“GO TO HELL.”

Peter Gray’s book starts with a bang – Peter’s son curses his parents and educators. Peter and his wife are crying: “This time I felt, maybe, I really would go to hell.” What would send him there? The book explores the dire consequences of forcefully educating children.

(Click the images to enlarge them.)

How can we stop being complicit? The book offers several answers to this question, including modeling one’s education after hunter-gatherers tribes. Kids can find the resources to live freer lives within modern tribes, such as techie start-ups, unschooler circles, and maker communities.

One of the benefits of open education is free age mixing, a topic large enough to warrant its own map.

Peter Gray presents a five-part definition of play strikingly similar to math. It is useful for those into game design, experience design, curriculum design, and parenting.

There is a math club activity where students make “star diagrams” out of lists of what is important to them. Here is such a diagram explaining Peter Gray’s five types of play as they relate to math.

“Free to Learn” explores two venues of open education. First, democratic learning communities in freeschools such as Sudbury Valley or Reggio Emilia. Second, a style of trustful parenting and homeschooling called “unschooling” where individual families walk their own paths. Both provide the benefits of open education presented in the diagrams above.

Reading Peter Gray’s analysis of the two methods, the drawbacks are clear. In freeschools, resident teachers do not pursue their professions so that they can help children full-time. This leads to a situation where kids are rarely exposed to the projects of adults. Unschooling families can provide exposure to grown-up work. However, it is harder for individual families to maintain ongoing daily contact with a large multi-age group of kids.

Why not the benefits of both paths without the drawbacks? We need something beyond freeschools, and beyond unschooling. Let’s get to work!

We need more young voices in science and math. I dream of children doing science alongside adults. Kids can contribute a lot to any project! They bring divergent thinking, creativity, and peacefulness to any working environment.

Joseph is a seven-year-old homeschooled boy. He loves science, engineering, and science fiction. He loves to ask questions and to tinker with things around him. He also loves climbing trees and splashing in puddles. Enjoy his poem!

Baby civilization

Some think we are smart,

Some think we are dumb,

But our civilization

Is still very new

And in some place

In a vast Universe

There is a big old civilization

Five thousand times older than us.

We are just new,

We are just new.

Some people think

We are smart, too.

But actually,

We are just new –

Remember that,

Remember that.

We are just new,

We are just new,

Like a new born baby.

With her mommy and daddy crew.

The civilizations

That are older than us

Old smart aliens,

Looking at us.

They think:

“Oh, how little,

Little civilization,

Does not know how to move,

Use it hands, legs,

Can not clean after itself,

Pees all the time;

You can’t stop it –

It’s how normal baby grows.

That is the Earth,

That is the Earth”

That’s how we

Live on the Earth.

But sometimes,

we do very bad things:

Like throwing sand

Into people’s eyes.

Of course, of course

We need to know

Stop doing that

Before we die.

Because we are doing something bad,

That if we did not, we’d be glad.

You know, you know,

That if we go

Five trillion light years

From the Earth

You will reach a place,

You will reach a place,

Where there is a new civilization

You have never seen.

But you guess what,

But you guess what –

It’s like a nanny

Looking at us.

Cleaning up,

Giving us food,

Running around

To everybody else.

Those other little civilizations

That are just born –

She needs to care about all,

About every single thing.

We are just one,

Just one of them,

That is just born,

Just newly here.

We know, we know –

The newly Earth.