I’ve followed Peter Gray for many years. He’s a US psychology researcher and scholar, a research professor of psychology at Boston College, and the author of an introductory psychology textbook. Gray’s research explores the relationship between neuroendocrinology, developmental psychology, anthropology and education. Peter’s also a great role model for all of us. At 82, he’s still going strong.

Below is a Substack post about school as a captive environment. I’ve always thought of schools as a sort of prison lite where young people are warehoused, controlled, and taught to be obedient and to conform. While they failed in my case, the result of my upbringing and maybe the nature of some of the schools I attended, they are largely successful in achieving their goals. This is also something I studied in my Ph.D. program.

MAA

School is a captive environment, which distorts the nature of childhood.

Dear friends,

Recently, Cevin (pronounced Kevin) Soling sent me a link to a new article he and Kathryn Burrows published in the scholarly journal Educational Studies. The article is entitled Compulsory schooling as a form of captivity: A polemic.

Cevin is not one to mince words. He calls something what it is. I first met Cevin years ago, shortly after I had viewed his 2009 award-winning film The War on Kids, in which, among other things, he compares the typical urban public school (unfavorably) to a high-security prison. For a few years we served together on the board of directors of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education. Cevin is a gentle, kind person whose words, soft-spoken, cut to the heart of things.

His article with Kathryn Burrows begins with the following paragraph:

“Every weekday morning across America, millions of children are required by law to report to designated institutional facilities where they will spend much of their waking hours under systematic surveillance, movement restriction, and behavioral control. This phenomenon—compulsory schooling—has become so normalized that questioning its fundamental structure appears radical, even though the conditions it creates would be considered unacceptable in any other context involving free citizens.”

Soling and Burrows define captivity, just as researchers studying captive animals or humans in prison define it, as a condition that includes the following four components: (1) constraint on preferred movements, (2) segregation from attached environments, (3) institutional provision of survival needs, and (4) taming through privacy reduction and behavior control.

It is not hard for the authors to establish clearly that our standard schools are captive environments for children, by all these criteria. Children are required by law to be there, they are removed from their homes and other environments to which they might feel attached, their basic needs are managed by the institution, and their behavior is systematically and deliberately shaped toward compliance. The authors acknowledge that children are not in school around the clock, so they are not always in captivity, but that does not negate the fact that they are in captivity while at school, which amounts to a good portion of their time. You can read Soling’s and Burrows’s discussion in full by downloading their article. But now, here, I want to turn attention to the consequences of their analysis for the study of child psychology.

Why Researchers Study Animals and Children in Captivity

Researchers who study animal or human behavior love to do experiments. The experimental method is regarded as the queen of methods for studying cause-effect relationships. In experiments, you manipulate the conditions for different groups, or for the same group at different times, and record the behavioral effects. But to conduct experiments with animals or children, you almost need to work with captive subjects. Your subjects must be in a setting and disposition where they can be manipulated, that is, where they will accept being put into one condition or another. This is why most research on animal behavior is conducted with animals in cages and most research on children is done in schools or school-like settings.

Children in school, and heavily schooled children even when not in school, are ripe to be subjects in experiments. They are used to being told what to do, used to conditions where the task is to please the authority figure. So, it is easy to assign some to Condition A and others to Condition B and then give them some sort of test to see if the two conditions produce different results. And, voila, you have, quite likely, a finding that you can publish in a scholarly journal of child psychology.

Even if you do the experiment in a laboratory rather than in the school building itself, you are dealing with subjects who have been schooled to do as they are told, without questioning, when confronted by an authoritative figure seen as the equivalent of a schoolteacher. As I have discussed previously, the major lesson in school is obedience. To avoid punishment and pass in school, the main requirement is that you do what you are told to do, no matter how silly or stupid it is. Almost the only way you can fail is to challenge authority, either directly or indirectly by not doing what you are told to do. This kind of conditioning creates adequately tamed subjects for research.

A problem with all such studies is that the behavior of animals and children in captivity may be quite different from their behavior in the wild. This is well understood and often acknowledged in animal research but generally ignored in research on children. For children, we might think of “in the wild” as being settings where children are free to behave in accordance with their natural drives, instincts, and what they have learned in conditions of freedom, as contrasted with “in captivity” where they understand that they must do as they are told.

If you want to study animals in the wild, you must be like Jane Goodall in her study of wild chimpanzees. You must seek them out in their natural settings, find ways to get close enough to them to see what they are doing, and watch them for perhaps hundreds of hours to see how they respond to various conditions that occur in their natural environment. If you are studying children in the wild, you must do something comparable to that. You must find ways to observe them as they go about their freely chosen activities without disrupting those activities.

Such work is hard. It may take a long time—longer than PhD students may be able or willing to take to get their degree, and longer than assistant professors may be able to take before a tenure decision is made. Moreover, because such naturalistic studies can almost never be described in the terminology of experiments (with independent and dependent variables), and cannot rigorously test cause-effect theories, they are often not given the same respect by the research community as experiments, even though they may tell us much more about the real priorities and behaviors of the species being studied.

How Might Research on Captive Children Distort Our Understanding of Children’s Nature?

Research on animal behavior has revealed many differences between animals in captivity and in the wild, which vary depending on the species and the conditions of captivity (e.g. here and here). Reviews suggest that captivity has dramatic effects on moods: It can create anger, anxiety, and/or depression. It can create purposeless pacing or what might be called behavioral tics. It can lead to learned helplessness, in which the animal stops trying to cope with stressful situations or trying in other ways to satisfy its own needs and desires. It can lead to physiological changes, such as high levels of stress hormones, particularly cortisol and other glucocorticoids.

What are some of the effects that the school setting, or the condition of being heavily schooled, may have on children?

One effect, directly predictable from the animal research, is that we would see more of what we call mental illness in captives. Elsewhere (e.g. here and in my new book) I have presented much evidence that, as schooling has become ever more restrictive and consuming of children’s time, and as settings outside of school have become increasingly school-like, we have seen increased rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide among kids.

Another effect is helplessness. Researchers have regularly found that captivity, where the captives can do little for themselves and are dependent on their captors for their survival needs, stop taking initiative for themselves, stop seeking ways of coping with the stressful situation. Soling and Burrows contend, quite aptly, that coercive schools are not just settings for learned helplessness; they are settings for taught helplessness. In schools, using systems of rewards and punishments, authorities actively suppress children’s attempts to take initiative, to be creative, to take charge of their own lives. While agency is a positive value in the “wild,” it gets you into trouble in school.

Arguably (maybe inarguably) the most defining characteristics of childhood are curiosity and playfulness, yet relatively little can be found on these in the research literature on child psychology. Why? Because they are suppressed in school and because they can only be studied under conditions in which children in free. Curiosity and playfulness originate from within children; for us to see the effects of these drives we need to stand back and let them happen. That does not fit the experimental paradigm. The research literature is jammed with studies of children’s so-called “academic” behavior, because that is easily studied in school, but sparce in studies of children’s play and almost devoid of studies of children’s curiosity (as I discussed in detail here).

Another research distortion created by schooling concerns children’s playmates. In school children are strictly segregated by age, and age-segregated schooling has led to a continuation of age segregation even outside of school. In contrast, studies of children in cultures without coerced schooling reveal that children almost always play in age-mixed groups. Indeed, elsewhere I have contended that same-age play is an artifact of modern times; it rarely occurred prior to the advent of age-graded schools. Age-segregated play lacks much of the developmental value clearly seen in mixed-age play.

Still another distortion has to do with competition versus cooperation. Children in school are not only captive, deprived of opportunity to behave as they otherwise would prefer, but are forced by adults into continuous competitions with one another. Who is best? Who wins? Who gets the highest grades? Who gets honors? Who makes the varsity team? Elsewhere I have pointed out that when competition isn’t forced on children, they are generally far more cooperative, less competitive, than they are in adult-controlled activities. They are far more interested in making friends with peers than in beating them.

Concluding Thoughts

There are two ways to think about the purpose of research into child psychology. One is to think of its purpose as documenting the moods and behavioral tendencies of most children in our current society. If that is the purpose, then studying captive children is the way to go, as most children today spend much of their life in captivity.

Another way, however, is to think of the purpose as that of understanding children as biological creations of Mother Nature (natural selection), who innately strive to take control of their lives, strive for independence, and play and explore in quite remarkable ways when free to do so. To pursue that purpose, we must study children in settings outside of captivity and, ideally, study children who have not been held captive to the degree that most children today have been. This is the argument for studying child behavior in settings such as centers for Self-Directed Education, where children are free to choose their own activities and free to mingle with whomever they choose. Next to studying children in hunter-gatherer societies or other unschooled societies, this is the closest we can come to understanding the biological nature of childhood. That’s why I have focused much of my own research on children in those settings.

As always, I am interested in your thoughts and questions related to the ideas discussed here. This Substack is, in part, a forum for discussion. Your comments add to the value of these letters for me and other readers. You will notice that commenters on these letters are highly respectful of one another, regardless of whether they agree or disagree.

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With respect and best wishes,

Peter