032: Free to learn

Professor Peter Gray was primarily interested in the motivations and emotions of animals before his son Scott started struggling in school, at which point Professor Gray’s interests shifted to developing our understanding of self-directed learning and how play helps us to learn.  He has extensively studied the learning that occurs at the Sudbury Valley School in Sudbury Valley, MA – where children are free to associate with whomever they like, don’t have to take any classes at all, and yet go on college and to satisfying lives as adults.  How can this possibly be?  We’ll find out. Reference Gray, P (2013). Free to learn: Why unleashing the instinct to play will make our children happier, more self-reliant, and better students for life (http://amzn.to/2Fkg8sR) . New York, NY: Basic Books. (Affiliate link) Also see Professor Gray’s extensive posts on learning and education on the Psychology Today (https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn) blog.   (#)   Transcript Jen:                                      (https://www.temi.com/editor/t/-gZMLd1_NxlN_SFKvrRjOIXK_9qyzSpZo_WFuAXeH6QQaMPK0uenWHGmXJJQ4kgCw7vHDNVwplw1E2H0wVWHMRKzNOg?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&ts=39.78)              Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Before we get going with our awesome guest Professor Peter Gray, who’s going to talk with us about self-directed learning, I wanted to let you know that if what Peter says resonates with you, then I’m on the verge of launching a course to help parents decide whether homeschooling might be right for their family. I first started to think about homeschooling after I realized that I’d been doing everything I could to help my job to pursue learning for its own sake and engage in self-directed learning. But the more I read about school, the more I realized that at schooled, there really is no such thing as self-directed learning. Children learn what they’re told to learn when they’re t