Peter Gray

Boston College | BC · Psychology Department

Reported here is a survey of former students of a radically alternative school, the Hudson Valley Sudbury School (HVSS). Like other Sudbury model schools, HVSS is a democratically administered primary and secondary day school, governed by the students and staff together, that has no academic requirements but supports students' self-directed activit...

Over the past half century, in the United States and other developed nations, children's free play with other children has declined sharply. Over the same period, anxiety, depression, suicide, feelings of helplessness, and narcissism have increased sharply in children, adolescents, and young adults. This article documents these historical changes a...

"Play" is a word used commonly to refer to children's preferred activities and to some adult activities, and it is often said that play promotes learning. But what is play exactly, and what and how do children learn through play? This essay begins with a description of an evolutionary, practice theory of play by German philosopher and naturalist, K...

Education, broadly defined, is cultural transmission. It is the process or set of processes by which each new generation of human beings acquires and builds on the skills, knowledge, beliefs, values, and lore of the culture into which they are born. Through all but the most recent speck of human history, education was always the responsibility of t...

Most educational research has been conducted in standard school settings. In this chapter, the author describes how children become educated in hunter-gatherer cultures, at a radically alternative school, and in families that have chosen to “unschool” their children—all of which are settings where children and adolescents are in charge of their own...

For this chapter we must distinguish between schooling and education. Schooling is the deliberate use of special procedures to teach preselected skills, concepts and beliefs (a curriculum) to students. Education is a much broader concept. It is the entire set of processes by which each new generation of human beings acquires the skills, knowledge,...

In this essay, the author contends that the approach to education described by Rousseau in Émile is not only impractical but is founded on four misconceptions concerning human nature and development. These are (1) the vulnerable-child child fallacy (that children must be protected from learning the wrong things); (2) the stage-of-development fallac...

A sample of 75 adults, who had been unschooled for at least the years that would have been their last two years of high school, answered questions about their subsequent pursuits of higher education and careers. Eighty-three percent of them had gone on to some form of formal higher education and 44 percent had either completed or were currently in...

Seventy-five adults, who had been unschooled for at least the years that would have been their last two years of high school, responded to a survey about their experiences. Their responses indicated that their parents generally played supportive, not directive roles in their education and played bigger supportive roles for those who started their u...

The apparent success of the Sudbury Valley School, coupled with its lack of impact on the larger culture, is used here to illustrate general constraints on managed change at the large-population level. Government regulations preventing innovation, the difficulty of bucking social norms, and the inadequacy of current indices of success operate again...

Unschooling families (families that don't send their children to school and don't school them at home) were invited to participate in a survey about their unschooling practices. Two hundred and thirty two self-identified unschooling families, with at least one child over five years old, completed and returned the questionnaire. Qualitative analyses...

Children in band hunter-gatherer cultures, wherever they have been studied, were free to play on their own, essentially from dawn to dusk, every day. This chapter describes the cultural context for such play-which included free age mixing among children and adolescents and direct exposure to essentially all adult activities-and explains how, throug...

This article proposes an evolutionary model of risky behavior in adolescence and contrasts it with the prevailing developmental psychopathology model. The evolutionary model contends that understanding the evolutionary functions of adolescence is critical to explaining why adolescents engage in risky behavior and that successful intervention depend...

Education is broadly defined as the set of processes by which each generation of human beings acquires the culture in which they grow up. By this definition, education is part and parcel of our biological makeup. An analysis of education in hunter-gatherer bands indicates that young humans are designed, by natural selection, to acquire the culture...

Over the past half century, in the United States and other developed nations, children's free play with other children has declined sharply. Over the same period, anxiety, depression, suicide, feelings of helplessness, and narcissism have increased sharply in children, adolescents, and young adults. This article documents these historical changes a...

From an evolutionary perspective, the normal social play of children involves kids of various ages. Our human and great-ape ancestors most likely lived in small groups with low birth rates, which made play with others of nearly the same age rare. Con-sequently, the evolutionary functions of children's social play are best understood by examining pl...

At an ungraded, democratically structured school, we documented 196 naturally occurring interaction sequences between adolescents (ages 12-19) and children (ages 4-11) who were at least four years younger than the adolescent. Children and adolescents appeared to be drawn together by common interests and play styles, personal attraction, and complem...

Observation of 200 children ages 4 to 19 attending a Massachusetts nongraded alternative school disclosed substantial age mixing. Younger children used older children to develop skills and acquire knowledge. Age mixing encouraged opportunities for creativity, helped match abilities, and fostered older children's sense of responsibility for younger...

The frequencies of age mixing and gender mixing were observed among students age 4 to 19, at an ungraded, democratically structured school where the students move about freely and direct their own activities. Age mixing (across a span of at least 24 months) was more frequent for the 12-to 15-year-olds than for the 8-to 11-or 16-to 19-year-olds and...

The purpose of this article is to encourage teachers of psychology to make greater explicit use of evolutionary theory in their courses. Examples and arguments are presented to show that evolutionary theory can help students (a) think critically about classic psychological theories; (b) understand psychology's recent shift away from general theorie...

Critical thinking has been defined as a disposition of reflective skepticism. This article describes an approach to the teaching of psychology that is aimed at fostering this disposition. The goal is to teach in such a way that students define their task as thinking about the ideas of psychology, not simply memorizing psychological information. The...

A follow-up study was conducted of the graduates of the Sudbury Valley School (SVS), a democratically administered primary and secondary school that has no learning requirements but rather supports students' self-directed activities. Although these individuals educated themselves in ways that are enormously different from what occurs at traditional...

Lesions of the medial preoptic-anterior hypothalamic continuum (MPOA-AH) are known to disrupt both maternal behavior and male sexual behavior in the rat. In order to test the hypothesis that the two behaviors involve different neural systems in the MPOA-AH, small bilateral lesions were made in different anterior-posterior locations in the MPOA-AH o...

Lesions of the medial preoptic-anterior hypothalamic continuum (MPOA-AH) disrupt both maternal behavior and male sexual behavior in the rat. To test the hypothesis that the 2 behaviors involve different neural systems in the MPOA-AH, small bilateral lesions were made in different anterior-posterior locations in the MPOA-AH of 41 maternal-sensitized...

72 weanling female and male CD rats were exposed to either pups or pup-sized toys for 10 days beginning at 22 days of age in order to assess differences between pup-directed and toy-directed behaviors and to determine whether exposure to pups at this time increases susceptibility to maternal sensitization in adulthood. Adult sensitization involved...

The school described here operates on the principle that play for the sake of play, without unsolicited adult intervention, entails the acquisition of skills and knowledge. Sudbury Valley School promotes cultural acquisition in a manner harmonious with the child's biological self-education system, without age segregation, grading, or academic requi...

Female CD-1 mice showed reduced light avoidance at estrus compared to nonestrus in two experiments designed to control for possible effects of changes in general activity. Estrous mice were quicker to enter a light chamber from a dark chamber and slower to enter a dark chamber from a light chamber, than nonestrous mice. Also, estrous mice reared up...

In two experiments, degraded one-way shock avoidance was found to correlate with estrus in female mice. In the first experiment, mice were trained in one session, either in estrus or nonestrus, and were tested 3 weeks later in extinction, either in estrus or nonestrus. Those tested in estrus made fewer avoidance responses than those in nonestrus, r...

Rats were tested for 3 min per day, for 4 successive days, in an open field apparatus, 20 min after injection of either lithium chloride (2 mEq/kg) or physiological saline. In the first experiment, the open field was illuminated with moderate white light for some rats (stress condition) and dim red light for others (non-stress condition). In the se...

Rats were tested daily in a free-operant avoidance task and were found to make more avoidance responses in sessions preceded by a brief period of prestimulation than in control sessions. Footshock, air blast, and handling were effective sources of prestimulation for this effect. Further experiments showed that the effect of prestimulation depended...

Rats were given one training trial that was followed 2 days later by one test trial in a "step-out" passive avoidance task. Each rat was injected with either adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) or placebo before training and before testing. Four groups of rats were used, representing the 4 possible training-testing injection combinations: placebo-pl...

Exposure of 2-day-old rats to ether resulted in a small but reliable increment in the corticosterone content of their plasma taken 30 min after the exposure. This increment was greater than the increment due to a handling or heat-stress procedure, and was completely prevented if the animal was pretreated with dexamethasone. Eight-day-old rats also...

In Experiment 1, rats deprived of water for 24 hr were administered a single grid shock after emitting 200 licks. Latencies to resume licking were significantly increased by prior ACTH injection but were unaffected by injections of dexamethasone, which inhibits endogenous ACTH, or by corticosterone. In Experiment 2, water-deprived rats were injecte...