Shutterstock Most Australian children are stuck at home due to the outbreak of COVID-19. They need to find ways to socialise, do their school work, exercise and entertain themselves. It’s not surprising parents may be hearing “I’m bored” a lot more than before. People hate being bored. So much so […]

How are your kids managing at home? By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn We are in the midst of a terrible pandemic. Certainly, there is cause for all of us to be anxious, but I want to focus here on the effect on children. It is a well-established fact […]

“As you can see, individual differences in writing can be seen as early as kindergarten,” says Cynthia Puranik, associate professor in the College of Education & Human Development. On her computer, she pulls up writing samples from two kindergarteners who were asked to print words that they know. One child […]

Education is much more than what is taught in school. Take advantage. A pandemic is never a good thing.  It’s a terrible thing.  But maybe some good can come from it.  Anything that disrupts our usual ways of being can lead us to try new ways of being, ways that might in the […]

Do “dyslexic” children who leave conventional schooling learn to read? How? By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn In previous posts on this blog (here and here), I’ve written about how children in unschooling families or attending schools for self-directed education learn to read on their own, when they are not pressured and are […]

Views on school refusal depend on beliefs about children and human rights. By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn Every state and country where school is compulsory is faced with the problem commonly labeled school refusal. Everywhere, a significant number of kids strongly resist going to school and manage to skip a […]

2020 Unschooling Conferences Not all dates have been set for 2020. For now, the links are staying from the past schedules too, so you can see. Most of these recur annually. Check their website frequently and then let Sue know! Going to Conferences Conferences are fabulous places to hear directly […]

An Australian family on the average wage typically spends close to A$6,000 out of pocket per year on child care, a new analysis from the Mitchell Institute shows. This is more than the average cost of sending a child to a private primary school. Unlike the school sector, families don’t have […]

Brooke Cagle/Unsplash Searching online has many educational benefits. For instance, one study foundstudents who used advanced online search strategies also had higher grades at university. But spending more time online does not guarantee better online skills. Instead, a student’s ability to successfully search online increases with guidance and explicit instruction. Young people tend to assume they […]

Here’s my theory about why some early childhood programs help and others hurt. by Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn Head Start was founded in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and it has been going strong ever since. This past year the program enrolled about 1 […]