---
product_id: 4536567
title: "Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life"
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---

# Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life

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## Description

Title: Free to Learn( Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier More Self-Reliant and Better Students for Life) Binding: Hardcover Author: GrayPeter Publisher: BasicBooks(AZ)

Review: Impeccable research, critical conclusions - Peter Gray's book Free to Learn is an excellent addition to the genre of books on restoring freedom in education. Gray clearly states: "Children are biologically predisposed to take charge of their own education. When they are provided with the freedom and means to pursue their own interests, in safe settings, they bloom and develop along diverse and unpredictable paths, and they acquire the skills and confidence required to meet life's challenges. In such an environment, children ask for any help they may need from adults. There is no need for forced lessons, lectures, assignments, tests, grades, segregation by age into classrooms, or any of the other trappings of our standard, compulsory system of schooling. All of these, in fact, interfere with the children's natural way of learning." So why did we create schools that so directly "interfere with the children's natural way of learning"? Gray shows that in tribal cultures the focus of childhood was playing and learning knowledge, skills, and how to live self-sufficiently and honorably. When the agrarian revolution increased the need for child labor on farms, the values of school turned to toil, competition and status. While Gray's view of this is perhaps a bit idyllic, the reality is that modern schools are less concerned with student knowledge, skills, honor or abilities than with the universal goal of job training. Certainly job training has an important place in advanced society, but Gray is focused on the education of children, and in fact the toll on children in our modern job-obsessed schools is very high. They are way more stressed than earlier generations of children and youth. Why are we raising a generation of children and youth who are stressed, not secure? Gray's answer, based on a great deal of research which he outlines in the book, is that we have turned learning into a chore, a task, a labor, rather than the natural result of curiosity, interest, passion to learn, and self-driven seeking of knowledge and skills. In short, we've taken too much play out of childhood and too much freedom out of learning. The results are a major decline of American education in the last four decades. The solution is to put freedom back into education. Interestingly, Gray suggests that in many of the educational studies of classrooms, schools, homes and teachers that have found a way to successfully overcome these problems and achieve much better educational results, one of the key ingredients is "free age-mixing." Where students are allowed to freely mix with other students of various ages, without grade levels, the capacity of individuals to effectively self-educate is much higher. As for the impact on college and career success, students from free educational models excel. This is a good book, and a must read for those who really care about education. I don't agree with everything the author teaches, but I learned something important on almost every page. Whether or not you read Free to Learn, all of us who have children or work in education need to do more to promote the importance of increased freedom in education. Gray is a particular fan of "unschooling," a type of homeschooling and private schooling where parents and teachers set an example of great education, create an environment of excellent learning, and let the kids become self-learners. While this may not be the ideal learning style for every student, it is the best model for a lot of them--and for nearly every young person under age 12. If you disagree with this conclusion, you simply must read the book. The research is impeccable. If you do agree, the book can help you get to work setting a better example for any students in your life.
Review: this is about much more than play. It explain depression in adults, self control and empathy - If you are a parent, about to become a parent, or even a parent of a teenager, this book is a must read. I have reading and researching a lot about play, and I have been working with children of all ages for more than 10 years, and now that I have my own kids I have become increasingly preoccupied with what exactly contributes to a child's independence, sense of self and sense of control over his own destiny. It finally makes sense now why my 6 year old cries, every day, on the way from his 5k public school, and tells me, in frustration "mom, but I didn't get to PLAY today". After reading this book I now understand why:... "my child goes to school to socialize with other children" is the biggest lie we parents have been told. In school, children are strictly supervised, and their actions are dictated at every second of every day. They are not free, nor will they be until we accept their innate desire to be in the company of peers and be able to take control over their actions, their games, their own destiny. I struggled, for a long time, to understand that giving children freedom to play is NOT THE SAME as raising undisciplined, misbehaving children. Actually, quite the opposite, and this book explains why. I can be a good parent, set limits to my children, enforce consequences for disobedience, BUT at the same time offer my children the freedom to play outside, get their hands dirty, invent games, let them carry out those game, let them negotiate changes in the rules of the games etc. That said, please don't imagine that this book is simply advice on "..oh, you know, letting kids play is good for them because I say so...."; no, the author did the most comprehensive research review analysis I have ever read. He explains, from anthropological, evolutionary, and psychological points of view, why giving children the reins over their games sets them up to be kinder adults, with a deeper understanding of what other are feeling, and with a deep sense of owning their destiny, all of which contribute to a reduction in depression as adults. If you want to understand why more adults are anxious, selfish, unable to relate to others, willing to step on others to reach the top without any considerations for peers, read this book. If you want a glimpse into why the current public education system is inefficient at TEACHING, read this book. If you are thinking, the way I was before reading this book, that public school is the best way for children to interact with other children, think critically and learn to be creative, read this book- you will find out that that's not the case.... I also now finally understand why, in a few short weeks since kindergarten started, my son has become increasingly selfish, refusing to clean up anything other than his own toys, whereas before, he would gladly help his little sister with her "part of the mess". Now, after consistently being told in the classroom to keep his hands to himself, worry "about yourself", "do YOUR work" (the reason I know this is because I worked in a classroom), he is self centered to a degree I have not seen in him before. This selfishness will eventually be the reason why we are pulling him out of system...Anyway, another story for another time. Now I accept my past decision (for which family and friends have criticized plenty), of allowing my kids and their playmates to roam our yard, get the toys they want, mix water with dirt IF THEY CHOOSE TO, gather sticks to build a "fort" and all the other fun stuff they like to do (of course all this stopped with kindergarten) without intervening. I had plenty friends looking at me sideways ; You don't go outside with them to watch what they're doing??? OH the audacity! This may have been the longest review I have ever written, so I will try to conclude by saying that if you want to find out how children learn, you have to read this book. Hint: it has nothing to do with sitting at table and tracing letters. Plenty of social and psychological studies across multiple countries and across time serve as a solid backbone for what the author is presenting. Also: I still have a hard time accepting and applying the Sudbury Valley school model that the author describes. I need to do some research before being OK with it. But tha's fine. It's always nice to learn other points of view. Are you still reading this? I hope that by now you have clicked the "BUY" button. No? do it now

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #1,219,028 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #158 in Experimental Education Methods (Books) #294 in Psychology Education & Training #630 in Vegetarian Cooking |
| Customer Reviews | 4.7 out of 5 stars 1,098 Reviews |

## Images

![Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51HhHTdB-VL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Impeccable research, critical conclusions
*by O***D on June 14, 2013*

Peter Gray's book Free to Learn is an excellent addition to the genre of books on restoring freedom in education. Gray clearly states: "Children are biologically predisposed to take charge of their own education. When they are provided with the freedom and means to pursue their own interests, in safe settings, they bloom and develop along diverse and unpredictable paths, and they acquire the skills and confidence required to meet life's challenges. In such an environment, children ask for any help they may need from adults. There is no need for forced lessons, lectures, assignments, tests, grades, segregation by age into classrooms, or any of the other trappings of our standard, compulsory system of schooling. All of these, in fact, interfere with the children's natural way of learning." So why did we create schools that so directly "interfere with the children's natural way of learning"? Gray shows that in tribal cultures the focus of childhood was playing and learning knowledge, skills, and how to live self-sufficiently and honorably. When the agrarian revolution increased the need for child labor on farms, the values of school turned to toil, competition and status. While Gray's view of this is perhaps a bit idyllic, the reality is that modern schools are less concerned with student knowledge, skills, honor or abilities than with the universal goal of job training. Certainly job training has an important place in advanced society, but Gray is focused on the education of children, and in fact the toll on children in our modern job-obsessed schools is very high. They are way more stressed than earlier generations of children and youth. Why are we raising a generation of children and youth who are stressed, not secure? Gray's answer, based on a great deal of research which he outlines in the book, is that we have turned learning into a chore, a task, a labor, rather than the natural result of curiosity, interest, passion to learn, and self-driven seeking of knowledge and skills. In short, we've taken too much play out of childhood and too much freedom out of learning. The results are a major decline of American education in the last four decades. The solution is to put freedom back into education. Interestingly, Gray suggests that in many of the educational studies of classrooms, schools, homes and teachers that have found a way to successfully overcome these problems and achieve much better educational results, one of the key ingredients is "free age-mixing." Where students are allowed to freely mix with other students of various ages, without grade levels, the capacity of individuals to effectively self-educate is much higher. As for the impact on college and career success, students from free educational models excel. This is a good book, and a must read for those who really care about education. I don't agree with everything the author teaches, but I learned something important on almost every page. Whether or not you read Free to Learn, all of us who have children or work in education need to do more to promote the importance of increased freedom in education. Gray is a particular fan of "unschooling," a type of homeschooling and private schooling where parents and teachers set an example of great education, create an environment of excellent learning, and let the kids become self-learners. While this may not be the ideal learning style for every student, it is the best model for a lot of them--and for nearly every young person under age 12. If you disagree with this conclusion, you simply must read the book. The research is impeccable. If you do agree, the book can help you get to work setting a better example for any students in your life.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ this is about much more than play. It explain depression in adults, self control and empathy
*by J***Y on December 3, 2019*

If you are a parent, about to become a parent, or even a parent of a teenager, this book is a must read. I have reading and researching a lot about play, and I have been working with children of all ages for more than 10 years, and now that I have my own kids I have become increasingly preoccupied with what exactly contributes to a child's independence, sense of self and sense of control over his own destiny. It finally makes sense now why my 6 year old cries, every day, on the way from his 5k public school, and tells me, in frustration "mom, but I didn't get to PLAY today". After reading this book I now understand why:... "my child goes to school to socialize with other children" is the biggest lie we parents have been told. In school, children are strictly supervised, and their actions are dictated at every second of every day. They are not free, nor will they be until we accept their innate desire to be in the company of peers and be able to take control over their actions, their games, their own destiny. I struggled, for a long time, to understand that giving children freedom to play is NOT THE SAME as raising undisciplined, misbehaving children. Actually, quite the opposite, and this book explains why. I can be a good parent, set limits to my children, enforce consequences for disobedience, BUT at the same time offer my children the freedom to play outside, get their hands dirty, invent games, let them carry out those game, let them negotiate changes in the rules of the games etc. That said, please don't imagine that this book is simply advice on "..oh, you know, letting kids play is good for them because I say so...."; no, the author did the most comprehensive research review analysis I have ever read. He explains, from anthropological, evolutionary, and psychological points of view, why giving children the reins over their games sets them up to be kinder adults, with a deeper understanding of what other are feeling, and with a deep sense of owning their destiny, all of which contribute to a reduction in depression as adults. If you want to understand why more adults are anxious, selfish, unable to relate to others, willing to step on others to reach the top without any considerations for peers, read this book. If you want a glimpse into why the current public education system is inefficient at TEACHING, read this book. If you are thinking, the way I was before reading this book, that public school is the best way for children to interact with other children, think critically and learn to be creative, read this book- you will find out that that's not the case.... I also now finally understand why, in a few short weeks since kindergarten started, my son has become increasingly selfish, refusing to clean up anything other than his own toys, whereas before, he would gladly help his little sister with her "part of the mess". Now, after consistently being told in the classroom to keep his hands to himself, worry "about yourself", "do YOUR work" (the reason I know this is because I worked in a classroom), he is self centered to a degree I have not seen in him before. This selfishness will eventually be the reason why we are pulling him out of system...Anyway, another story for another time. Now I accept my past decision (for which family and friends have criticized plenty), of allowing my kids and their playmates to roam our yard, get the toys they want, mix water with dirt IF THEY CHOOSE TO, gather sticks to build a "fort" and all the other fun stuff they like to do (of course all this stopped with kindergarten) without intervening. I had plenty friends looking at me sideways ; You don't go outside with them to watch what they're doing??? OH the audacity! This may have been the longest review I have ever written, so I will try to conclude by saying that if you want to find out how children learn, you have to read this book. Hint: it has nothing to do with sitting at table and tracing letters. Plenty of social and psychological studies across multiple countries and across time serve as a solid backbone for what the author is presenting. Also: I still have a hard time accepting and applying the Sudbury Valley school model that the author describes. I need to do some research before being OK with it. But tha's fine. It's always nice to learn other points of view. Are you still reading this? I hope that by now you have clicked the "BUY" button. No? do it now

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Love it. Hate it. Worth reading!
*by H***N on March 11, 2013*

Some books you read and think "Yes! Yes! Yes!" Some others, "No, No, No." This one, for me, had parts of both. The "Yes!" parts: 1) A very insightful critique of traditional education. Peter Gray offers a rare, poignant critique of what is fundamentally wrong with public education in his outline of the seven sins of forced education. As he states, children generally don't like school, and for many good reasons, the paramount of which is that government schools are forced education: "A prison, according to the common, general definition, is any place of involuntary confinement and restriction of liberty. In school, as in adult prisons, the inmates are told exactly what they must do and are punished for failure to comply. Actually, students in school must spend more time doing exactly what they are told to do than is true of adults in penal institutions. Another difference, of course, is that we put adults in prison, because they have committed a crime, while we put children in school because of their age." Beyond the denial of liberty, Gray also identifies many other real problems of schools: - They interfere with the development of personal responsibility and self-direction. - They undermine intrinsic motivation to learn, and turn learning into work. - They judge students in ways that foster shame, hubris, cynicism, and cheating. - They interfere with the development of cooperation, and encourage bullying (in large part by their forced nature and their strict age-segregation.) - They inhibit critical thinking, because of their focus on getting high marks on very simplistic multiple-choice tests. 2) An insightful analysis why and how play and playfulness can foster real learning. This is the part of the book I loved most: Gray shows, in many examples and lots of detail, how a playful attitude can foster learning. He specifically describes five key attributes of play, which I found illuminating: play isn't just crazy running around, or fantasy. Play, to Gray, is defined by choice and self-direction; it's an end in itself, not a means to something else; it's not crazy chaos, but defined by mental rules the players either design, or freely accept; it draws on a human beings unique attribute of using imagination; and it is characterized by an alert mental attitude that is stress-free. As a Montessori parent and professional, I just wanted to say "Yes!" to each of these, as they so clearly line up with what happens in a Montessori preschool or elementary environment--but many observers think Montessori is all work, because children don't run around, or yell, but instead are rather calm, intent, and joyful in a quiet way. Yet because they choose their activities freely, they learn so much; to them, their learning is play, in the sense identified by Gray in this book. Gray's advocacy of child-led, mixed-age environment and intrinsic motivation for learning is right on target. This is what education can and should be all about. Yet... The "No!" part: Rejection of any structured curriculum. In an insightful chapter on play as learning in early hunter-gatherer times, Gray makes the point that children in these societies learn solely by play, with hardly any direction by adults. Later in the book, he presents the Sudbury Valley School as an example of this same approach applied to modern times. At Sudbury Valley, children run the school. There are no adult-imposed areas of study, no schedules, no curriculum: students freely decide what to do, all day long, every day, without, apparently, much or maybe any adult direction. Adults serve as resources - but only if and when children ask for help. The hypothesis here is that children will naturally learn what they need, that their innate curiosity about the world is not just necessary, but sufficient to enable them to self-educate, provided they have an environment where they are free to do so in the presence of older children and helpful adults. The question is: while this may have worked for hunter-gatherers, does it still work today? Gray's answer is an emphatic yes. How could that be, though, when what we need to know in today's modern, conceptual civilization is fundamentally different from the perceptual level knowledge required to be a great hunter or gatherer? Most of the knowledge hunter-gatherers needed was perceptual level knowledge, ideas about things that are very near to what we can see, hear, smell, things we can perceive directly with our senses, or that are just a few steps removed from direct perception. This knowledge may well have been very sophisticated, as indicated by Gray's review of anthropologist studies, and becoming a good hunter may well have taken decades of study. Yet hunter-gatherer knowledge is substantially different from the very conceptual knowledge needed to really understand the world today. Philosopher Ayn Rand showed that knowledge is hierarchical, that higher ideas build upon lower ideas, and that in order to understand sophisticated concepts like individual rights, or gravity, or photosynthesis, we need to be able to retrace the chain of ideas that led to the discovery of these concepts. Knowledge is not just repeating back memorized words (that's dogma, and it's unfortunately what happens in most schools today); it's being able to have a first-handed grasp of what, in reality, gave rise to an idea. To know something means to be able to point to the facts in reality that make it true. In a hunter-gatherer society, pointing to reality to support ideas is very simple. In ours, it's not. Just ask yourself: how do we know that the earth rotates around the sun? What gives rise to the theory of evolution? What is it that makes the US Constitution so unique: what are individual rights, and why do they matter? Most adults cannot answer these questions: they live in a society that calls for conceptual thinking every day, yet they function at the perceptual level of hunter-gatherers, accepting (or rejecting) many ideas without truly understanding them. This hierarchical nature of knowledge gives rise to the need of educated adults to shape children's education so they can come, over the course of many years, to understand the essential ideas of the modern world--in history, in math, in science, in literature, in language arts. If our goal is to equip our children to be conceptual thinkers, thought-guided actors, it is our role as educators to help train their conceptual minds by equipping them with the essential knowledge and skills they need to thrive in today's world which is fundamentally different from that of hunter-gatherers. Today, we live in a modern, conceptual civilization--which demands a modern, conceptual education. (I don't dispute that children can self-teach many practical skills for our modern world, like how to operate a computer, or play an instrument, or learn photography or film editing. Many of these are modern-day equivalents of hunter-gatherer knowledge, and playful self-education among differently-skilled peers is probably a great way to learn these skills. What unguided self-education will not do, however, is train the conceptual mind in the systematic, careful thinking that is needed to understand big questions, to be able to tell truth from falsehood, and to maximize the potential to understand and apply conceptual level knowledge to ones life in a principled way.) The real challenge today is not to abandon curriculum, and letting children play all day, like hunter-gatherers did. The real challenge is designing a curriculum and an educational environment that will enable children to playfully, joyfully learn the conceptual knowledge they must have to thrive in the 21st century and beyond. The real challenge is to bridge the gap between the content-focus of traditional education, and the process-focus of progressive education, and create a third way, which combines the best of the two, and truly prepares children to live in the modern world, as conceptual, thought-guided, joyful doers. For those who embrace this task, "Free to Learn" is a great book to read, as it provides many insights into the catastrophe that is today's public education, and into the essential role that intrinsically-motivated, playful learning plays (no pun intended) in any truly meaningful educational revolution. Despite (or maybe because of) the "No!" parts, I'll definitely recommend the book to friends and to my colleagues at LePort Schools, where we are working on creating a different educational model, one that is playful and conceptual at the same time.

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