picked a school, together with their daughter, which they think will be a good fit for her specific learning goals and emotional needs.

Although they support their daughter’s decision, they do worry about her creativity being stifled by the one-size-fits-all approach that is conventional schooling, but hope by picking a charter school which encourages students’ individuality she will have the opportunity still to really shine.

One of Chris’ takeaways from the episode with Peter Gray last week was that children and humans were born with the innate ability to learn and it doesn’t need to be forced upon us. The idea that education was built for obedience is still evident today in it’s rigid and inflexible system, which discourages questioning and discourse.

The second key takeaway; the school system was not designed for critical thinking and robs children from exploring their interests in a way that doesn’t take away from their sleep requirements. Oftentimes, youth are working on their hobbies and extra-curriculars late into the evenings because during the day, they have a curriculum forced upon them in school, most of which is not necessary for life. We’re essentially building a society of unhappy people learning topics that don’t interest them and working in jobs they hate.

Jenna asks listeners to consider what they would have pursued further in school had they been allowed to learn about anything. Take a moment to reflect on that. Where would it have taken you? How would your life be different right now?

The third take away from the Peter Gray episodes was that the act of being evaluated, no matter the reason, creates fear and stress on the one being evaluated. It takes the fun out of learning and demonstrating competency of a concept. By evaluating students, we also take away the desire to take chances because they are more inclined to meet the EXACT criteria for the assignment so they don’t compromise their grades. Testing kids all the time stifles critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity.

Jenna heard a professor interviewed on The School Sucks Project podcast who offers his students complete autonomy over how they learn the material in his class. You can check that out here.

Chris asks: why are we so concerned about performance? Why are we so concerned about grading and evaluating people?

Jenna emphasizes the point Peter Gray made about how quickly one can learn a new skill or concept if it’s needed for their particular goals, careers, etc. She uses the SATS as an example. Unschooled children can study with a tutor for 3- 6 months and pass the SATS, so why is it that students who have attended 12 years of traditional schooling also feel compe...