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Why Free Play is Disappearing in our Culture

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Mammals are innately playful. Our large brains and complex social structures require that we learn vast amounts of information in childhood to help us thrive in adulthood. How do mammal children learn all of this?

They play.

But it’s not just any play. According to researchers, the most valuable play for normal human development is free, unstructured play. In a Scientific American article, scientists report that free play “is critical for becoming socially adept, coping with stress and building cognitive skills such as problem solving.”

Despite these benefits, natural, free play—the kind most of us had as kids—is rapidly disappearing. According to a 2005 study in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, childhood free play declined by 25% between 1981 and 1997. The catalyst for this drop in free play, according to the study, was an increase in time children spent in structured activities.

Childhood play deprivation is not without consequences. Psychologist Peter Gray, who studies play and childhood development, writes that “over the past half century we have increasingly deprived children of opportunities for free play, and over that same period we have seen dramatic and continuous increases in all sorts of emotional disorders in children.”

Despite this alarming trend away from free play, most parents are not clamoring for its return. According to a newly released Gallup study, parents acknowledge that free play “fosters creativity and problem-solving,” but they do not prioritize these qualities.

In fact, the study found that “child-led, independent indoor play ranks near the bottom of the priority list for both children and parents.” Self-confidence, social skills, and academic skills were the top three priorities for parents with children ages 10 and younger.

Playtime for Kids

Parents in the Gallup study placed a high value on structured, purposeful play activities—such as organized sports and educational programming. In contrast, these parents reported that their children place a higher value on screen time—perhaps one of the few remaining outlets children have for unsupervised playtime.

The good news is that both parents and children in the study value outside play; but parents reported that weather (too cold, too hot, too rainy), and fear of sending children outside without adult supervision, were the top two barriers to more unstructured playtime outdoors.

The Gallup report concludes: “Many parents may not recognize the positive role that unstructured, child-led play can have on their children’s development, despite the scientific research linking this type of play to the development of problem-solving skills, social cooperation, resiliency and creativity.”

In the accelerating quest toward early academics, organized activities, and purposeful play, we may be losing sight of the innate and time-honored benefits of free, unstructured childhood play.

The mounting focus on childhood success and academic achievement at ever-earlier ages may result in children who are less creative, less collaborative, and less emotionally resilient than they were a generation ago. As parents, we should fiercely protect and preserve our children’s free playtime, prioritize unstructured, unsupervised play, and encourage them to go outside—even in the rain.

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Image Credit: Pixabay

This post Why Free Play is Disappearing in our Culture was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Kerry McDonald.

What Unschoolers Have in Common with Jimi Hendrix

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When he was 14 years old, guitar legend Jimi Hendrix got an old, one-string ukulele from the garbage. He played single notes, teaching himself by ear while listening to Elvis Presley songs. A year later, he bought his first acoustic guitar for $5 and taught himself how to play. He practiced for hours each day, observed other guitarists, sought advice when needed, listened to an array of different music, especially blues, and soon created his first band.

Humans have an extraordinary capacity for self-education.

With no formal guitar or music training, Hendrix developed a creative, experimental playing style. He went on to become a celebrated musician whom the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame calls “arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music.”

He was entirely self-taught.

Not Just Jimi

Humans have an extraordinary capacity for self-education or autodidacticism. We are innately designed to explore, discover, and synthesize the world around us. The term autodidacticism originates from the Ancient Greek words autós didaktikos, or self-teaching. Today, it is defined as “education without the guidance of masters (such as teachers and professors) or institutions (such as schools).”

Autodidacticism flourished for much of human history, with some of the most influential historical figures teaching themselves. Famous autodidacts include Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci, Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, American inventor Thomas Edison, American president Abraham Lincoln, and American abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

Even during American slavery, when it was illegal for a slave to be literate, the drive for self-education endured. As Heather Andrea Williams writes in her book, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom:

Despite laws and custom in slave states prohibiting enslaved people from learning to read and write, a small percentage managed, through ingenuity and will, to acquire a degree of literacy in the antebellum period.”

It wasn’t until the mid-19th-century advent of U.S. compulsory schooling laws that autodidacticism began its descent, becoming more exception than rule. The idea of self-directed learning was anathema to the growing apparatus of forced schooling, which demanded obedience and conformity and punished originality and willfulness.

Natural tendencies toward self-education eroded as mass schooling consumed more of childhood, teaching passivity over agency. As evolutionary developmental psychologist, Dr. Peter Gray writes in his 2013 book Free To Learn:

Children are biologically predisposed to take charge of their own education. When they are provided with the freedom and means to pursue their own interests, in safe settings, they bloom and develop along diverse and unpredictable paths, and they acquire skills and confidence to meet life’s challenges. In such an environment, children ask for any help they may need from adults. There is no need for forced lessons, lectures, assignments, tests, grades, segregation by age into classrooms, or any of the other trappings of our standard, compulsory system of schooling. All of these, in fact, interfere with children’s natural ways of learning.”

Tech-Fueled Self-Directed Learning

A half-century ago, educator and author John Holt revived our understanding of autodidacticism, advocating for “unschooling,” or self-directed education that takes place outside of traditional schools. His best-selling book, How Children Learn, galvanized the modern homeschooling movement, and is being re-published later this summer in honor of its 50th-anniversary debut.

In it, Holt writes:

We like to say that we send children to school to teach them to think. What we do, all too often, is to teach them to think badly, to give up a natural and powerful way of thinking in favor of a method that does not work well for them and that we rarely use ourselves.”

Holt’s work spurred renewed interest in self-directed learning and set the stage for reimagining education.

Today, fueled by technological innovation that makes learning easier and more accessible than ever before, autodidacticism is experiencing a renaissance. Online resources, YouTube tutorials, learning apps, cyber-schools, and massive open online courses (MOOCs) provide real-time access to skills, knowledge, information, and ideas.

Tech leaders like Facebook and Netflix are infusing schools with self-directed learning software.

Autodidacts are transforming education in myriad ways. Homeschooling continues to boom as an outlet for more education freedom and self-direction, with up to half of the over two million U.S. homeschoolers embracing some variety of unschooling.

Increasingly, more careers rely on self-teaching skill-sets. For instance, a recent poll of software developers found that over 69 percent of them are at least partly self-taught. And tech leaders like Facebook and Netflix are infusing schools with self-directed learning software, inverting the typical student-teacher relationship and placing learners in charge of their own education.

Autodidacts are helping to shift education from a top-down schooling model to a self-directed learning one. As Jimi Hendrix concluded: “It all has to come from inside, though, I guess.”

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Is School Driving Kids Literally Crazy?

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May can be a particularly dangerous month for schoolchildren. According to 13 years of recent data collected on mental health emergency room visits at Connecticut Children’s Mental Health Center in Hartford, May typically has the most.

Under Pressure

Boston College psychology professor, Peter Gray, looked more closely at this data and found that children’s mental health is directly related to school attendance. Dr. Gray found that children’s psychiatric ER visits drop precipitously in the summer and rise again once school begins. The May spike likely coincides with end-of-school academic and social pressures.

The suicide rate among 10 to 14 year olds has doubled since 2007.

Dr. Gray concludes: “The available evidence suggests quite strongly that school is bad for children’s mental health. Of course, it’s bad for their physical health, too; nature did not design children to be cooped up all day at a micromanaged, sedentary job.”

School-related anxiety and depression are real, serious issues that can lead to catastrophe, as evidenced by the rising suicide rate among children. In fact, according to the CDC, the suicide rate among 10 to 14 year olds has doubled since 2007. And for girls in that age group, the suicide rate has tripled over the past 15 years.

Beyond these extreme mental health crises, Dr. Gray’s research, and that of others, has shown that generalized anxiety and depression are skyrocketing in children. Dr. Gray maintains that much of this rise in anxiety and depression in children is due to lengthier, more restrictive schooling over the past several decades. He writes:

Children today spend more hours per day, days per year, and years of their life in school than ever before. More weight is given to tests and grades than ever. Outside of school, children spend more time than ever in settings in which they are directed, protected, catered to, ranked, judged, and rewarded by adults. In all of these settings adults are in control, not children.”

A national study of trends in adolescent depression rates found that teens reporting a major depressive episode (MDE) within the previous year skyrocketed from 8.7% in 2005 to 11.5% in 2014. The report, published last November in the journal Pediatrics, reveals: “The risk of depression sharply rises as children transition to adolescence.” The researchers cite stress and bullying as contributing factors.

More Stressed than Adults

A 2013 study by the American Psychological Association found that school is the main driver of teenage stress, and that teenagers are more stressed-out than adults. According to the study: “Teens report that their stress level during the school year far exceeds what they believe to be healthy (5.8 vs. 3.9 on a 10-point scale) and tops adults’ average reported stress levels (5.8 for teens vs. 5.1 for adults).”

“We don’t need to drive kids crazy to educate them.”

The report reveals that 83% of teens said that school was “a somewhat or significant source of stress,” with 27% of teens reporting “extreme stress” during the school year. Interestingly, that number declines to just 13% in summer.

Curious about mounting data showing correlations between school attendance and anxiety, Dr. Gray conducted his own informal, online survey of children who left conventional schooling for homeschooling or other forms of alternative education.

He found that, specifically for children previously labeled ADHD, often with related anxiety issues, “the children’s behavior, moods, and learning generally improved when they stopped conventional schooling…” Results were particularly positive when children engaged in self-directed education, like unschooling, where they had more freedom and control of their own learning.

An advocate of autodidacticism, and founder of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education, Dr. Gray urges parents and educators to think critically about the potential negative impacts of coercive schooling on children’s health and well-being. He asserts: “We don’t need to drive kids crazy to educate them. Given freedom and opportunity, without coercion, young people educate themselves.”

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.