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(35 reviews) Author: Visit Amazon's Peter Gray Page ISBN : 9780465025992 New from $20.86 Format: PDF
Download for free medical books PRETITLE Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life Hardcover POSTTITLE from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link (35 reviews) Author: Visit Amazon's Peter Gray Page ISBN : 9780465025992 New from $20.86 Format: PDFReview
Laurette Lynn, Unplugged Mom.com
“[A] well written, well organized and beautifully stated piece of work….I emphatically recommend this book for any parent as well as any educator or anyone interested in improving education for our society.”
Mothering.com
“[Free to Learn is] a powerful agent of transformation. I'd like to put a copy in the hands of every parent, teacher, and policy maker.”
Publishers Weekly
“[E]nergetic…Gray powerfully argues that schools inhibit learning…. [Gray’s] vivid illustrations of the ‘power of play’ to shape an individual are bound to provoke a renewed conversation about turning the tide in an educational system that fosters conformity and inhibits creative thinking.”
Frank Forencich, author of Exuberant Animal and Change Your Body, Change the World
“Free to Learn is a courageous and profoundly important book. Peter Gray joins the likes of Richard Louv and Alfie Kohn in speaking out for a more humane, compassionate and effective approach to education.”
Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works
“Peter Gray is one of the world’s experts on the evolution of childhood play, and applies his encyclopedic knowledge of psychology, and his humane voice, to the pressing issue of educational reform. Though I am not sure I agree with all of his recommendations, he forces us all to rethink our convictions on how schools should be designed to accommodate the ways that children learn.”
Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids
“All kids love learning. Most don’t love school. That’s a disconnect we’ve avoided discussing—until this lightning bolt of a book. If you’ve ever wondered why your curious kid is turning into a sullen slug at school, Peter Gray’s Free to Learn has the answer. He also has the antidote.”
David Sloan Wilson, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology, Binghamton University, and author of Evolution for Everyone
“The modern educational system is like a wish made in a folk tale gone horribly wrong. Peter Gray’s Free to Learn leads us out of the maze of unforeseen consequences to a more natural way of letting children educate themselves. Gray’s message might seem too good to be true, but it rests upon a strong scientific foundation. Free to Learn can have an immediate impact on the children in your life.”
Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, author of Einstein Never Used Flash Cards and A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool
“A compelling and most enjoyable read. Gray illustrates how removing play from childhood, in combination with increasing the pressures of modern-day schooling, paradoxically reduces the very skills we want our children to learn. The decline of play is serious business.”
Stuart Brown, M.D., Founder and President, The National Institute for Play, and author of Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul
“Peter Gray’s Free to Learn is profoundly necessary as a fundamental illumination of the continuing tragedy and entrapment of both kids and their teachers in a generally failing and failed educational system. Gray demonstrates through science and evolutionary biology that the human species is designed to play, is built through play, and that for kids, play equals learning. Free to Learn is timely, paradigm shifting, and essential for our long term survival as adaptive humans.”
“[A] well written, well organized and beautifully stated piece of work….I emphatically recommend this book for any parent as well as any educator or anyone interested in improving education for our society.”
Mothering.com
“[Free to Learn is] a powerful agent of transformation. I'd like to put a copy in the hands of every parent, teacher, and policy maker.”
Publishers Weekly
“[E]nergetic…Gray powerfully argues that schools inhibit learning…. [Gray’s] vivid illustrations of the ‘power of play’ to shape an individual are bound to provoke a renewed conversation about turning the tide in an educational system that fosters conformity and inhibits creative thinking.”
Frank Forencich, author of Exuberant Animal and Change Your Body, Change the World
“Free to Learn is a courageous and profoundly important book. Peter Gray joins the likes of Richard Louv and Alfie Kohn in speaking out for a more humane, compassionate and effective approach to education.”
Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works
“Peter Gray is one of the world’s experts on the evolution of childhood play, and applies his encyclopedic knowledge of psychology, and his humane voice, to the pressing issue of educational reform. Though I am not sure I agree with all of his recommendations, he forces us all to rethink our convictions on how schools should be designed to accommodate the ways that children learn.”
Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids
“All kids love learning. Most don’t love school. That’s a disconnect we’ve avoided discussing—until this lightning bolt of a book. If you’ve ever wondered why your curious kid is turning into a sullen slug at school, Peter Gray’s Free to Learn has the answer. He also has the antidote.”
David Sloan Wilson, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology, Binghamton University, and author of Evolution for Everyone
“The modern educational system is like a wish made in a folk tale gone horribly wrong. Peter Gray’s Free to Learn leads us out of the maze of unforeseen consequences to a more natural way of letting children educate themselves. Gray’s message might seem too good to be true, but it rests upon a strong scientific foundation. Free to Learn can have an immediate impact on the children in your life.”
Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, author of Einstein Never Used Flash Cards and A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool
“A compelling and most enjoyable read. Gray illustrates how removing play from childhood, in combination with increasing the pressures of modern-day schooling, paradoxically reduces the very skills we want our children to learn. The decline of play is serious business.”
Stuart Brown, M.D., Founder and President, The National Institute for Play, and author of Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul
“Peter Gray’s Free to Learn is profoundly necessary as a fundamental illumination of the continuing tragedy and entrapment of both kids and their teachers in a generally failing and failed educational system. Gray demonstrates through science and evolutionary biology that the human species is designed to play, is built through play, and that for kids, play equals learning. Free to Learn is timely, paradigm shifting, and essential for our long term survival as adaptive humans.”
About the Author
Peter Gray is a research professor in the Department of Psychology at Boston College. The author of Psychology, a highly regarded college textbook, he writes a popular blog called Freedom to Learn for Psychology Today. He lives in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts.
- Hardcover: 288 pages
- Publisher: Basic Books (March 5, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0465025994
- ISBN-13: 978-0465025992
- Product Dimensions: 1.3 x 6.5 x 9.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life PDF
According to Peter Gray. he wrote this book in response to the implications and consequences of a school-centric model for childhood development: "The school system has directly and indirectly, often unintentionally, fostered an attitude in society that children learn and progress primarily by doing tasks that are directed and evaluated by adults, and that children's own [informal, self-directed] activities are wasted time...Related to this anti-play attitude is an ever-increasing focus on children's [begin italics] performance [end italics], which can be measured, and decreasing concern for true learning, which is difficult or even impossible to measure. What matters in today's educational world is performance that can be scored and compared across students, across schools, and even across nations to see who is better [who scores higher] and who is worse [who scores lower]. Knowledge that is not part of the school curriculum, even deep knowledge, doesn't count."
Credit Gray with brilliant use of sequences to explain the development of a key concept or the steps/stages of a key process. For example, seven reasons why children don't like school; lessons to be learned from exemplary schools (e.g. Sudbury Valley School); universal types of children's play; five of the most valuable lessons to be learned from children's informal, self-directed ways of playing games such as baseball that formal, adult-directed games do not; three primary styles of parenting (i.e. trustful, directive domineering, and directive-protective; reasons for the decline in trustful parenting; and how to become a more trustful parent.
Peter Gray's book Free to Learn is an excellent addition to the genre of books on restoring freedom in education. Gray clearly states:
"Children are biologically predisposed to take charge of their own education. When they are provided with the freedom and means to pursue their own interests, in safe settings, they bloom and develop along diverse and unpredictable paths, and they acquire the skills and confidence required to meet life's challenges. In such an environment, children ask for any help they may need from adults. There is no need for forced lessons, lectures, assignments, tests, grades, segregation by age into classrooms, or any of the other trappings of our standard, compulsory system of schooling. All of these, in fact, interfere with the children's natural way of learning."
So why did we create schools that so directly "interfere with the children's natural way of learning"? Gray shows that in tribal cultures the focus of childhood was playing and learning knowledge, skills, and how to live self-sufficiently and honorably. When the agrarian revolution increased the need for child labor on farms, the values of school turned to toil, competition and status. While Gray's view of this is perhaps a bit idyllic, the reality is that modern schools are less concerned with student knowledge, skills, honor or abilities than with the universal goal of job training.
Certainly job training has an important place in advanced society, but Gray is focused on the education of children, and in fact the toll on children in our modern job-obsessed schools is very high. They are way more stressed than earlier generations of children and youth.
Why are we raising a generation of children and youth who are stressed, not secure?
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