[MUSIC PLAYING]
Professor Gray, your new book
focuses on the central impact
that free play has on the
child's emotional and social
development.
Can you summarize in the ways
in which free play impacts
their development?
Yeah.
Play really is the way
that children learn how
to get along with their peers.
I mean, that's one of the
major functions of play.
How else can
children learn that?
This is how they make friends.
This is how they learn to see
from other points of view.
Because children are really
strongly motivated to play
with other children.
They come into the world with
this enormously strong drive.
All normal children everywhere
want to play with other kids.
When they're playing with
other kids, because it's play
and you're always free
to quit, the other kids
are going to quit if you don't
pay attention to their needs as
well as your needs.
So you've got to
learn in social play,
even if you're just
three years old,
how to attend to the
needs of the other person
and satisfy your needs in
play while not violating
the other person's needs.
That's the most important
social skill that any of us
can develop.
It's one of the most
important skills all of us
have to develop to live
a successful human life.
And children are practicing
that all the time.
The essential
freedom of play, what
I call free play,
which is real play,
is that you're
always free to quit.
And because every
child is free to quit,
every child will quit
if they feel bullied,
if they feel not listened to.
So there's this constant
force for learning
how to attend to the needs of
other people, learning how to--
seeing from others'
perspectives.
So that's a good part of it.
Also all play has rules.
And when you're playing
socially, the rules are social.
It doesn't matter what kind of--
this is not just games
with formal rules.
All play has at
least implicit rules.
You're playing a game
of house, and there
is a certain structure
to this game,
and you have to stay in
character, and so on and so
forth.
So children are
practicing in play
how to abide by socially agreed
rules, the rules of this game.
This is another extraordinarily
important skill that all of us
need to develop to live
a normal, healthy life.
And how else can you learn it?
Kids learn it in play.
So that's at least part
of the social development.
The emotional development--
play is the place
where children are in
control of their own lives,
where they are making
decisions, where they
are solving their own problems.
As long as there's not an adult
standing nearby and stepping in
and solving it
for them, children
have to solve their
own problems in play.
They learn that
they can do things.
They learn that they
can control themselves.
They develop what
psychologists call
an internal locus of control.
And that internal
locus of control,
we know from all kinds
of clinical research,
is essential for healthy
psychological development.
People who don't have this sense
that they can control things,
that they are in
charge of their life,
are very prone to
depression and anxiety,
because they feel that they're
victims of fate around them.
Play is the one place where
children are not being
controlled by somebody else.
They are in control.
And they're learning
how to be in control.
And they're learning this
internal locus of control.
So that's part of the
emotional development.
In addition to that,
think how often
children play at what we
think of as dangerous things.
They climb too high in trees.
They'd jump off of cliffs.
They skateboard down banisters.
They do these things
that frighten parents.
And parents are better
off not looking.
But all mammals do this.
Other animals do this too--
young animals.
And what are they doing?
In part, they're developing
their physical abilities
to do these things.
But also in part,
what they're doing is
they're learning how to
experience fear and realize
that they can tolerate fear,
that they can get over it.
So that the child
climbing a tree
is climbing just
to the point where
the fear is barely tolerable.
He feels frightened, but
he's experiencing that fear.
And then he's coming
down, and he realizes,
I could handle that.
I don't have to panic from fear.
And so both young mammals--
young mammals of all types,
including young humans,
are learning how to
control their emotions,
and particularly fear.
They're also learning
how to control anger.
Because in social play,
inevitably, there's
conflicts that arise.
But if you lash out in anger, if
you lose control of your anger
where you have a tantrum of
some type, the play ends.
And you don't want
the play to end.
So that's a powerful
force to learn to control
your anger, to learn to--
OK, I'm feeling this anger.
But I'm not going to
let it go because that
will ruin the play.
It's very interesting
that, when you deprive--
we can't do these
experiments with children.
But with other mammals,
we've done experiments
where you deprive young
monkeys or young rats
of the opportunity
for social play
either by simply preventing
them from interacting
with other youngsters
that play of their species
or by only presenting them
with nonplayful playmates.
And you can make them
nonplayful by injection
of a certain drug
that doesn't knock out
other kinds of their
behavior but knocks out play.
When animals are
deprived of play,
then when they develop
and you put them
in a moderately
fearful situation,
they overreact with fear,
and they don't adapt
to that fearful situation.
You put them in a moderately
anger-producing situation, put
them with a strange
animal of their species,
even if that other animal
is making friendly overtures
toward them, they act
with a combination
of fear and aggression.
And they don't know--
they are unable to control
those emotions.
So the evidence is
really very strong
that play is nature's way
of teaching young mammals,
and particularly young humans.
Because we have to learn
these lessons even more
than other animals do because of
the nature of our way of life.
How to get along with
others of our kind
and how to control our emotions
so that we can deal effectively
with the real-life, fearful
and anger producing situations
that are inevitable
in all of our lives.
You have done extensive
research on free play
among hunter-gatherer children.
What strengths and
skills do you believe
that children develop as
a result of being raised
in a hunter-gatherer society?
Yeah.
First of all, let
me just comment
on hunter-gatherer societies.
Hunter gatherers live
in band societies.
Sometimes people talk about
hunter-gatherer tribes.
But that's a little
bit of a misnomer.
These are band societies.
These are people who live
in bands of typically
20 to 50 people per
band, counting children.
Each band is completely
politically autonomous.
It's not controlled
by any larger ruler.
And within each band, decisions
are made by consensus.
There is no chief.
There's no big man as there
is in tribal societies.
So these band societies
have been found and studied
in many parts of the world.
Most of them are gone now.
But even as recently
as 30 or 40 years ago,
it was possible
for anthropologists
to go out and observe
these band societies.
Now, the characteristics
that are required
to be a good citizen
in a band society
are that you be willing
to share and cooperate.
These people absolutely depend
upon sharing and cooperating.
They couldn't
survive without it.
That if you kill a large
animal, you don't own it.
You share it.
It belongs to the whole group.
This is in the nature of the
hunter-gatherer way of life.
If you're gathering and
you find a large amount
of a particular kind
of root that's edible,
you share with the others.
The whole process-- the band
cooperates in raising children.
They cooperate in their means
of hunting and gathering.
They share information.
That's crucial to
their way of life.
So cooperating and
sharing are essential
to hunter-gatherer cultures.
And also having an
egalitarian attitude.
Hunter-gatherer cultures are
extremely resistant to anybody
who acts as if they
are a big shot, anybody
who acts as if they're
better than somebody else.
Well, my argument is
that children in play
are learning precisely
these character traits.
Just as I said before, they're
learning how to cooperate.
They're learning how to share.
They're learning how to see
from one another's perspective.
And they're learning
that they can't try
to lord it over people in play.
Because the other people will
say, no, you can't do that.
We're just not going
to play with you.
So the very kinds of skills
that I just said are accepted,
social and emotional
skills, are really
especially important to
hunter-gatherer cultures.
The ability to control
your emotions--
anthropologists have
commented over and over
again at the incredible
emotional control
that hunter-gatherer
children and adults have
that they can be a terribly
frightening situations
and terribly painful
situations and yet
maintain their calmness,
maintain their ability to think
clearly, to solve problems.
They don't panic in these
situations as we do.
So that's part of
what they're learning.
But in addition, in the
ways that they play,
they're learning all the
sustenance and artistic skills
of their culture.
These are, in many ways,
very rich cultures.
They have art and music.
They have dances.
And of course, to survive, they
need to hunt and to gather.
And these are very
difficult skills.
They need to know
how to track animals.
They need to know how to
identify the several hundred
different species
of animals that
are relevant to their
tracking and their hunting.
They need to know the many, many
different kinds of vegetations
that they survive on
and how to find them
and when they find them.
There's a lot of knowledge and a
lot of skill that goes into it.
And children are practicing
these all the time in play.
They look out into
the world around them.
They see what adults are doing.
They see what older
kids are doing.
And they incorporate
that into their play.
So in a culture where the men
hunt with bows and arrows,
the little boys are
constantly practicing
with bows and arrows.
Not because anybody
is telling them
that they have to
practice bows and arrows,
but because this is fun.
This is what they are doing.
They're pretending
that they're hunters.
And they're in the
process, learning to hunt.
And they're also going out
on gathering trips in play
and learning that they're
playfully cooking.
They're playfully
building dugout canoes
if it's a culture that
uses dugout canoes.
They're playfully building huts.
They'll often
build a little play
village near the temporary
village of the band itself.
They are also playing
out the arguments
that they hear among the adults.
It's very interesting to me
that natural selection endowed
the young of our species not
only with the drive to play,
but with a drive to play
at the very things that
seem to be important in
the culture around you.
So hunter gatherers play
at hunter-gatherer things.
Our children, when they
have the opportunity,
play at things like
computers and things
that are important
to our culture.
And they are also,
of course, playing
the musical instruments.
They're playing with
the art workings.
If there is a culture
that creates bead works,
they're playing with that.
They're playing in all
the kinds of skills that
are valued in their culture.
And that is how they
become educated.
Your book highlights
the success of schools
like the Sudbury Valley School.
How does this school
mirror the characteristics
of the hunter-gatherer society?
Yeah, well, Sudbury Valley
School, as you may know,
is a school here in in
Framingham, Massachusetts
and has been around
for 45 years.
So it's not an
experimental school.
It's a school that has hundreds
and hundreds of graduates.
And I've been observing
the school for a long time.
I had a graduate student who did
his doctoral dissertation based
on spending about 100 days at
the school making observations.
And I did a study
of the graduates
of the school many years ago.
So this has been a focus
of a lot of my study.
Now, here's the way that
Sudbury Valley is like--
you hear about this school.
And if you don't know
anything-- if you
haven't given a lot of thought
to it, it just sounds crazy.
I mean, here's a
school that violates
all of our basic societal
views about education.
The kids are not
told what to do.
They are free to play
and explore all day long
just like
hunter-gatherer kids are.
In hunter-gatherer bands, adults
do not tell kids what to do.
They really don't.
By the age of four,
children are regarded
as having common sense,
being able to make
their own decisions.
They don't have to
be watched by adults.
They are off playing with the
other kids by the age of four.
Interestingly, Sudbury Valley
regards the age of four
as the minimum age
that they would take.
You've got to be four in
order to have enough sense
to be able to be a
student at this school is
the general belief.
So there's something
about four apparently
when kids have incorporated
language enough.
They're able to
control themselves.
So the philosophy of
education at Sudbury Valley
is the same as the
philosophy of education
in hunter-gatherer bands.
The belief-- if you ask a
hunter gatherer, how do children
become educated, they would
say, they teach themselves.
They learn through
their observing
around them, their playing,
and their exploring.
And they become educated.
We might help them out
if they ask for help.
But basically, they're in
charge of their own education.
And it works.
The hunter-gatherer adult will
tell us that they all learn.
We don't have to
worry about that.
And that's what the people of
Sudbury Valley will tell you.
That the kids play and explore.
The main thing that
the adults have to do
is stay out of their way.
Don't intervene.
Let them do what
they want to do.
And so you go there at
any given time of day.
And you would say
that it was recess.
The kids are playing outdoors.
They're playing indoors.
Some kids are reading,
but they're obviously
reading what they want to read.
Some kids are
having discussions.
And they may be highly
intellectual discussions.
But it's on their own topics.
So there's that going on.
There are certain
characteristics
that I list in the book
that I think represent
the optimal kind of environment
that children need in order
to use their instincts
to educate themselves
to best advantage.
And here's what they are.
One of them is freedom
to play and explore,
which I've just been
describing-- infinite freedom
to play and explore.
Another one is being
trusted by the adults.
This sense that there's
a certain self-fulfilling
prophecy.
If you are trusted--
everybody says, you're
trustworthy-- you
become trustworthy.
The feeling like, I really
am in charge of my own life
because nobody else is
taking charge of my life.
So that's part of it.
The opportunity to really
play with the real tools
of the culture.
So hunter-gatherer
children can play
with bows and arrows
and knives and fire
and the things that are
the tools of their culture
and, therefore, thereby,
learn how to use these things.
Children at Sudbury
Valley School
play with the tools of our
culture-- computers and books
and cooking equipment and
woodworking equipment,
various kinds of tools that
are valued in our culture.
Access to experts,
being able to see
people who can do these
things really well.
In a hunter-gatherer
culture, the children
can observe the adults and see
how the adults do these things.
Or they can observe
older children
who are farther along in
their playful activities
at these things.
And they can learn from them.
Similarly, at Sudbury Valley.
There are fewer adults per
child at Sudbury valley--
far fewer.
But there are always older kids
who are much farther along.
And the kids are learning
skills from the older kids
and, to some degree,
from the adults.
So the age mixing is key
in both environments.
A school like Sudbury
Valley couldn't possibly
work if all the kids
were the same age.
It works, because there are
kids from age 18 down to age 4.
And in their play,
they're often playing
across broadly age-mixed groups.
And the little kids are
learning from the bigger kids
naturally in the course of play.
And the bigger kids
are learning how
to be caring and nurturant
through their interaction
with the younger kids.
And that occurs, similarly,
in a hunter-gatherer band.
The anthropologists who've
studied children's play
in hunter-gatherer
bands talk about it
as always being age mixed
in a broad range of ages.
And so they're playing in ways
in which the little kids are
always learning from
the bigger kids.
So that's a really key part.
And then one more
thing which I think
is really really essential.
Both a hunter-gatherer band
and the Sudbury Valley School
are fundamentally moral
democratic communities
in which the child is
respected as a real part
of this community.
Growing up in a stable, moral
democratic community is,
I think, absolutely
essential to all aspects
of human development--
emotional development,
the sense of security that comes
from it, the sense of safety
that comes from it.
Acquiring moral values
of the community,
the sense that there are right
and wrong ways to behave.
And you can see this represented
in the behavior of the adults
as well as in the behavior
of the older children.
And you become socialized into
that as you're growing up.
And you feel like you are
part of this community.
At Sudbury Valley,
you're part of it
because you have a vote
on every rule that's
made in this community.
There are no rules except
those made in which,
whether you're four years
old or 17 years old or you're
a 50-year-old staff member,
every member of that community,
the staff and the
students, has one vote.
There are 140
students and 10 staff.
So fundamentally,
it's the students
who are the voting force here.
So those
characteristics, I think,
are the set of characteristics
that allow children to really
take charge of
their own education
and to educate
themselves well to become
adult citizens in the culture
in which they're developing.
What factors have led to
the decline of free play
in the school environment?
Yeah, I think there's
a number of factors.
I think, for one
thing, there's a kind
of a self-engendered
growth of schooling.
Schooling is an institution.
And it's an institution
that, among other things,
tends to convince people
that they need schooling.
And so we're now three
or four generations
into compulsory schooling.
So most people in
our culture don't
know what it would be
like not to have it.
So as a consequence, we
tend to think more and more
that children learn
by being schooled.
Well, therefore, if we
want them to learn more,
we have to school them more.
And as part of
this, we haven't--
especially in recent
times with No Child
Left Behind as a
prototypical example,
but there were other less
obvious examples before.
We've kind of turned
to this notion
that education
should be measurable.
And in my mind,
it's a silly idea.
Because each person's education
and reality is different.
Education is sort of bringing
out your own abilities
and figuring out your own
way of modeling the world
and finding your
way in the world.
And different
people are naturally
going to learn different
kinds of skills
and different
kinds of abilities.
But we have this view that
it should be measurable,
which means it has
to be standardized
if it's going to be measurable.
So we're putting everybody
through this same standard
track and measuring everybody.
And now, we're
evaluating teachers too
on how high those scores are.
Well, when you're
in that situation,
administrators know they've
got to raise test scores.
Teachers know that.
Kids know they've got
to get high test scores.
The whole goal becomes
the test scores.
But when you do that, you begin
to not have time for play.
You begin to not have time.
When I talk with teachers,
and even school principals,
what they tell me is, the
reason we've had to do away
with recess or why we've
had to cut recess back
is we don't have time for it.
We've got to do all
these other things
to meet state standards to get
these kids passing these tests.
And so let me just
backtrack a second just
to point out how
big the change is.
When I was in elementary
school in the 1950s,
we had six-hour school
days pretty much
as today, although there
weren't as many school days.
We had no homework.
Never was there homework
for elementary school kids.
There was a little
homework by high school,
but certainly not in
elementary school.
But within the school day,
only four of those hours
were indoors.
We had a half-hour
recess in the morning,
a half-hour recess
in the afternoon,
and a full hour at lunch.
And we were free to
go anywhere we wanted.
We could go home.
We could play on the
school playground.
We could go off into the
woods and play there.
Every boy carried a jackknife.
We played with knives.
We played with fire sometimes.
We weren't probably
supposed to do that.
But there weren't
adults watching us.
We were more or less
trusted at that time.
And so because of the
way this was spread up,
there was never a time that
we were more than an hour
in our seats in school.
You'd have an hour.
Then you'd have a half-hour
recess, then another hour.
Then you'd have a full hour
of lunch, and similarly
in the afternoon.
So there's been a huge shift.
At that time, first of
all, it was very much up
to individual teachers.
So even within that hour
that we were there at a time,
a teacher might see
that we were restless
and just say, oh, I see.
Everybody is restless.
Why don't you just
get up and play
for a little while and then
we'll get back to this work?
And now, teachers just
don't feel free to do that.
Because they feel
like, oh, my god.
If the principal ever looked
in and this was going on,
I could lose my job unless
those test scores are
going to be really high anyway.
And the principal
is going to feel
like if the
superintendent of schools
found out this was going on,
they would lose their job.
So there's this
hierarchical pressure
to keep kids focused
on their work.
And that results in
loss of play in school.
One other factor
that plays a role
is the litigiousness of society.
We no longer feel that
it's acceptable to let
kids play on their own
during school time.
Because God forbid,
if a child gets hurt,
there is the belief that the
school system would be sued.
They'd be held liable.
There is great fear
about that kind
of thing within
the school system
and within society in general.
And that's one of
the reasons why
children don't have the freedom
today that they once had.
What factors have led to
the decline of free play
in the home environment?
Yeah, the lack of
play in home life--
again, let me just say
something to indicate how
much the decline of play is.
Howard Chudacoff,
who's a historian,
wrote a book on the
history of play in America.
And he talked about the first
half of the 20th century--
from about 1900 to
about 1955 he puts
for some reason as the date
that things began to change.
He puts the first half
of the 20th century as--
he calls it the golden
age of children's play.
And by about 1900, the
necessity of child labor
had declined enough.
And child labor laws
were strong enough
that we didn't have many
kids working in sweatshops
or working all the time
in mines or on farms
and so on and so forth.
So children have
a lot more freedom
beginning about
then to play, began
to re-evoke the kind
of hunter-gatherer view
that children should be playing.
This is what children
are designed to do.
And that view became
kind of prominent
among people in the
early 20th century.
But over time,
beginning around 1955,
there has been a continuous
shift in that attitude
that we've forgotten what
natural childhood is all about
and that children are supposed
to be out there playing.
And we've developed, as I
said before, this more, we
might call it, "schoolish"
attitude about child
development that children
develop when they're
directed by adults
rather than developed
through their own play and
exploration and in interactions
with other children.
And at that same time,
and as school became
more and more of a force--
more homework, more
intervention from school
into the home where
their parents are
more or less expected to
be assistant teachers.
Because they're supposed
to monitor and make sure
their kids do homework and sign
off on the homework and so on.
So as parents got more and more
drawn into the whole schooling
mentality, parents began to
more and more act in the way
that teachers do.
Their job is to teach the child
and to be sure the child is
taught even out of school.
So kids more and more
began to be put into,
instead of just going
out and playing,
they're doing adult-directed
things, adult-led sports
or classes of various
sorts outside of school.
So that shift in
attitude that childhood,
instead of being a time of joy
as free play, as a time of sort
of resume building.
That shift in attitude, I
think, has played a big role.
But there are many other
things that have played a role.
The decline of neighborhoods
has played a role.
It's wonderful that
women can get jobs today.
But one of the things
that that means
is that women are not
home during the day
as they once were.
Nobody is home during the day.
And so people don't
get to know one another
in the neighborhood.
And and when people
don't get to know
one another in the
neighborhood, then
they tend to distrust
the neighborhood.
And in some sense, it becomes
a little bit more dangerous.
If you know everybody and
there's somebody home looking
out the window, and they can
see that little Johnny's getting
in trouble over there or
having trouble or fallen
and hurt themselves,
then usually it
would be a mother
looking out the window,
not necessarily Johnny's
mother, is there to protect him,
to do something about it.
And also, when there
were more kids outside--
just because kids
in the neighborhood
knew one another-- when
they came from school,
they'd play outside.
They'd play together all summer.
With a lot of kids outside,
there is safety in numbers.
They are looking
out for one another.
They're protecting one another.
God forbid there would be
some kind of a child molester
or child snatcher around.
He's not going to do it in
front of witnesses, right?
But if there is just a
single child out there,
that child probably, literally,
is in a little bit more danger.
We greatly exaggerate
the real fear of that.
But nevertheless, there is
some possible danger of that.
And if there's not
numbers out there,
there's a little
bit more danger.
So it's a combination
of factors.
It's also the litigiousness.
Once again, we don't
feel so welcoming as we
once-- it used to be that all
the neighborhood yards were
free range for all the kids.
You would play in
anybody's yard.
Now, we've got fences up.
We've got hedges.
We've got ways of
protecting private property.
And we also even
have laws saying
that, if you have something
potentially dangerous
in your yard, you have
to keep children out
or your insurance company
will insist that you do.
Because you might
get sued if somebody
gets hurt on your property.
So there's a whole
set of forces that
has worked against children
being able to play freely
away from adults outdoors.
And these have just been
accumulating over time.
And there's been, as a result,
a gradual but, in the end,
dramatic decline
in opportunities
for children to play
freely outdoors especially.
You assert that you're
optimistic about the future
of education.
Can you talk a little
bit about the trends
that are making you optimistic?
Well, I'm optimistic
for several reasons.
One is we are really
beginning to see movement
outside of the school system.
I don't think the school system
is going to reform itself.
It can't I don't think.
There's too many
entrenched forces.
There's too much self-interest
and so on and so forth at
every level.
There's too many blinders
on ways of thinking.
I don't think the school
system can reform itself.
But what's happening
is the school system
has reached the point where
more and more kids can't
deal with it.
We're drugging kids.
There was an article just two
days ago in The New York Times
that now 20% of high school boys
have been diagnosed with ADHD.
20%, one out of five, is
given this classification
of mentally disordered.
I mean, a lot of parents
are recognizing that there's
something wrong here.
This is really crazy.
And it's not the
boys who are crazy.
It's the system who was crazy.
And so that's just one example.
But many parents
are recognizing,
my kid is just really
unhappy in school.
And instead of drugging my kid,
instead of fighting with my kid
all the time, I'm taking
my kid out of school.
Every single year, a higher
percentage than the previous
year-- and this has been
occurring over the last 10
years or so--
of people leave
the school for home
schooling of one
sort or another.
There's a certain
amount of movement
out to schools like
Sudbury Valley.
But those schools
haven't really caught
on as much as home schooling
and so-called unschooling, which
is a kind of very
loose home schooling
where the children really are
in charge of their own education
but in a home base.
This is increasing.
We're now at something like 5%
of the entire school population
is being home schooled.
At some point, who knows
exactly when it will be,
there will be enough
kids not going to school
that practically
everybody will know
somebody who is not in school.
It's a little bit like, once
people who are gays or lesbians
came out, we reached the point
where everybody knew somebody
who was gay or lesbian.
It became much harder to
think that that's abnormal.
It became much harder to
think that this is not
a normative kind of thing.
So therefore, I think when
people see more and more people
who haven't gone to school
and they're doing OK in life,
then they'll be much freer
about taking their own kids out
of school.
We've got this
view in our society
that you've got to
do school or you're
going to be like that
dropout who can never get
a job and so on and so forth.
But when we see that
there are people
who have withdrawn from
school, taken charge
of their own education,
and are doing well in life,
more and more people
are going to realize
that they can do that too.
And that way, they can
preserve their own freedom.
They don't have to
be in this situation
where they're constantly being
told exactly what they have
to study, how they
have to do it,
what tests they have to
take, and so on and so forth.
So that's part of it.
Another thing that's happening
is really the whole revolution
of information availability.
Information is so
readily available.
It's so easy to educate
yourself these days.
There's no need to
go to school for it.
And every kid knows it.
Every kid knows that they can
find whatever information they
want on the internet.
And they can find it so easily.
Of course, they have to use
judgment and common sense
to decide what to believe
and what not to believe.
But the idea is that information
has become democratized.
It's out there.
You can find it.
It becomes a lot
easier for parents
to believe that they can
do home schooling at home.
Because there's so many
resources available.
There are courses
available on the internet
and so on that you can do.
So that's a part of what
gives me optimism too.
And then the other thing that
gives me optimism is this.
It seems as if over
the last few centuries
there's been a kind
of inevitable course
towards more freedom.
When people see freedom as
an option, they take it.
There's no group of people
who willingly puts themselves
in the less free
situation if they can
be in the more free situation.
And so we've seen that
first with the overthrow
of dictatorships in governments.
We've seen it with the
gradual increase in democracy
at the larger scale.
We've seen it
within this country
where first freedom was just
for white male property owners--
the rights of democracy.
And then it became
available finally to people
who are African descent.
And then it became
available to women.
And now, more and
more we're recognizing
the full rights of
people regardless
of sexual orientation.
I think it's
inevitable that we're
going to recognize
that children too
have these human rights,
that they have the right
to follow their own pursuits.
And they have the
capability to do it.
And so when parents
and children themselves
see that freedom in education
is an option, it works.
You don't have to take
this bad-tasting medicine.
You can do it without that.
Inevitably, they'll choose that.
Can you tell us
a little bit more
about the researchers who have
most influenced your book?
Yeah, I would say--
well, let me start with
some of the classics.
The one work that's not--
actually two books that are
not well known, certainly not
by most psychologists.
There's a philosopher
and naturalist
named Karl Groos, who more
than 100 years ago, sort
of the turn of the 19th
to the 20th century,
wrote a book called
The Play of Animals.
And then he wrote another
book called The Play of Man.
And he was well aware
of Darwinian theory.
And he developed some ideas
about what the function of play
is in animals much along the
line that I've just described.
And then with his book
on the play of man,
he developed these ideas
with regard to humans.
And he said, basically,
mammals come into the world
without their final
behaviors fully formed.
We, all mammals,
including human beings,
have certain roughed
out instincts.
But we need to refine those
instincts through our play.
And in humans, we
need to refine them
in accordance with the culture
around them through our play.
And so all animals,
he argues, play
at the very things,
the very skills
that they need to develop.
And that's how they
develop those skills.
And humans play not
just at the skills
that humans everywhere
have to develop,
like the social skills and the
ability to speak and so on.
But they also play at
the skills that are
unique to their own culture.
They come into
the world prepared
to observe those things.
Well, those ideas have kind of
lain fallow all these years.
And it was kind of an
insight when I read Groos.
And so that did play a
role in my own thinking.
And in some ways, I
see myself as standing
on the shoulders of Karl Groos
and developing his ideas that
have been more or
less ignored not
so much by animal behaviorists,
but by psychologists
since then.
Another influence
is Lev Vygotsky,
the Russian developmental
psychologist
who wrote in the 1920s.
And he didn't write a book.
But he wrote a wonderful
essay on the role of play
in children's development.
And he's the one who talked
about all play having rules
and pointed out how
children are acquiring rules
through play, a tremendous
insight which had
a big effect on my thinking.
More recent people.
I've been influenced
by anthropologists
like Melvin Konner who wrote
a book a number of years
ago called The Tangled Wing.
And it was based on his
observations of children
in a hunter-gatherer culture.
And it was really
more about infants
and how infants are treated.
It was also though, generally,
about the culture at large.
And that really is what got me
interested in hunter-gatherer
cultures was reading his book.
Another person,
our own [INAUDIBLE]
who is a colleague of mine.
She was in the
psychology department.
I think she's moved over to
the education school now.
But she did research with
a hunter-gatherer group
called the [INAUDIBLE].
And it was very inspiring
to me to hear her talk
about the way [INAUDIBLE]
children played
and how they learned.
And hearing her talk led me
to do a more systematic survey
of other researchers to see, is
this unique to the [INAUDIBLE],,
unique to the [INAUDIBLE]
that Melvin Konner
studied, or is this generally
true of all hunter gatherers?
And it led me to do a
survey of anthropologists
who had studied a variety
of hunter-gatherer cultures
and put together my
hunter-gatherer argument
about play as the means by which
children educate themselves
in those societies.
So those are some of the
people who've influenced me.
One more that I
really must mention
is Daniel Greenberg, who
is not so much a researcher
as a real innovator.
He's the person who,
way back in the 1960s,
founded the Sudbury
Valley School.
And he's written a great deal.
I would refer to him
as a philosopher.
His own writings,
both about democracy
and what it means to
grow up in a democracy
and how children need to grow
up in a democratic environment
in order to acquire the
characteristics that we value
in a democracy, have very
much influenced my own thought
and research.
Your research is relevant to
a wide variety of audiences
and social scientists.
Is there a particular
group that you're most
hoping to influence?
Yeah, I would say,
first of all, parents.
But closely related
to parents, everybody
who cares about the happiness
and development of children.
And parents want their
children to be happy.
They want them to
grow up healthy.
They want them to be--
and so I see parents
as the first-line audience.
But people who don't have kids
want their nieces and nephews
to grow up well too.
And people who
care about society
want everybody to grow up well.
So I don't see school
administrators and so on
as the primary.
I hope they read it.
I hope it's meaningful to them.
But that's not the
primary audience.
I think the primary audience
is the general public.
Because in some sense, the
school system in a democracy
is responsive to
the general public.
I gave a talk just last night to
a group of teachers in Waltham.
And they told me that
parents are putting pressure
on them to give more
homework, to do this and that.
So they see themselves
as, in some sense,
under pressure from society at
large to move in the direction
that they are
themselves thinking
is the wrong direction,
that these kids
need more chance for play.
So I am trying to
convince parents, no,
your children need more play.
And it's very interesting
that a lot of teachers,
in fact, are saying that's
precisely the message they
want parents to get.
So parents really
play a big role
ultimately through
their voting power,
through their ability
to choose school boards,
through their ability to
influence the decisions.
Even at the highest
political level.
I mean, right now,
whether it's George Bush
or whether it's Barack
Obama or whether it's
Romney, the would-be
president, they all
are arguing for more schooling
for kids, more testing.
They're not talking
about more play.
And so if we change the attitude
of the public, in a democracy,
we will change the rhetoric
and attitude of our leaders.
And that's how we change
the system in the end.
So that's primarily my audience.
I also am interested in
reaching social scientists.
Because I think there has
been a dearth of research
on play that--
I have documented
this in some places.
Even among developmental
psychologists, who
you would think would be very
interested in children's play,
there's been relatively little
study of children's play.
And I'm trying to encourage
more academic attention
towards play.
It's interesting that,
when you asked me
who were the big
influences in my work,
they're mostly people who
were writing a long time ago.
We don't really have a
lot of people writing
very deeply about play today.
Thank you.
So those were my
formal questions.
Do you have anything
you'd like to add?
Well, no, except for, thank
you for your interest in this.
And I've been very pleased
with the reception of my book.
There were certain groups that
I knew would be interested.
You talk about
preaching to the choir--
the unschoolers and
the Sudbury School
parents and so on and so forth.
I knew they would be interested.
But I'm finding that it is
generating a lot of interest
among people who are
discovering this book.
And it's leading them to
think about these ideas,
in some cases,
for the first time
or at least to think more
deeply about these ideas.
And that's what has been
most gratifying to me so far.
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