Free to Learn - Some perspectives

As a fresh parent just rolling out the shop, it comes naturally to think about giving your child the best possible environment to grow and learn.

Peter Gray’s book Free to Learn is about the importance of play and how children learn best when they have the freedom to explore this magical world on their own terms. It boils down to a couple of important points about play which I think are worth internalizing:

No rules or structure. Let kids make their own rules.
Mix various ages. Young should learn from old, old will develop nurturing and leadership skills.
Freedom for anyone to quit any game.
No adult interventions, praises, or rewards.

Free play is not just about the individual child, but more about exploring social skills as a group. Reaching consensus. Emotional control. It takes a whole lot of empathy to come up with a game that is fun for everyone.

What resonated with me: sometimes kids take 2 hours to come up with the rules of a game, only then to just abandon it and go do something else. It’s all part of the process.

When these principles are applied correctly, the three holy pillars of our hunter-gatherer brain are activated:

Curiosity. Being attracted to all counterintuitive things. Explore the interesting weird things.
Playfulness. Learn different skills: physical, linguistic, exploratory, constructive, and fantasy.
Sociability. Learn to cooperate with your fellow humans.

Anything else, like adult intervention, only makes things more boring for kids. Someone telling you how to do it is usually much less interesting than figuring it out yourself. Aren’t we just the same?

Yikes, so, can we just, I don’t know, let children play?

Isn’t our world full of horrors, dangers, and vicious traps? How do we balance freedom with safety?
Is there no room for authority, setting strict boundaries and rules?
And what about school, where there’s less time for play and more focus on formal learning?

Let’s dive into these questions.

Safety

For one, freedom to play doesn’t mean letting them free to explore totally unsupervised. But it does mean trusting them to learn from their experiences.

For example, while it’s important to teach children about dangers like the busy traffic on that particular road nearby, it’s also crucial to give them space to take small risks, like climbing trees or exploring the neighborhood. This builds confidence and problem-solving skills and also gives you confidence step by step that the children are able to assess dangerous things as they gain experience.

In today’s world, a good balance might be just enough supervision. Let them play freely, but check in regularly or keep a healthy distance. Encourage exploration, but offer guidance when they ask for it.

Authority

Much like just enough supervision, we could consider something like just enough boundaries. Some plants are poisonous, some roads are just too dangerous. Some boundaries just really need to be there.

Instead of enforcing these rules from the top down, a more collaborative approach could also work well. During play, children make up their own rules and reach a consensus. Adults could use a similar mechanism, so children make it part of their belief system.

Don’t direct, guide.

School

Historically, schools were designed to prepare children for a world where obedience to authority was essential, like in factories or during times of war. Whether that was a good thing or not, I don’t know. In modern times, however, this rigid structure might not be the best approach for all children.

Final thoughts

Children who have experienced traumas have been observed to play at themes that involve reenactment coupled with some form of soothing. Repair some of the damage.
The evolutionary purpose of play is to help the young learn how to cope with emergencies. Being chased is preferred by most animals over chasing. It gives the greatest challenges and danger.
Reports suggest that frequent video game players are on average better socially adjusted than their nonplaying peers. Don’t throw the computer away.

To conclude this short article, something to think about for adults:

Geniuses are those who somehow retain, into adulthood, the imaginative capacities of small children.