Made by Hand (27 page)

Andrew said that when he and Renee had kids, they discussed the role formal education had played in their own lives and how it had affected who they were. “We are who we are not because of school but because of what we did with our lives,” Andrew said. Neither of them felt that they were using what they learned in college in their current jobs. (Andrew is now an executive at Six-Apart, a company that makes software for bloggers, and Renee is a home-birth midwife.)

“My parents still think we’re crazy for doing this, though,” Andrew said. “My father’s a doctor, and he thinks it’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever done.”

Unschooling was an intriguing idea. I didn’t have the nerve to pull my own kids out of school and try it, though. In fact, when I mentioned it to Sarina, she thought I was nuts for even mentioning it. Carla wanted nothing to do with it. Still, I found the idea of kids’ having more control over their own education compelling. I called Dr. Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology at Boston College who studies the way children learn from a developmental and evolutionary psychology perspective. I’d been reading “Freedom to Learn,” his
Psychology Today
blog about education. In our discussion, he seemed to share many of Andrew and Renee’s views about childhood learning.

“What’s wrong with the way kids are taught in schools today?” I asked him.

“There’s a lot of things that come to mind immediately,” he said, “the most obvious being that our educational system is set up to train kids to be
scholars,
in the narrowest sense of the word, meaning someone who spends his time reading and writing.” This is a poor way for kids to learn, Gray explained, because people survive by doing things. School, however, is about “always preparing for some future time when you will know enough to actually do something, instead of doing things now. And that’s such a tedious approach for anybody to take to life—always preparing.”

Another problem with the way children are taught today is that there is little room for individualized education. Gray sees this in the Boston vocational schools. Recently teenagers who attend these trade-based learning centers had to start taking the same kind of standardized academic tests as every other high school kid. Having to prepare for these tests, said Gray, took “away their time and opportunity to do the vocational things, the things that they’re
good
at. They’re being evaluated on something that they’re
not
good at, and not interested in. The whole idea of No Child Left Behind is that everybody is the same. Everybody is supposed to be progressing in the same way along the same track.”

The right way to approach learning, Gray said, is by encouraging play, “where you just go out and
do
things, and learning is secondary to doing. In school, you learn before you do. In play, you learn
as
you do and you’re not afraid of mistakes—you make mistakes and that’s how you learn. Whereas in school a mistake is something bad. In some ways you become afraid of taking initiative and trying things out for fear you’ll make a mistake.” What Gray was saying here jibed perfectly with what alpha DIYers tell me—that mistakes are the best teachers.

This fear of making mistakes is so ingrained in our culture that parents would rather let their children miss out on an experience than have them do something less-than-flawlessly. Years ago, Gray said, when he and his son were in the Indian Guides (a YMCA father-and-son organization), their local chapter held a pinewood derby contest, in which the boys built model race cars and competed to see whose car rolled the fastest down a ramp: “My son made his own, and it looked like he made his own. When we went to the event, there were these beautifully crafted, polished, brightly painted model cars. There was no way those little kids did any of that. But it’s as if the whole culture is oriented toward this idea that things have to be perfect, and if the kid can’t make them perfect, then you do it for the kid. That attitude is fostered by an educational system that really believes that there are right answers to things and the job is to learn the right answers before you try to do anything.”

Children learn most of what they need to succeed in life by interacting with the world and with other kids, Gray said, not by sitting in a classroom trying to remember information so they perform well on standardized tests. Children who are free to follow their own interests will learn what it is they enjoy doing and will end up happier as adults, working in a field they feel passionate about.

As part of his ongoing research, Gray and his graduate students study the way children learn at the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts. The school, founded in 1968, is unusual in that adults don’t design the curriculum, grade students, or direct them to learn particular things. The children there are in charge of their own education, and decisions are made democratically, one vote per child. The emphasis at Sudbury Valley is on helping children learn without resorting to teaching them anything. “It is an environment that really calls upon kids to do what they want to do,” Gray said. “What’s fascinating is that in that setting they become educated!” They don’t do it by “sitting down and thinking, like little educators, ‘What is it that I need to do? What curriculum should I do? How do I educate myself for the future?’ They’re not even thinking about the future for the most part.” Instead, Gray said, most of them are simply thinking about what they want to do that day.

Gray consulted anthropologists who studied hunter-gatherer societies (which existed in a relatively pure form until the early 1970s) and found that children in those societies behaved similarly. “Whether the cultures were in Africa or Asia or South America or Australia or New Zealand, there are certain commonalities among them. One of those commonalities is that there is no concept of education as something that adults
do
to children. The concept is that children learn on their own and that children need time to do this.” Another commonality across these cultures is that children, and even teenagers, aren’t expected to work. “One anthropologist told me that in the culture she was studying a girl might be fifteen or sixteen years old and married and she still wouldn’t be expected to work, because she’s still a girl. She needs time to play with the other kids, and there’s just an understanding that play is how kids learn what they need to know and that they will become productive members of society when they’re ready to.”

But that doesn’t mean the kids aren’t learning or preparing for the future. “In hunter-gatherer cultures the kids are playing in ways that represent the skills, values, and beliefs of their culture. They’re playing at the kinds of things they see around them. They’re playing at hunting and gathering and making dugout canoes and building the kinds of tools that they use and following animal tracks.” They’re not consciously planning for the future, when they’re adults and need to work; they’re just doing it because it’s fun. They’re doing it because the adults around them are doing it. Natural selection favors species in which the young playfully imitate adult behavior.

Sudbury Valley has a wood shop, a photo lab, an art center, and many other different kinds of activities, which Gray said reflects our culture’s “greater variety of kinds of things that people do than in a hunter-gatherer culture.” Because reading, writing, and math are necessary parts of learning photography, art, theater, and woodworking, the children at Sudbury Valley become proficient in these areas, not for their own sake but because they need to learn them to get things done, just as Andrew and Renee’s son, Zach, learned to read because he wanted to know what the characters in video games were talking about. These academic skills, said Gray, are “secondary to engaging in the kinds of adventures and games and projects that kids get drawn into.”

In hunter-gatherer societies, kids of all ages play together. Sudbury Valley doesn’t group kids by age, either. Most of the play there is social. “And when kids are playing in groups, they’re learning from one another. If it’s age-mixed groups, little kids are learning from older kids, and older kids sometimes learn from younger kids as well,” Gray said. When the kids play sports outside, the older children protect the younger children from getting hurt. In the classrooms, kids follow one another’s lead in what kind of literature to read.

I asked Gray what I should do when my kids tell me they’re bored. Gray’s answer was that I shouldn’t do anything about it. He shares Sudbury Valley founder Dan Greenberg’s view that the best thing you can do for bored kids is let them be bored. “Just don’t try to amuse them,” Gray said. “Eventually people get tired of being bored, and they find something to do. In our culture we have this view that it’s the adults’ responsibility to make sure that kids are never bored, that they’ve always got something interesting to do.” Gray said alleviating boredom is the kid’s responsibility.

As for my reluctance to allow my six-year-old daughter to indulge her fondness for playing on the computer for hours on end, Gray told me not to worry so much about it. “Playing on the computer is not necessarily a bad thing, especially in our culture, where computers are so important.” In a way, Jane is simply imitating what I do to earn a living, just as hunter-gatherer kids do when they make miniature hunting bows. (When Jane was younger, she used to point to my computer and say, “I wanna do a piece of work.”)

Gray told me that Jane’s interest in the computer could be making her smarter, at least when it comes to abstract thinking. It’s called the “Flynn Effect.” The people who make IQ tests have to make the tests harder over time in order to keep the average score at 100. “The kinds of questions they have to make harder are the ones that have to do with abstract thinking. Abstract thinking is getting better and better all the time over the course of history.” Gray said it doesn’t correlate with schooling—the Flynn Effect occurs even if you control for the amount of schooling kids have: “Most of the people doing this research think it doesn’t have anything to do with schooling. It has to do with the kinds of things that kids are learning in the natural course of life, even from TV and, these days, especially from computers. Because they’re involved in abstractions all the time. Whereas kids in the past might have been playing with real, concrete things that you can put your hands on. And so they had more manual intelligence, you could say. Kids today are playing with symbols. They’re manipulating symbols, and they’re doing the kinds of things that require keeping everything in your head. As a consequence, when they’re doing these tests that require your ability to keep a lot of things in your head and manipulate things in their heads, they’re good at it. So you could argue that computer play is an adaptation in our culture that is helping kids acquire the kinds of skills that probably are more important to our culture today than they were in years past. That said, I also think it’s a shame that kids aren’t spending more time doing other things, too, that exercise their bodies, give them fresh air, get them out more socially with other kids.”

So what can parents do to help their kids have a fulfilling, secure life? Gray said he favors a hands-off approach. The best thing a parent can do is to provide them with a safe place to play, along with “the opportunity to mess around with objects of all sorts, and to try to build things.”

I felt that my kids were getting some opportunities to increase their manual intelligence by their exposure to chicken raising, vegetable gardening, and food preserving, but I wanted to take Gray’s advice a step further and expose them to something entirely new, like electronics. My father was an electrical engineer, and when I was younger, I used to watch him work on electronics projects at home. He built his own stereo systems from the venerated hi-fi kit company Heathkit, and repaired broken appliances. One day after school, when I was eleven or twelve years old, I waved a strong magnet in front of the picture tube of our TV set to distort the image. It was like using Silly Putty to stretch the faces in the Sunday funnies. But when I’d finished, the picture tube wasn’t working right. Everything was skewed, and portions of the screen were tinted purple.