We, as a modern adult society, are quite literally “driving our children crazy in the name of education,” according to author and Boston College research professor Peter Gray. Speaking yesterday at the SXSWedu conference, where I’ll be reporting for Alt Ed Austin throughout the week, Gray cited numerous studies showing a marked increase since the mid-1950s in childhood psychopathology. This change is closely correlated, he said, with the expansion of in-school and homework hours and the attendant decline in children’s free play time over the same half-century. Careful to note that he could not definitively prove a causal relationship, he said that after more than thirty years of professional research and personal observation, he considers the “continual usurpation of children’s free time” to be the most likely reason for the rise in anxiety disorders, depression, and suicide among children and teenagers.

Gray, author of a widely used introductory psychology text now in its sixth edition, explained that the higher numbers are not, as some might suggest, the results of today’s better diagnostic tools or broader recognition of these disorders; rather, they reflect data from standardized assessment tools that have not changed over the decades as they have been used to measure anxiety levels and depression in normalized samples of children and adolescents. Interestingly, the psychopathology numbers do not correspond at all with economically difficult periods or wartime, Gray said; children seem to have weathered the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War—all shown to have been seriously stressful times for adults—with no significant increase in mental or emotional distress. What is stressful for children, Gray posited, is the lack of freedom to play and a shortage of friends to play with.

Play by definition is self-directed, Gray said. “It is nature’s means of teaching children to take control of their own lives.” We are naturally selected, he explained, to practice solving problems on our own from a very young age. Independent play, especially the kind that pushes safety boundaries—like young chimpanzees swinging just a bit too high or far—is necessary for healthy development. Animal behavior researchers believe this is about learning to regulate fear and other emotions, he said. Unlike our hunter-gatherer ancestors (and members of the few such societies that survive today), children in the United States and most other developed economies largely miss out on these crucial developmental experiences.

According to Gray, the closest modern students can come to the kind of freedom young humans experienced in the egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies that were the norm from 1.8 million years ago until only ten thousand years ago (the latter characterized as “an evolutionarily insignificant amount of time”) is in schools that follow the Sudbury model of democratic education. As a longtime observer of and sometime systematic researcher at the original Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, Gray has concluded that it closely resembles the hunter-gatherer mode of education, although its founders did not set out with this goal in mind. These schools, Gray said, share the following conditions that make them work:

unlimited freedom to play and explore—“because that's how children educate themselves”
free age mixing
access to a variety of knowledgeable and caring adults
access to the culture’s tools and freedom to use them, especially the cutting-edge ones that help them prepare for the future
immersion in a stable, moral, democratic community (in contrast to what Gray characterizes as the “tyranny” of traditional schools, where kids have virtually no legal rights)

Gray’s new book, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, was officially released today. It documents the evidence for his theories in detail, drawing on research in anthropology, behavioral and evolutionary psychology, and historical sources. You can also find more of Gray’s writings on play and education at his Psychology Today blog, Freedom to Learn. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on his provocative work; please feel free to share them in the comments below.

Peter Gray will give a talk and Q&A tonight at 7:00 p.m. at the Clearview Sudbury School. It is free and open to the public. More details about the event are on Clearview’s blog and Facebook event page.

There is no right school size for everyone. Some children thrive in large groups with many diverse social opportunities such as those found in most public schools and typical private schools. But many children (and adults, for that matter) feel overwhelmed by crowds and find that they don’t function at their best when surrounded by too many people. They blossom in small groups and when nurtured with individual mentoring. That’s one reason Alt Ed Austin’s Alternative School Directory is focused on small programs. (You can find somewhat larger progressive schools in our carefully curated Other Recommended Schools directory.)

My son’s school during his upper elementary and early middle school years was what some in the education world refer to as a “microschool” and others like to call “small but mighty.” It had about a dozen students and one main teacher (though students also learned from parent volunteers, neighbors, and guest speakers, as well as from artists, artisans, and other community experts the students visited in their workplaces). Now a teenager, my son is one of about 60 students enrolled in high school and middle school classes at another innovative school in Austin. These are just two of many intentionally small schools featured on this site, and the demand for this kind of intimate learning environment is growing. To be sure, some of the smallest schools in the directory are simply new; they plan to grow in student enrollment, staff size, and facilities—but not to exceed the size of a well-functioning community.

What is the upper limit of such a community? That’s a matter of opinion, and education researchers continue to debate the issue and to study the effects of “small learning communities” or “schools within schools” established in the last two decades in Boston, New York, and other large cities—even right here as part of AISD’s High School Redesign. The main idea behind the Human Scale Education Movement is that smaller classes and school communities lead to closer relationships between teachers and students and among fellow students, which in turn lead to higher levels of academic engagement, fewer dropouts, better test scores, higher rates of college admissions, etc. These programs generally try to cap learning communities at around 300 (so, for example, an urban high school of 1,200 students might encompass 4 separate or semiseparate learning communities that stick together with the same teachers and advisers for several years).

These smaller learning communities within large urban public schools are a good step in the right direction, but 300 is still too many for some kids, perhaps most. For my purposes at Alt Ed Austin, I’ve chosen to embrace Dunbar’s Number, a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom a human being can maintain stable relationships, which works out to approximately 150. First proposed by the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar and popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point, Dunbar’s Number has come to be seen as a useful guideline in organizing groups in business, industry, law enforcement, some European government agencies, and even online social networks. Why not education?

Here’s a brief video primer on Dunbar’s Number, by Robin Dunbar himself:

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2010/02/18/Robin_Dunbar_How_Many_Friends_Does_One_Person_Need Evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar expands on "Dunbar's number," his theory that the maximum number of stable relationships a person can maintain is approximately 150. Time to delete a few hundred Facebook friends?

What’s your upper size limit for a school or other created community? Do you have a lower limit? Does it depend on the age of the students or other factors? Does size matter?

[2018 update: My son, mentioned above, is now in college, studying at a terrific small liberal arts college.]

Teri