Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life

Soon after celebrating my primary certification as point of culmination and cessation for my mandatory schooling, I got disillusioned when I realized that continuing medical education will never end unless I stop practicing medicine. Around the same time, I observed my nephews rebelling against our constant push to timely complete schoolwork. I had always wondered how youngsters will learn if they do not go to school. Isn’t their preference to play counterintuitive to their survival? How can they be born with this paradoxically conflicting instinct? Then it dawned to me that mandatory schooling is a very modern invention that has not had enough time to get ingrained into our genes. Therefore, our current genetic urges about what–how–why to learn, which have evolved over millenniums, have remained beyond the understanding of modern schooling. Henceforth, my pursuit for happiness led me to read the book, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, by Peter Gray, PhD, who is a well-known research professor in psychology, author of the textbook Psychology, and renowned blogger for Psychology Today. This book changed me as learner and an educator. It is now loud and clear to me why we do not enjoy our mandatory modern education. Instead of satiating our urge to learn, it is forcing us to learn, wherein, although we are being made to binge on it, our instinctive existence is always hoping to find a way to purge it. Although this book is intended to open the eyes of parents and teachers among us while advocating appropriate and natural nurturing of childhood within us, we, as the modern practitioners of medicine, cannot underestimate the importance of this book for ourselves because, while the society as our parent and teacher expects and mandates us to continually educate ourselves to remain certified for practicing medicine, our inner instinct—the child within—always rebels to play and learn along the way. This 288-page book is like taking a walk in the woods, after which the reader longs for more. It is divided into 10 chapters, which aptly begin with “What Have We Done …” and appropriately end with “…in Our Modern World.” The focus of the book is to make us understand what “… Playful State of Mind” truly is, and how we instinctively learn more from our playing peers than from our working teachers because the “plays” from which we truly learn are the ones that we are always “free” to quit. The book makes its case to “Free (us) to Learn …” by interpreting millenniums of historical context and presenting decades of psychological research along with the exemplification of Sudbury Valley School and its founding educators, including Daniel Greenberg, who have been “staffing/managing” the world-renowned private school at Framingham, MA, since its inception in 1968. Although the Sudbury Valley School model has been slow to percolate into our modern psyche and slower to replicate across our modern world, it is not clear whether (and when) it will pick up the pace because our less-than-a-century-old mandatory schooling-based education will have to give in and accept our more-than-millenniums-old instinctive play-based learning. After reading this book, and while role “playing” the devil’s advocate, 2 big questions arise: Why does childhood stop learning from play as it evolves into adulthood because even after graduation from Sudbury Valley School at a certain age of childhood, the well-adjusted, happier, and matured adults have to seek modern-world opportunities and essentialities like colleges and jobs, which are still bounded by the realms of mandatory education? and Would our booming population and its beaming progress have been possible without mandatory schooling? Although we might have been happier for millions of years when we were neither forced to go to school nor expected to keep living forever, we may have progressed at such lightning speeds within the past few decades only secondary to mandatory schooling because it is producing a surplus of “essential” professionals like engineers and doctors, whose ever-growing numbers are still not meeting the disproportionately growing needs of modern society, leading to their eternal shortages. In summary, reading, loving, and recommending Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life may not enlighten our modern practice of medicine yet, I at least will sleep better at night knowing that I am not born to be mandatorily schooled per a curriculum because I am driven by my own desires to quench my quest to educate myself, irrespective of whether or not continuing medical education and/or maintenance of certification remain mandatory requirements to practice medicine in future. Deepak Gupta, MDDepartment of AnesthesiologyWayne State University/Detroit Medical CenterDetroit, Michigan[email protected]

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