Please share your stories about about freedom and learning.
Peter Gray
Published on January 6, 2010

Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology at Boston College, is a
specialist in developmental and evolutionary psychology and author of an
introductory textbook, Psychology.

Dear readers,

As you know if you have been following it for awhile, this blog is primarily about self-education, especially in children but also in adults. It's about learning that occurs through play, self-directed exploration, and self-initiated focused effort. The comments and emails I have received over the past few months suggest that many of you have stories to tell that are quite relevant to these themes. I would love to hear and perhaps share your stories, which can be about your children, others you know, or you. Your stories may be a great source of inspiration for other readers.

If you have a story to share, please email it to me at grayp@bc.edu. It can be as long as it needs to be for coherence, but please try to be succinct. (My guess is that most would be between 1/2 and 4 single-spaced pages long.) Please paste your story into the body of the email rather than send it as an attachment. If you have your own blog or website and would like to link your story to it for further information, you are welcome to do that.

Here are some topics that particularly interest me, about which I especially invite you to write:

• Learning to read without schooling. I am interested in how children learn to read in situations where they have no or little formal instruction in reading. I know that this occurs within a wide range of ages for children at Sudbury schools and in unschooling environments. If you have a story about this, I'm interested in all the relevant details you can provide. I plan to do a post on this soon and would like to include your observations.

• Learning math without schooling. Some young self-educators learn math because they love it. Others learn it because they want to go to college and have to take the math SAT, or because they need to know it to pursue some other interest that intrigues them. If you have a story about self-initiated math learning I want to hear it.

More of the story,
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