The pandemic is revolutionizing how families think about education. A Gallop Poll published August 25 (2020) revealed that 10% of American families with children of school age are intending to homeschool their children this year. That’s a huge increase, up from 5% just one year ago. The poll was very clear not to […]
Shutterstock Languages like Japanese, Korean, Turkish and the indigenous languages of the Amazon, East Africa, and New Guinea build sentences in a way that lets them grow to enormous length. Our research shows learning one of these languages may help children create complex sentences that express multiple ideas at a younger age. […]
Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn Two large surveys, a month apart, revealed family benefits of school closures. Two weeks ago, I published an article summarizing the results of a survey of 800 parents and 800 children (ages 8 through 13) that was conducted in April of 2020, approximately a month after […]
It’s important for successful adult-ing, experts say. Friendships can be made stronger through play-acting and problem solving. Robert Collins/Unsplash Archaeological records— and the modern-day antics of our primate relatives—make it clear that monkeying around goes way back. Less certain, however, are the developmental and evolutionary advantages that underlie our instinct […]
This artist’s concept shows the hypothetical super-Earth known as Planet Nine or Planet X, which some researchers think lurks far beyond Pluto in the outer reaches of the solar system. (Credit: R. Hurt/IPAC/Caltech) A fun and easy ways to help teach science to your kids at home. Or maybe your […]
Without school, children exhibited increased independence and responsibility.By By Peter Gray, Ph.D., a research professor at Boston College, author of Free to Learn When COVID-19 resulted in closures of schools and after-school activities for children, beginning generally in early March of this year, there were some dire predictions about the effects this […]
There are a lot of misconceptions out there about what unschooling is, how it works, what people mean when they use the term… So I wanted to do a post on the topic addressing some of the biggest misunderstandings that seem to crop up repeatedly. Misconception #1: unschooling is […]
Do parents care about their children’s happiness? I think it’s an easy answer to say overwhelming they do, very much so. And yet, they don’t necessarily prioritize it in the daily lives of their children. I feel like a lot of parents erroneously believe that academic success will lead to […]
By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn This is Part I of a series on the functions and malfunctions of shame. This seems like a ripe time in history to think about the emotion of shame. We are living in a period of renewed reckoning with the shame of the racist […]
This artist’s impression shows the red supergiant star Antares in the constellation of Scorpius. Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer astronomers have constructed the most detailed image ever of this, or any star other than the Sun. Using the same data they have also made the first map of the […]