A few years ago, Peter Gray blogged some provocative claims: Foragers don’t distinguish work from play: Hunter-gatherers do not have a concept of toil. When they do have that concept, it derives apparently from their contact with outsiders. … Their own work is simply an extension of children’s play. Children play at hunting, gathering, hut construction, tool making, meal preparations, defense against predators, birthing, infant care, healing, negotiation, and so on and so on; and gradually, as their play become increasingly skilled, the activities become productive. … work is play for four main reasons: (1) It is varied and requires much skill and intelligence. (2) There is not too much of it. (3) It is done in a social context, with friends. And (4) (most significantly) it is, for any given person at any given time, optional. …
Money is really a representative of the labor of the possessor, since labor must create goods or services that can be traded for money. What money does better than barter is to create a medium that is almost universally excepted for all goods and services. That way you can trade the product of your labor for the product of anothers labor that you want without having to acquire another good that they want if they do not want what you already have in excess.
There's really nothing stopping you from living a nomadic hunter/gatherer life in modern america. What's hypocritical is to expect to live such a life and enjoy anything more than a sustenance level of material wealth.
you want to live a life like that don't bitch when you don't have a car, or a TV, internet, regular meals, or health care....
Isn't it fairer to say, based on the rest of that paragraph, that hunter-gatherers do not have a concept of play? Children's play, apparently, is just a miniature and symbolic version of adult work.
In a modern, commercial society, we have forms of leisure that have nothing to do with any productive work. Modern children don't always play at adult work; they also dress up their dolls, build lego fortresses, watch videos. If we're sufficiently affluent and safe, we can produce recreational activities so pleasant that work is unappealing by comparison. This may be why schoolroom and workplace discipline is necessary today; work is competing with very good toys.
I don't think we'd loose people who do the boring stuff like office work etc. if everybody went to a free school. I believe our personality differences are responsible for what we want to do and I guess there are a lot of people out there who just love to put things in order, calculate, make repetitive phonecalls and like the idea that they are helping the world to stay on top of things. I went to a pretty mainstream socialist school (former East Germany) and I got it all in a prechewed way. There was no freedom AT ALL. I am not into office work or any repetetive work. I am actually pretty artsy and all over the place :-) Which might as well be a response to the way our schools functioned.... combined with my genes and everything else that has contributed to the way I am.Maybe graduates from these free schools will pick office work for themselves also as a response to this school type. Maybe due to there personality they are struggling with that much freedom and the mass of opportunities that they seek out something more predictable and repetitive. And may even start to do so at school by seeking out other folks who function in similar ways and become "the boring group" who counts sticks and puts them neatly into selfmade cotton folders.I totally resonate with the free school philosophy and am glad I read about this (having a two year old son). I am totally in favour of letting the child take the lead and support and trust him in his choices and his innate curiosity about the world. Would be interesting to read some more about former Sudbury Valley School students and what they are doing now.
Many adults are coerced to accept things without Popperian learning.
I'm not even talking about covert coercion, but overt acceptance of authority in the workplace. If the boss says "Black is White" then even though you do not think the boss is an authority on this, it is more expedient for you to use this assumption than it is to do the legwork to disprove it.
This is politics. School is good at teaching kids when it is expedient and when it is not to question authority...maybe not for social welfare, but possibly for personal.
I agree that you can't expect students to learn phonics and the finer points of grammar by reading alone, without explaining the rules at some point. (I had a substitute English teacher in middle school who was a terrible speller because she'd never been taught the concept of phonics, and therefore had no idea how to spell a word unless she'd memorized it.)
The same goes for just about every other subject. But I do think it is valuable to in some fashion guide a student to "discover" concepts, rather than simply drill them into their minds. The "aha!" moment where a person realizes (partly on their own) the usefulness of a concept, is an extremely powerful learning tool.
The question for me is, how can we counter-act 20 years of institutionalized brainwashing?
For example, I notice I'm much more inclined to seek steady, safe employment than investigate even one venture that might not pay off, but if it did pay off, would lead to $500k a year income. Even at a 1/20 chance of paying off, the expected utility from seeking such ventures over a 40 year "career" would be extremely high.
"When they feel like" hunting or foraging appears to equate to "when they're desperately hungry". Most moderns have no idea what an incentive hunger can be and how appealing a regimented life with a full barn can be.
I agree with some here in that hunterer-gatherer societies don't have any "wow" factor that makes our society look pale in comparison. I also doubt any hunterer-gatherer society are/were partcularly highly-skilled. I'll take modern society warts and all than some romantic view of some of poorest parts of the world.
"Child-directed learning" has been tried and it's a disaster. It leads to e.g. literacy instruction that is not based on systematically teaching English orthography, but simply exposes the student to written sentences and expects her to pick up the writing system on her own. Or math textbooks that don't really teach anything at all because each student should "discover the answer for herself" and "come up with her own methods"--no matter whether these methods are actually sound.
I agree that this "free school" concept is just as extreme as 100% rote memorization. When all you need to learn to succeed in life is to mimick the physical activity and spoken language of the older people around you, then no formal schooling is necessary. But in a society where most labor is specialized, some kind of guidance is going to be necessary.
I think, though, that there is a great deal of value in making room for "child-directed learning" (my own term--I am not an educator or a sociologist) within a generally structured curriculum. My own experience in most of my primary and much of my secondary education was that I discovered things in a self-directed way (either at home or during self-study time at school), and that this knowledge was then organized and/or reinforced during the formal lessons.
Also, don't knock the role of formal schooling in preparing students to work in industrial jobs. While more and more employment these days is not in the traditional 9-to-5 working on an assembly line or behind a desk model, many (most?) of today's students will find themselves working in that type of environment after they complete their education.
Money is really a representative of the labor of the possessor, since labor must create goods or services that can be traded for money. What money does better than barter is to create a medium that is almost universally excepted for all goods and services. That way you can trade the product of your labor for the product of anothers labor that you want without having to acquire another good that they want if they do not want what you already have in excess.
There's really nothing stopping you from living a nomadic hunter/gatherer life in modern america. What's hypocritical is to expect to live such a life and enjoy anything more than a sustenance level of material wealth.
you want to live a life like that don't bitch when you don't have a car, or a TV, internet, regular meals, or health care....
"Hunter-gatherers do not have a concept of toil."
Isn't it fairer to say, based on the rest of that paragraph, that hunter-gatherers do not have a concept of play? Children's play, apparently, is just a miniature and symbolic version of adult work.
In a modern, commercial society, we have forms of leisure that have nothing to do with any productive work. Modern children don't always play at adult work; they also dress up their dolls, build lego fortresses, watch videos. If we're sufficiently affluent and safe, we can produce recreational activities so pleasant that work is unappealing by comparison. This may be why schoolroom and workplace discipline is necessary today; work is competing with very good toys.
I don't think we'd loose people who do the boring stuff like office work etc. if everybody went to a free school. I believe our personality differences are responsible for what we want to do and I guess there are a lot of people out there who just love to put things in order, calculate, make repetitive phonecalls and like the idea that they are helping the world to stay on top of things. I went to a pretty mainstream socialist school (former East Germany) and I got it all in a prechewed way. There was no freedom AT ALL. I am not into office work or any repetetive work. I am actually pretty artsy and all over the place :-) Which might as well be a response to the way our schools functioned.... combined with my genes and everything else that has contributed to the way I am.Maybe graduates from these free schools will pick office work for themselves also as a response to this school type. Maybe due to there personality they are struggling with that much freedom and the mass of opportunities that they seek out something more predictable and repetitive. And may even start to do so at school by seeking out other folks who function in similar ways and become "the boring group" who counts sticks and puts them neatly into selfmade cotton folders.I totally resonate with the free school philosophy and am glad I read about this (having a two year old son). I am totally in favour of letting the child take the lead and support and trust him in his choices and his innate curiosity about the world. Would be interesting to read some more about former Sudbury Valley School students and what they are doing now.
No, they enjoy drinking beer, yacking with friends and comparing guns. This is quite different from hunting.
Many adults are coerced to accept things without Popperian learning.
I'm not even talking about covert coercion, but overt acceptance of authority in the workplace. If the boss says "Black is White" then even though you do not think the boss is an authority on this, it is more expedient for you to use this assumption than it is to do the legwork to disprove it.
This is politics. School is good at teaching kids when it is expedient and when it is not to question authority...maybe not for social welfare, but possibly for personal.
I agree that you can't expect students to learn phonics and the finer points of grammar by reading alone, without explaining the rules at some point. (I had a substitute English teacher in middle school who was a terrible speller because she'd never been taught the concept of phonics, and therefore had no idea how to spell a word unless she'd memorized it.)
The same goes for just about every other subject. But I do think it is valuable to in some fashion guide a student to "discover" concepts, rather than simply drill them into their minds. The "aha!" moment where a person realizes (partly on their own) the usefulness of a concept, is an extremely powerful learning tool.
Really? Seems to me that many people enjoy hunting, even when they are not at all hungry.
Robin, I continue to be amused and saddened that you accept the Foucault critique of modern society without any moral outrage or calls for change.
Crunched the math. Regard the venture above,
E(venture) = 5,250,000 over 20 years.E(job @ 150k) = 3,000,000 over 20 years.
E(venture) = 20,500,000 over 40 years.E(job @ 200k) = 8,000,000 over 40 years.
The question for me is, how can we counter-act 20 years of institutionalized brainwashing?
For example, I notice I'm much more inclined to seek steady, safe employment than investigate even one venture that might not pay off, but if it did pay off, would lead to $500k a year income. Even at a 1/20 chance of paying off, the expected utility from seeking such ventures over a 40 year "career" would be extremely high.
"When they feel like" hunting or foraging appears to equate to "when they're desperately hungry". Most moderns have no idea what an incentive hunger can be and how appealing a regimented life with a full barn can be.
I agree with some here in that hunterer-gatherer societies don't have any "wow" factor that makes our society look pale in comparison. I also doubt any hunterer-gatherer society are/were partcularly highly-skilled. I'll take modern society warts and all than some romantic view of some of poorest parts of the world.
"Child-directed learning" has been tried and it's a disaster. It leads to e.g. literacy instruction that is not based on systematically teaching English orthography, but simply exposes the student to written sentences and expects her to pick up the writing system on her own. Or math textbooks that don't really teach anything at all because each student should "discover the answer for herself" and "come up with her own methods"--no matter whether these methods are actually sound.
I agree that this "free school" concept is just as extreme as 100% rote memorization. When all you need to learn to succeed in life is to mimick the physical activity and spoken language of the older people around you, then no formal schooling is necessary. But in a society where most labor is specialized, some kind of guidance is going to be necessary.
I think, though, that there is a great deal of value in making room for "child-directed learning" (my own term--I am not an educator or a sociologist) within a generally structured curriculum. My own experience in most of my primary and much of my secondary education was that I discovered things in a self-directed way (either at home or during self-study time at school), and that this knowledge was then organized and/or reinforced during the formal lessons.
Also, don't knock the role of formal schooling in preparing students to work in industrial jobs. While more and more employment these days is not in the traditional 9-to-5 working on an assembly line or behind a desk model, many (most?) of today's students will find themselves working in that type of environment after they complete their education.
kids can learn modern skills this way today
I daresay they can. As long as they want to. Not every school is full of kids who want to learn algebra.