School Is A Prison And Damages Our Kid Summary

Children Can Educate Themselves Many communities do not have highly advanced education systems, or a structured way to educate their children. There are smart people in these communities. How did they get smart? What did they do to acquire this knowledge? In “School is a Prison and Damages Our Kids” Peter Gray states that, “Children’s natural abilities will educate them”, this can happen by avoiding the traditional school structure, allowing them to learn what they want, and allowing them to use democratic schools. First, the traditional school structure needs to be avoided. In the traditional school structure children are required to attend school, taking away their freedom. According to Peter Gray traditional schools are, “well designed for indoctrination and obedience training but not much else”. He believes this is why some of the smartest people like Albert Einstein, and Thomas Edison dropped out of school. Professors Mihaly Csikszeentmihalyi and Jeremy Hunter conducted a study to see how happy children were throughout the day. They found that children were the least happy when they were in school. All of these children were going to a traditional school. This explains why traditional schools are not effective. …show more content…
Gray said, “research shows that people of all ages learn best when that are self-motivated, pursuing answers to questions that reflect their personal interest and achieving goals that they’ve set for themselves”, Gray believes that this is the best way for children to learn. He used an experiment done by Sugata Mitra to prove this point. Sugata Mitra put outdoor computers in an area were children were illiterate; they began to learn many things, to include reading. Allowing kids to use their curiosity, creativity, and interests to learn is a much better way for them to