⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Free to Learn by Gray
| Full Title | Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life |
| Authors | Peter O. Gray |
| Year Published | 2013 |
| Date Read | March 31, 2025 |
| Rating | 5/5 stars |
| Retention | 16 Anki cards created |
This was an awesome book. One of my favorite attributes of it is just how positive and optimistic it is — while it of course is motivated by the decreases in free play in recent decades, it only spends a little time on those, instead opting to talk at length about the promise of what more free play could enable.
The book really shifted my perspective on corporal punishment. In the past, my perception of the arguments against it were that it is somehow morally wrong to hit children, or that doing so might damage their upbringing. I haven’t historically and still do not buy this as a good argument. However, Free to Learn provides motivations that are completely orthogonal to these: primarily drawing on evidence that shows primitive cultures did not do such hitting, Gray links the motivation for that type of punishment in the first place to the Neolithic Revolution (and further, the Industrial Revolution). Needing kids to do specific things in a specific way is an attribute of the society that they are being brought up to live in, not some objective requirement of upbringing in general. I found this to be quite an intuitive explanation, and now I feel I’m more on the side of ‘avoid’ for the practice. I love when a book reverses a long-held opinion of mine like this.
I’m honestly not sure when I have felt this excited by a book’s thesis. Would highly recommend basically everyone read this, in particular those with some relationship to young children.