Abstract
Most educational research has been conducted in standard school settings. In this chapter, the author describes how children become educated in hunter-gatherer cultures, at a radically alternative school, and in families that have chosen to “unschool” their children—all of which are settings where children and adolescents are in charge of their own education. The author concludes that, given an optimal self-educational environment, the instinctive ways of learning that evolved to serve hunter-gatherers’ needs still function well in our culture today, such that coercive, top-down education is not necessary. The optimal environment for self-education includes (a) the expectation that education is children’s responsibility; (b) unlimited freedom to play, explore, and pursue one’s own interests; (c) opportunity to play with the tools of the culture; (d) access to a variety of caring adults, who are helpers, not judges; (e) free age mixing; and (f) immersion in a stable, moral, democratic community.
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Gray, P. (2016). Children’s Natural Ways of Educating Themselves Still Work: Even for the Three Rs. In: Geary, D., Berch, D. (eds) Evolutionary Perspectives on Child Development and Education. Evolutionary Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29986-0_3
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