(Credit: Newman Studio/Shutterstock) When it comes to raising kids, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Kids forbidden to talk to strangers. Kids afraid to go inside a store on their own. Kids terrified of cooking an egg for fear of burning the house down. These are examples Lenore Skenazy, who pioneered the […]
By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn Early academic pressure creates learning blocks, diagnosed as disorders. Source: Flickr Creative Commons Our standard schools operate on the assumption that all children of a given age should learn the same lessons, in the same ways, at the same time. That assumption is […]
How a learning disorder diagnosis can become a self-fulfilling prophesy. By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn Source:Randen_pederson_creative_commons Many years ago, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson (1968) performed a fascinating experiment in elementary school classrooms. They led teachers to believe that a special test had revealed that certain students would […]
Sometimes a fiction is repeated so often that people believe it’s true. By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn “Well, what about Lord of the Flies?” How often I have heard someone say that after I’ve talked about the value of children’s independent play, away from adults, or about a […]
By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn Parents say removing pressure is the key to their children’s learning to read. ADHD and dyslexia make kids hate reading, right? Wrong … I am often asked if Self-Directed Education works for children who are diagnosed with dyslexia. The usual assumption, in the special education world, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Steven Fons. Credit: Calle Schonning Ph.D. student Steven Fons’ Arctic research adventure, complicated by COVID-19. For Steven Fons, returning home to D.C. in June was like coming back from another planet. “It was totally surreal. The grass and the trees were greener than I remembered,” recalled Fons, an atmospheric and oceanic […]
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 […]