Boston College Psychology Professor: “School Has Become a Toxic Place for Children”
More families may be flocking to homeschooling and other schooling alternatives over the past two years, but Peter Gray has been urging families to flee coercive schooling since long before the pandemic began. The Boston College psychology professor wrote in his 2013 book Free To Learn: “The more oppressive the school system becomes, the more it is driving people away, and that is good.”
Gray joins me on this week’s episode of the LiberatED Podcast to talk about the harms of forced schooling and why self-directed education, grounded in play, is most beneficial for youth learning and development.
In our conversation, Gray explains that standard schooling today is a key factor in the continuous rise in rates of childhood and adolescent anxiety, depression, and suicide. Its imposed, one-size-fits all curriculum, reliance on reward and punishment as external motivators, and dismissal of natural childhood curiosity and creativity erode learners’ powerful drives for learning and discovery. Stripped of these drives, and increasingly deprived of opportunities to play, explore, and pursue individual interests outside of school without the constant hovering of adults, children and adolescents become more melancholic and morose.
“We adults are constraining children’s lives, in school and out of school,” says Gray in our podcast discussion. “School has become a toxic place for children, and we refuse to say that publicly. The research can show it but it almost never gets picked up in the popular press,” he adds.
Our discussion digs deeper into Gray’s research on the link between standard schooling and skyrocketing rates of diagnoses of ADHD, which Gray asserts is essentially “a failure to adapt to the conditions of standard schooling.” He talks about the disappearance of childhood play and the corresponding rise in childhood mental health disorders, as well as why parents shouldn’t be too concerned about their children’s screen time use.
Gray believes that parents should remove their children from standard schooling and embrace schooling alternatives that are centered on self-directed education. “I’m cheered by the ever-growing stream of people who are leaving coercive schooling for relaxed homeschooling, unschooling, Sudbury schooling, and other forms of education that allow children to control their own learning,” he wrote in Free To Learn.
The current exodus of families away from standard schooling and toward other, often freer, learning models, may have positive, long-term effects on young people’s intellectual development and emotional well-being.
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Content syndicated from Fee.org (FEE) under Creative Commons license.
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Truly sad.
Just above the headline of this article there is an ad for Depression Rehab Centers for young adults. A bit further down in the article is another ad for “Counseling & Psychiatry ages 4+ – Appointments within 2 weeks.”
What a strange future our kids are facing. I agree, schools have become toxic to our children but do we keep telling our kids they’re depressed and not fully functioning well rounded kids when all is said and done or do we need to do a better job of protecting our kids? That won’t be easy if the law doesn’t start clamping down on the government’s Education Department’s use of these horrid sexualizing indoctrination programs for children. They have a plan for all grades and all ages it seems but the younger children who are just out of the toddler age are being targeted because they are so willing to do as told. All kids need to be kept home. Parents can do it. But they also have to have law enforcement taking part in this too, not to handcuff parents but to stop the perverts from creating more perverts. Or there will be nothing for kids other than rehab centers in their future, or something much worse.