Hello everyone, my name is Ryan and welcome to The Vegan Report.
In last week's episode, our guest Adam shared that he wanted to homeschool his son.
A few years ago, I would have frowned at the idea of homeschooling.
I would have thought of it as something very marginal, cultish, and even detrimental to
the future prospects of any kids.
But not anymore.
Today, I think that the institution of school is what's detrimental to kids, to our mental
health, to social cohesion, and even to democracy.
And homeschooling, or any other alternative to schools, should be seriously considered
by any responsible parent.
Our guest today, Dr. Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology at Boston College,
is the reason why my beliefs have so drastically shifted.
His book, Free to Learn, has been hugely influential in shaping my views of school.
In addition to getting the classic book Free to Learn, I invite you to subscribe to Dr.
Gray's Substack.
More details in the description of the episode.
Peter, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for inviting me.
I'm happy to be here.
Of course.
So let's dive right in.
There is a crisis of mental health among younger people.
I feel like everyone is aware of that at this point.
We're talking about higher rates of anxiety, higher rates of depression, even sadly, higher
rates of suicide.
And every time someone mentions that issue, the great evil of social medias, and to a
lesser extent, video games, will be blamed for that problem.
And sure, let's be critical of social medias.
I'm all about that.
But I never heard someone mention schools as a probable cause.
Yet if I think about my own experience, and I know it's anecdotal, but school was such
a source of distress in my life.
Because of school, I remember experiencing anxiety, episodes of depression, stress, shame,
tiredness.
So my first question for you, Peter, is what is the responsibility, if any, of schools
in the current mental health crisis experienced by younger people?
I like the way you introduced that question, because I think that one of the reasons that
as a society, we want to blame computers, we want to blame social media, we want to
blame anything else really other than school, because we think the school is just so absolutely
essential.
Everybody at school has a halo around it in so many people's minds.
Anything else other than school lets blame for the huge crisis that we're finding among
young people.
But you know, if you ask young people, that's a new idea, right?
Let's ask them what's bothering them, right?
Instead of hypothesizing.
So a few years ago, the American Psychological Association conducted a survey that they called
Stress in America, and they surveyed people of all ages in the United States, asking them
questions like, have you experienced severe stress?
And they had some definition of severe stress over the past two weeks.
And a number of other questions.
The people who came out as the most stressed people in America were high school-aged students,
more so than adults, more so than adults.
Interestingly, when they asked this question during the summer, when school was not in
session, the rate of saying that they had been highly stressed in the last two weeks
was half what it was during the school year.
When high school-aged students were asked the question, what is the primary source of
your stress, 83% said school.
Now isn't that interesting?
This was done in 2014.
It was published in a very small article by the American Psychological Association.
As far as I know, no newspaper, no magazine ever picked that up.
It simply was not relayed.
You know, I've been publishing it on my site.
I now have, I have actually a new article coming out in the Journal of Pediatrics that
brings this to bear and other evidence.
So not only that, but there are also several studies.
We know that the suicide rate among school-aged children and teens is at record levels, way
above, you know, it's like 10 times what it was 40 or 50 years ago.
And this has been gradually increasing and it's at record levels.
But again, suicides among school-aged children are the rate of them per month is twice as
high when school is in session than when it's not in session.
Twice.
Twice as high according to some of the studies.
And the suicide, you know, during COVID when people were isolated, everybody thought this
was going to be a terrible time.
The suicide rate among school-aged children went down.
So the school, the suicide, suicides pretty much track schooling pretty well, you know,
the evidence is glaring, absolutely glaring, but we don't want to admit it because we just,
everybody thinks, everybody was predicting that during COVID the kids would be suffering
because they're not in school.
So that's the, that's the way we think about it.
You know, it's got a halo around it.
And school has, school is a much bigger source of distress in recent times than it was in
the past.
And the reason is because it truly is, first of all, it's taking much more of children's
time than it did in the past.
It's become, the school year is now five weeks longer than it was when I was a kid in the
1950s.
The school day is longer in many, for many schools.
But the biggest difference is homework for elementary school children.
When I was in school many decades ago, there was no homework for elementary school children.
Now even kindergartners have homework.
So the school day doesn't end.
When the school day ends, you're still doing school when you're back home again.
The pressure of ever since No Child Left Behind in the United States, ever since the passage
of that and the pushing for higher test scores, the pressure and the focus on drilling for
tests, which is about the most boring, uninteresting thing you could possibly do is prepare for
those multiple choice, you know, tests.
I attest to that.
It's horrible.
And we now have the situation in the United States where teachers are being judged on
the basis of those test scores.
So of course they're spending lots of time on test scores.
All kinds of other creative activity, which used to be kind of fun in school, writing
essays and poems and putting on little plays and these kinds of things have largely been
taken away for the sake of drilling for tests.
Recesses have been in some schools completely eliminated and almost all schools greatly
reduced from what they were before.
So we have really changed the school environment in a way that's not that school was ever great.
We've changed it in a way that it is worse, more stressful than it ever was before.
One of the ways I sometimes put this to adults is that would you take, would you as an adult
accept a job that's like school?
Would you accept a job where you are being micromanaged throughout the day, where you
are constantly being judged and evaluated and compared to your workmates?
Who's better?
Who is worse?
Where you have to get permission to go to the bathroom?
Where talking to your colleagues about the work you're doing would be called cheating?
Would you accept a job like that?
This is the worst kind of, this is a nightmare job for an adult and yet we require children
to be in this kind of a setting.
Well it resonates with me so much because I'm now a working adult and I understand that
comparison to a deep level.
What explains that halo you talked about around schools?
Why is it this blind spot in people's conversation, minds, thoughts?
For some reason, so first of all what we have to say is that school, along the lines that
we know, although school has gotten worse, as I just described, we basically have school
in a similar manner for several generations now.
This has been going on so I went to school, my parents went to school, their parents went
to school, I'm old enough so that the previous generation probably didn't go to school after
that.
So it would be younger people, it would be three or four generations of school.
So you just think school is the key to growing up.
The other thing is that this whole school system has adopted a language that's fundamentally
deceiving and I don't think it's deliberately deceiving but it is deceiving.
So for example, during COVID people were saying, because people were saying children need to
get back to school for the sake of learning, right?
So school becomes learning.
People say should we have more recess or more learning?
People say if we increase the summer vacation, as I've been arguing that we should, we would
decrease learning.
So learning, the word learning, which is a good word, we all need to learn.
Learning has become equated with school.
Learning quite properly has a halo around it, right?
We all need to learn and we all need to be educated, we all need education.
But we've confounded learning and education with school as if that's the only place it
occurs.
We've forgotten that children learn a huge amount of what they're ever going to know
before they ever start school.
They learn their entire native language, they learn a huge amount about the world around
them.
So learning is going on more rapidly than it does once they start school.
And so we've got to get over this idea that school is learning.
School is a certain kind of training in certain kinds of things and yeah, there's a little
bit of learning that goes on.
But most of what all of us learn, we learn outside of school.
And so we've got to get away from that kind of language.
We've got to get away from this idea that school is so essential.
The other thing we kind of, you know, it's like we sort of, we almost turned teachers
into saints.
I like teachers.
Most teachers are good people, but they're not in a good system.
But we have this view that, you know, that if you're a teacher, you're just kind of a,
you know, a saint.
And if we're blaming schools, then we're blaming teachers.
And so that's another part of it, I think.
So I just, I think that the part of the problem is as a society, if we were to admit what
we should know, if we were to admit the facts that school is driving a lot of kids crazy,
that school is a huge part of the cause of the mental health crisis among young people,
what would we do about it?
Are we ready to really change in a serious way?
Are we really ready to, you know, school has come to serve so many purposes.
It's babysitting.
It's, you know, it's keeping teenagers off the job market when there's not too many jobs
available.
It's serving, it's serving various social roles.
And it's also serving a discriminatory function because wealthier people do well better in
school than poor people.
You can't discriminate against somebody because they're poor, but you can discriminate against
somebody if they didn't do as well in school.
So this is, school is serving a lot of societal purposes in addition to the purported purpose
of education.
So I think that it would just be a huge step.
On the other hand, it wouldn't be such a huge step to say, well, let's at least try to turn
back the tide of what's happened in school.
Let's try to go back a little bit to where schools were 30 or 40 years ago where we,
the school year wasn't as long, where the school day wasn't long.
Let's reduce homework instead of increase it.
Let's do away with standardized tests.
Let's give teachers more authority in the classroom because most teachers are decent
people and they will change the curriculum to fit what the kids need and what they're
interested in to the degree that they can.
Not that they can totally solve that problem if you've got 30 kids in your class, you can't
please everybody, but you can at least move in that direction if you have authority to.
But these days teachers are, I've heard teachers tell me I'm no more free than the kids.
This is the curriculum I've got to teach.
My response to them always is, well, that's not true because you're free to quit and the
teachers are not and the kids are not.
But as long as they're in that job, as long as they feel they have to be in that job,
there's truth in what they're saying.
Yes.
And I think part of it is an American phenomenon because if we look at Europe, for instance
France, the school year I think is shorter, you have more vacations and that is reflected
with work too because in European countries workers have longer vacation time than American
workers.
Okay, so in your book Free to Learn, you attribute seven cents to school so you go into the consequences
of having that system.
And again, let's be clear, we're not blaming the teachers.
I survived school because of a few teachers who were truly interested in my success in
creating a relationship with me and I'm really grateful for them.
We're talking about the institution, we're talking about that system.
And the number one sin goes at the heart of the problem, school's pause, which is no freedom.
We're attacking the freedom of kids.
And you talk about how school is actually euphemism for prison.
So could you please talk about this in more details?
Yeah, I wouldn't exactly say that it's a euphemism for prison, but school is a kind of prison.
Think about it.
I mean, first of all, the children have no choice about being there.
If they have very enlightened parents who have the capacity, whether it's the economic
capacity or the time capacity to homeschool them or to find some kind of an alternative,
a democratic school they could go to.
But for most kids, there's really no choice.
They don't, they're there.
They're there for, they can say as much as they want, I don't want to go to school, but
they have to go to school.
They're being forced to go.
So that's the first part.
And then once they're there, they are, as I said, they are, they are, they are told
exactly what to do, exactly where they have to have to be.
What we think of in America as basic human rights are taken away.
Free speech, freedom of assembly to get together with whoever you please, you know, pursue
your own interests.
These things, the right to trial by jury, if you're accused of due process, if you're
accused of some wrongdoing, these are totally taken away from children when they're in school.
You don't have a right to defend yourself.
You don't have any way to defend yourself, any due process if you've been blamed for
something.
So you are, you are really in a prison like situation.
There was a film done quite some years ago called The War on Kids in which what the filmmaker
did is he went, he filmed, he went through a big city school, high school, and he filmed
what was going on.
He filmed what a typical day was like.
He filmed, he filmed the, you know, the metal detectors in the school that the kids had
to go through.
And he, and the fact that they could, they were not free to leave their classroom and
so on and so forth.
And then he went through a maximum security prison, a real prison.
And at the end of that film, you felt if you had to be in one or the other, you would rather
be in the prison.
They could go to the library whenever they wanted.
They had more time out in the exercise yard for recess than kids had.
Now granted, you know, kids do go home at a certain time.
But while you're there, this is constraining even more than a prison is.
You're not free to decide what you want to read.
You're not free to decide what, who you want to talk with.
You're not free to go out and play when you want to go out and play.
You're, you are really being controlled.
So that's what I mean when I say that school is a prison.
And there is also the monitoring part.
You have no privacy in school.
You're always watched.
You have no privacy in school.
And while we're saying that it's worth pointing out that it's more and more true that children
have no privacy anywhere.
You know, I think this is a huge part of the mental health problem that we all need privacy.
We all need time alone.
We all need time just with our peers when there's no authority figures overseeing us.
So children, not only are they increasingly imprisoned in school, but when they're out
of school, they're more or less under sort of home lockup.
You know, there is kind of a home in prison because at least in the United States, we
have become so paranoid about the possibility that children could be kidnapped or something
awful could happen if children are allowed to run free, even if teenagers are allowed
to run free.
This is another part of the change that's occurred.
So not only are children's time being taken up more and more with schoolwork, but even
when they do have free time, they're not allowed to just go out and play and explore as they
used to.
They're not allowed to just get together with their friends without some adult around.
And more and more, they're put, you know, they go off to some kind of adult directed
sports rather than just going out to play or some kind of adult directed activity, which
are again is school like.
And so they're constantly under surveillance by adults as opposed to and constantly being
in a situation where somebody else would correct them if they're doing something wrong.
You're not allowed to make mistakes.
You know, I really believe that part of growing up is making mistakes and correcting them
yourself, learning from your own mistakes, that misbehavior even is part of growing up.
You need to misbehave a little bit.
It's the perfect time.
You need to be able to talk with your peers about this without your adult, your parents
finding out about it or without some other authority figures, adult authority figures.
But now young people are so constantly monitored, constantly that that is that they don't really
have private time.
And then we blame them for going on social media, which is the only place where they
can get together with others without or some in some sense on the computer, whether they're
texting one another or they're doing we think that we think is so shameful that they're
spending so much time in the community.
Well, why are they doing that?
There was a there was a survey done a number of years ago in which the author of this book
was originally done as a doctoral dissertation, interviewed hundreds of teenagers across the
country on why they're why they're on on the computer so much interacting with other kids,
other kids rather than interacting in person.
And the basic response was we're not allowed to get together in person.
This is the only way we can get together.
And we need to get together in a way that that is private from adults.
And so that's why they're doing it.
And as soon as their adults, you know, they might have been on Facebook, but as soon as
their parents are on Facebook, they're off of Facebook onto something else.
It feels like a dictatorship.
I feel like you're describing the dictatorship.
Another component, another characteristic that you describe about school is sin number
four, which is an unquote judging students in ways that foster shame, hubris, cynicism
and cheating.
You make the point that we teach children that their worth is determined based on others'
judgments through class, rank or grades.
And you mentioned that earlier.
And when the value is placed on grading, rather than learning, cheating becomes a preferable
option because it's more about scoring big than learning something new.
What you are describing here is a violent system of competition.
And I'm worried about what kind of adults will come out of this.
I've seen students go as far as taking drugs like Adderall.
And I mean, without a prescription to get a nudge in the classroom.
I've also witnessed students displaying like an obsession with their success or lack of
success and their self image and self esteem.
And as I witnessed that, I wondered, is it how you create a narcissist, basically?
I know that you wrote about this subject.
So what exactly is the impact of school in adulthood?
Because those children are going to grow up.
And I know you don't like the word grow up.
So I think that what school you're absolutely right.
School is we have turned what we call education into a competition.
And I think that I think that essentially all students, students are not stupid.
They realize that what is important to the adults, what they have to do in order to beat
this system is get high grades.
It has even the best students.
If you talk to them, they'll say this has really very little to do with learning.
This has to do with knowing how to get high grades.
And there are certain rules.
This kind of and you know, the best students will say, you know, I've learned to play the
game, right?
The game.
And I'm all for games, but this is a game that they didn't choose to play.
This is a game they're being required to be in.
And it's and it's a game that's taking an enormous amount of time, an enormous toll on
their lives.
But basically, it's a game of can you score higher than other people on the tests and
that way get an A, you know, or if you're at the lower level, can you score high enough
so you pass so you eventually get out of this system?
Right.
And I think every kid learns certainly by the time they're in fourth or fifth grade.
What you need to do is you need to cram this information into your head long enough to
take the test.
Then you can forget it.
Right.
You learn it in a superficial way.
You learn it.
You learn just as much as you need to know to get whatever the grade is.
You feel you need to get on the test and that's it.
It would be a waste of time to really delve into something because you're not being tested
on actual real deep knowledge.
You're just being tested on this kind of shallow memorized information or ability to if it's
arithmetic or math, the ability to carry out these calculations.
You don't have to understand why they work.
You don't have to really know it.
You just have to remember the system for doing it.
And whatever it is, you are learning in this shallow way and then you're forgetting about
it.
Now, every student knows that, all right, so if you write this information into your
brain long enough for the test, that's legitimate.
That's within the rules of the game.
If you were to write this information on the cuff of your shirt or on a piece of paper
that you stuck up your sleeve, that would be cheating.
But I think every student knows that there's a fine difference between those two things.
And is it really cheating to do that?
Who are you cheating?
Everybody wants a high grade.
Your parents want you to get a high grade and so on and so forth.
So the whole idea of cheating becomes, you know, this is not really cheating.
This is just because this is just a hoop I'm going through.
It's a meaningless hoop I'm going through.
I'm just giving myself a little extra help to go through the hoop.
Well, where does that stop?
And where does this idea, the other thing that's, see, I believe that we human beings
are naturally, if we allow ourselves to be naturally playful.
And what playful means is that we do things, including learn things, because we want to,
because we're motivated to, because it's fun to do it, because it's meaningful to do it,
and so on and so forth.
But school takes that all away.
In school, we're not allowed to follow our own interests.
We're not allowed to do the things that we want to do, to learn the things that we want
to do, at the time that we want to learn them, in the way that we want to learn them.
So we're forced to do it in this other way.
And the motivation for doing it in this other way has nothing to do with any kind of intrinsic
sense of I have accomplished what I personally want to accomplish.
It has to do with rewards from the outside world.
I have pleased my teacher.
I have pleased my parents.
I have gotten this material reward of a high grade, and that's going to be my ticket maybe
to go on to college.
And then if I get high grades there, maybe that'll be my ticket for the next event.
So what school is doing is teaching us to work for extrinsic rewards, rather than because
it's something that's really meaningful and interesting to us.
And then I think that persists through life.
So once you are finished with school, now what is the measure of your worth?
In a sense, the grade becomes sort of the measure of your worth.
I've proven to all these people that I can do this.
I think once you leave school, the measure of your worth becomes are you in what society
regards as a high prestigious job, and are you earning a lot of money?
I remember one time, I'm no longer teaching, but back when I was teaching in college, I
would sometimes meet with my advisees as a group, and I would ask them questions like,
so what are you thinking of going on into once you finish college?
And they would tell me things like, oh, I'm thinking I want to be a doctor, or I'm thinking
I want to be a lawyer, or I want to be a business executive, or whatever it is, they would tell
me.
And then completely independently of that, at some other point, I would say, so I'm interested,
when you have free time, what is it that you really like to do?
And maybe the one who said, I really want to be a doctor, would say, well, I really
love the woods.
I like hiking out in the woods.
And the one maybe who wanted to be a lawyer said, I like little kids.
I like to be around little kids.
I like to play with little kids, and so on and so forth.
And then at some point, I would say, so to the one who wanted to be a doctor, I'd say,
so you really like to be out in the woods.
Why don't you want to be a forest ranger?
You know, a doctor, you're not going to get out in the woods much.
You're going to have very little time for me in the woods.
And the one who wants to be a lawyer, I say, you know, why don't you, you know, we need
really good, kind nursery school teachers.
Why don't you want to do that?
And they would feel like I had insulted them because I'm suggesting a lower level job to
them that would be fun for them and interesting to them.
But it would rank them in society's eyes as lower.
And sometimes I would talk about, you know, people would say, well, I need to have a high
income.
And I'd talk about, well, why do you need to have a high income?
How much you really need to make in order to fulfill the needs that you that are real
needs for you to be happy.
And I'd point out that, you know, once you have there's actually data on this.
Once you once you have enough money to satisfy certain basic needs, after that, there's no
relationship between income and happiness.
So why have why why strive for why break your neck for higher income?
Why struggle for that?
Why is that even important?
I think it's only important because it's a status symbol.
So so we create people growing up who are working for status symbols, working for the
the recognition of achievement from other people rather than their own internal sense
of this would be great fun.
This would be meaningful to me.
This would be something that I feel I'm really doing something for the world.
And there is also a financial incentive to that competition because there there are scholarships
and that's scholarships are often seen as something great.
And I've benefited from them.
So I'm not here to complain.
But I did notice that often scholarships are given to people who have the means, you know,
to put time and efforts in their studies and not have like a part time job or something
like that.
So there is a social inequality component to to that.
And then if you don't get good enough grades, you don't get the scholarship, which is unfair
because you should get the scholarship in order to finance your efforts to get better
grades.
It's very twisted the way we think about this.
Yeah, I think that that's true to the degree that's true.
Some colleges, universities, the way they do this financial aid is if you get accepted
and if you are financially needy, then they supplement, then they give you financial aid.
That's the way I think it should be done, not scholarships based on the set.
There should be a separate decision.
Have you done well enough to be accepted or not?
And then if you're accepted, do you need financial aid or not?
And some schools do it that way.
Yeah, so we talking about the violence of competition, there is also a more explicit
form of violence I associated with school.
I recently watched Real Time with Bill Maher and he was having a conversation with the
famous David Sedaris and they were talking about how children were problematic.
And Bill Maher said children are feral and they need adults to civilize them.
They're different than they used to be.
They're I mean, they're naturally feral.
I mean, it's true.
We all read Lord of the Flies, right?
What did we get out of that book?
Kids are feral.
They have to be civilized by adults.
And then David Sedaris responded, half joking that corporal punishment had some virtues
and might we might benefit from a comeback from corporal punishment.
I feel like a lot of people who say that they're wounded or offended by something don't when
they were never hit by their parents.
So I think it's true.
I know people who have never ever hit their hit their children and so they don't know
what pain is really.
But I think that if you don't want to hit your kids, then that's fine.
Of course, that's fine.
But other people should be allowed to.
And I was astonished by that discussion.
I kept wondering where are those ideas coming from?
Let's talk about the history of schools.
Schools did not always exist.
When and why did schools appear?
How did people manage to get an education before schools?
And how did this other contempt for children was born in our society?
Yeah.
So, well, first of all, the schools as we know them for the masses really began to appear
as part of the Protestant Reformation.
I mean, going as far back as the 17th century, there began to be some Protestant schools.
They were developed especially in the German state of Prussia initially, but then they
began to spread to other places.
Even the colonies in the United States, what became the United States, the American colonies
had Protestant schools.
And in Massachusetts where I live, schools became more or less compulsory already back
in the 1700s and even in the 1600s.
And they were run by the Protestant churches of the local town.
And the reason for compelling children to go to them is because the Protestant religions
of that time believed that we were all going to hell unless we were saved.
And the way you become saved is by learning the Bible.
And unlike the Catholics, they believed that it's important for every person to read the
Bible themselves.
Hence learning how to read became part of school.
And the other thing, of course, even more important than reading the Bible is believing
it.
And equally important to that is obedience, obedience to authority.
So the whole system of theology is a hierarchical system.
God is at the top.
And we human beings, our job is to follow God's commands, follow God's orders.
And within the Catholic church, the hierarchy spreads itself all the way down through the
pope and the bishops and so on and so forth.
But the Protestants said each person has to get the word directly from God and that they
do that through the Bible.
But the Protestants still held to the view that obedience to authority on earth is very,
very important.
So schools were developed really for three purposes.
One, for those children who couldn't read or were growing up in families that couldn't
read so that they would know how to read, so that they would be able to read the Bible.
In the American colonies, the reader that children learned from was called the Little
Bible of New England colloquially.
It's basically Bible passages and little ditties about how if you lie to your parents, you'll
go to hell and burn forever and so forth.
This is what little children were learning to read on.
But these were the first schools that looked like schools today in the sense that there
was a school master, they were called a master at that time, standing in front, giving them
lessons and then the children had to feed it back.
One of the things we know about indoctrination is the way you indoctrinate people is making
them repeat the same thing over and over.
Make them memorize it, make them say it over and over and over again.
And that was how biblical indoctrination was occurring through the schools.
The way at that time that you enforced children to do these things was not so much by shame
and embarrassment as we do today, it was by literally beating them.
If you didn't get it right, if you made mistakes, you might be beaten with a stick.
So that was the way schools began and the clear purpose of schools, it didn't have really
anything to do with education in the sense of learning the things you really need to
know.
There was not even any pretense that this had anything to do with learning the things
you need to know to live an adult life, to do your job, to be a good citizen in other
senses other than the religious sense.
It was all about saving souls, keeping people from being sinful.
To many of the Protestants, play itself is sinful.
Play is the devil's work.
Children are born in sin.
So this idea that children are naturally sinful, this was part of the Protestant beliefs at
that time.
Fortunately, most Protestants don't feel that way today, but that was the origin of a lot
of the Protestant beliefs, so that was the origin of schools.
So we've got to keep that in mind.
Now, the other thing in terms of your question about, well, what about before there were
schools?
First of all, throughout most of human history, of course, there were no schools, and yet
people have become educated throughout history.
There is actually good evidence that before there were schools, both in Europe and in
America, most people could read, most children could read, most children learned to read
at home.
It was well understood that if you were growing up in a literate family, if your parents could
read, you would read.
Every kid learned how to read from their parents.
It's not hard to learn how to read.
Today, homeschooling kids learn to read from their parents without any particular training
even.
They just pick it up.
Go ahead.
That's very surprising to hear because we have this impression that our ancestors without
schools were just those ignorant peasants and they had no idea of what a book is.
Right.
Think about the time.
First of all, almost everybody had a Bible and they could read the Bible.
What schools I think were not so much interested in whether people could read or not, they
were concerned.
I think that the school personnel, people who started schools were more concerned that
people were reading the wrong things.
People were reading Thomas Paine's revolutionary writings.
People were reading works that were going to stir up the masses because the masses really
… There's even evidence in the United States that at the time of slavery, it was illegal
to teach blacks reading, to teach black kids reading, but yet a very high percentage of
slaves could read.
They picked it up.
Some of them who wrote by autobiographies later on talked about how they would bribe
the white kid to teach them letters and then they learned to read.
It's not that hard to learn to read.
I studied children who were growing up outside of school in unschooling and in democratic
schools where reading is not taught.
They all learned to read, not all at the same age.
They learned at various ages when they get interested in it, but reading is not hard.
If you compare reading to learning your oral language, you're learning an enormous amount
when you learn to speak a language.
Reading is just taking a code and turning that into a code, a fairly simple code.
Anybody can learn it unless they're blocked about it.
We make reading hard in schools.
We make it hard because we want everybody to learn at the same age, in the same way,
at the same time, whether or not they have any interest in reading at that time.
We give them readers that 90% of the kids have zero interest in.
When you are interested in reading and when you're reading for meaning and you want to
read, you learn how to read.
The kids outside of school who learn how to read, they see how they learn how to read.
They learn how to read.
They don't start off learning how to read by learning the phonics.
They start off by reading certain words that are important to them.
A lot of kids these days are learning to read on the computer.
They're playing video games.
There's a word on the screen.
They need to know that word in order to play the game.
They pick up words and at some point they've picked up enough words that they kind of even
unconsciously infer the grammar, infer the phonetics.
This word cat and this word hat, they have a similar sound.
They also look similar.
This is the difference.
A-T, that's the at part.
The difference here is in this first letter.
They make this assumption.
They don't have to be taught that.
They pick it up at some point after they've learned enough sight words.
In school, that system doesn't work of picking up words because you have to be interested
in what you're reading for that to happen.
In school, you're forcing kids to read who aren't interested in reading and you're forcing
them on material that they're not interested in.
The only way you can teach them is the mechanical way of making them sound out the letters and
sound out words and it becomes a mechanical thing.
That really slows the process down.
I also think that that becomes a source of what we call dyslexia because you're creating
reading blocks in people by doing that.
I never thought about this.
There are also relatively high rates of illiteracy.
School isn't, like you said, even doing a good job at teaching kids how to read and
write.
I think the worst thing you can do to a writer is make their book required in school.
Children will hate it.
I know that I picked up books that I had read in schools and I hated them, but now as an
adult I find a new appreciation for those books.
Still on reading, I did an informal study a few years ago where I invited people who
are homeschooling or unschooling their children.
I did a search for people who had a child who had been diagnosed with dyslexia while
in school and who then took the child out of school for homeschooling or unschooling.
I asked the question, did the child subsequently learn how to read and if so, how did that
happen?
I had about 60 responses to that, if I remember right.
It wasn't really that many.
It was something like 15 responses.
Essentially what all of them said was, yes, my child learned how to read, but not right
away.
My child was terrified about reading when I took him out of school.
He was terrified.
Reading was scary.
He didn't want to have anything to do with reading.
The child had been diagnosed with dyslexia, but what the parents recognized was that this
is not a cognitive problem.
This is an emotional problem.
This child has been terrorized in school about reading.
Think about it.
For whatever reason, maybe reading comes a little more difficult to you.
I can identify with this.
I was a late reader in school and I hated reading out loud in front of the other kids
and the teacher.
It was terrible.
Because school wasn't as pressured, I didn't suffer as much as kids might today as a result
of that.
Then you begin to feel like I'm stupid, I can't read, I hate reading, I don't want to
have anything to do with reading.
At some point by third grade or so and you're still not reading, it's really interfering
with your ability to do school and you get this diagnosis of dyslexia and then experts
try to work with you who are supposed to be experts on dyslexia, at least if they've got
such experts there, with various ranges of results.
What essentially every one of these parents said is, at first I tried to teach reading
but my kid would have nothing to do with it.
So I finally gave up and I said, when and if you're ever ready to learn to read, that's
up to you.
What they all said is, at some point the child decided I'm ready to read.
Some of the children basically taught themselves.
They didn't need any help from the parents.
Some of them asked for some help, but once they were ready to read, they learned to read.
There was nothing wrong with their brains that made it cognitively impossible for them
to read.
This is a myth that we've developed that dyslexia is due to some kind of abnormality in the
brain.
There may be differences in the brain, in different ways that people learn to read,
different ways people interact.
The usual way to solve this problem of differences is let people choose their own way.
People know better.
The kid knows much better than any expert what works for him or her.
You just have to let the kid do it.
That's amazing to hear.
It's a good segue for my next question.
I'm thinking about the parents who are out listening and they're wondering, what can
I do?
What is the alternative?
If school is that bad for my kid, what are my options exactly?
It partly depends on where you live, but in the United States, homeschooling is easy to
do and is completely legal.
Large numbers, increasing numbers of families are homeschooling.
The most recent poll, 11% of families with school-aged children in the United States
are homeschooling at least one of their children.
That's a huge number.
A lot of that increase occurred as a result of COVID, but most of the people who started
homeschooling then are staying with it.
Before COVID, it was about 5% of families.
More than double during COVID.
As more and more people are doing it, it becomes more and more acceptable to do it.
There are more and more resources for doing it.
There's more and more opportunities for getting kids together who are homeschoolers so they
have social groups.
More and more opportunity for parents who are doing this to get reinforcement from other
parents for doing it.
The homeschoolers that I've been most interested in and have conducted research on are those
who call themselves unschoolers.
They are not trying to do school at home.
They are rather allowing their child to direct his or her own education and they're facilitating
it.
You know how I said that children learn so much before they ever start school?
They're just basically allowing the children to continue that.
Children get interested in things.
They read about things when they're interested.
Once they know how to read, they get involved in building things.
They get involved in exploring.
Children are naturally curious.
They're naturally playful.
They're curious and their curiosity leads them to want to understand and know things.
Their playfulness leads them to play at things where they're developing skills.
So they're just allowing that to occur.
My colleague Gina Riley and I did a study a few years ago of grown unschoolers.
So these are people who didn't go to school growing up and they weren't homeschooled.
They were legally homeschooled, but they were allowed to pursue their own interests.
We identified 75 such people and we found they were doing very well in the world.
If they wanted to go on to higher education, they were going on.
They were in all kinds of careers.
They were happy with their lives.
So here's people in our world today who are not doing anything that looks like school
during what we think of as their kindergarten through 12th grade years.
And yet they're doing very well as adults.
They're clearly educated by any meaningful definition of education.
They believe they're more responsible, that they're happier, that they're in careers that
they love because they were allowed to take charge of their own life as they were growing
up.
The other thing is that there are schools for self-directed education.
In some cases these are certified schools, so they're legally schools.
But at the extreme case, such as the Sudbury Valley School where my own son was a student
many years ago, there are no courses being offered.
Kids can get together and create a course if they want, but that doesn't happen very
often.
So you've got kids there from age four through what we think of as high school age, not segregated
by age.
They're interacting.
All the rights that I said that children are deprived of in typical schools, they've still
got here.
They've got the right to free speech, right of free association, right to go wherever
they want on campus, and the right to vote on any rules that affect them.
So all the school rules are made by a school meeting.
This is a democratic society for children.
Staff members also have an adult, but the number of students greatly outweighs the staff
members.
It never is this case, but if it was ever the staff versus the students, the students
would win on any vote.
So this is a radically alternative school.
The school that my son went to has been in existence now for 54 years.
It has got hundreds and hundreds of graduates who are doing well in the world.
I did a study of the graduates a long time ago and found that they're doing very well
in the world.
So it's basically been proven that you don't need school as we know it to do well in the
world, to be well educated by any meaningful definition of education.
My definition of education is that education is everything that a person learns that helps
that person to live a satisfying, meaningful, and moral life, whatever it is.
So education does have a whole halo around it in my view, but I don't equate education
with school, as school as with compulsory schooling.
Education comes from all the experiences that you have.
And so this kind of a school, the Sudbury Valley School that my son went to, schools
modeled after it, unschooling, these are all ways that people become educated.
And this is very wise, and I'm happy that there are options out there for parents.
You mentioned the right to vote.
And for my final question, I would like to talk about the political side of this issue.
Children are maybe the most vulnerable members of our society.
And I wonder if it would be beneficial to give them more political power.
I know that some politicians want to make it so that 16-year-olds get the right to vote.
And this is just one way to give children more power, one, the power to defend their
interests and have their voice heard about issues concerning them, two, give them power
early so they can learn what it's like to be a citizen of democracy, and finally, three,
if children had more power, I'm certain that schools would not stay open for very long.
So is it going too far?
I know that through your organization, you do a lot of advocacy work.
What do you think about this suggestion?
It's really an interesting question.
John Holt, who was really the originator of the idea of unschooling and who wrote a book
who played a big role in the idea of self-education and so on, he actually wrote a book that children
should be liberated in the sense of having political power and having even the power
to decide where they want to live, a lot of liberation.
And that's a very controversial idea.
And to be honest, I don't know where I stand on that.
The truth of the matter is, of course, that children start off completely dependent on
their parents.
They can't live without their parents, right?
And so where is the transition point between when you're no longer so dependent on your
parents that you really feel comfortable expressing a political view, where you really feel comfortable
and capable of presenting political opinions and so on that are independent of your parents?
And if children are voting, but they're only kind of voting what their parents tell them
to vote, then they don't, you know, what is the sense in that?
What's the meaning of that?
It basically doubles or triples or quadruples the parents' vote, right?
So it's interesting.
On the other hand, I do think it certainly made sense to bring it down to 18 from 21.
I think it makes a lot of sense to bring it down to 16.
You know, by 16, you're pretty independent thinker.
You're pretty willing to disagree with your parents.
You may be very willing to disagree with your parents.
So I think it makes a lot of sense to do that.
Maybe if we try 16 and that works, then down to 14, something like that.
I wouldn't mind.
But on the other hand, the idea that school should be a practice place for democracy and
real democracy for the children at the school.
You know, it's so ironic that we in America pride ourselves in being democratic.
And yet we raise our children in schools that are the most autocratic institutions that
we have.
They are completely deprived of democratic rights when they're in school.
They're completely they have no freedom.
They have none of these things.
It becomes a joke.
I remember in school, kids would say, oh, yeah, free world.
Ha ha ha.
You know, you're studying that you're studying in your civics class about all these rights
and you yourself are being deprived of these rights while you're in school.
So the whole idea of the Sudbury Valley School when it was first started, there are now dozens
of schools modeled after it was let's raise.
If we want to raise children to be good democratic citizens, we need to raise them in a school
where they are democratic citizens, at least of that school.
So they're learning the principles of democracy.
They're learning what voting means.
They're really voting.
They're making the decisions for their school.
They've got due process.
If somebody is accused of violating a rule in the school and the rules have to do with
things like no bullying and no littering and if you place with something, you have to put
it away afterwards and so on.
If you're accused of it and you and you are claiming that you didn't do this, that you
didn't violate a rule, then you have a right to a little trial of your peers.
And that goes on at the school.
So you're actually experiencing democratic citizenry growing up in the school.
I think that is wonderful preparation.
And I think one of the results is that graduates of schools like that are more likely to participate
in the democratic processes of their city, of their state, of their nation when they
do grow up and leave school.
This is a wonderful answer and a great way to end the conversation.
It was so pleasant to talk with you, Peter.
Thank you very much.
Did you have anything more to add?
Well, I could go on forever, but I think we've covered enough ground for this time.
Great.
OK.
Thank you again, Peter, for having been a guest on the podcast.
Thank you, everyone, for listening.
I kindly invite you to share this podcast with the vegans you know.
Let's encourage more people to take action.
Again, thank you so much for caring.
And I will see you next Tuesday for a new episode.