Will schools finally get the message?
Childhood is about play, period.
The KidsLearn Substack is written by Suki Wessling, known as “Prof.” Suki to her students. Scroll to the bottom for links to my classes, books, and podcasts. If you enjoy my work, please interact with this post. A “like” or comment goes a long way and will make my day!
Radical no more
I’ve been reading Peter Gray since I was homeschooling my kids. The first time I read a piece by him I thought, Great ideas, but nobody in power will ever listen. It was the No Child Left Behind era, when schools (and individual children) were being punished if they didn’t meet the Sysiphean task of bringing all children’s scores over the 50th percentile.
This morning I opened the New York Times to find that Gray is cited in an article that pretty much reads as a bunch of secular homeschoolers sitting in a circle saying, “What we said.”
There is growing evidence that school itself is essential to understanding why so many children seem to be struggling. It can be a cause of stress that exacerbates anxiety or depression; but just as importantly and less frequently acknowledged, it is often where disorder presents, leading many children — and their parents — down the path toward a diagnosis.
Yeah, what we said.
I started homeschooling under great duress. Our younger child was a wonderful, brilliant, volatile little soul who simply couldn’t stand to be in a classroom.
“What’s happening is, instead of saying, ‘We need to fix the schools,’ the message is, ‘We need to fix the kids,’” said Peter Gray.
There was no fixing my kid. The therapist we were seeing had extensive public school experience as a counselor, and told us that she figured he’d be put in a special education classroom. I soon found out that it was worse than that: Because our district only offered IEPs (the plans created for children with disabilities) for kids who were “behind” in school, our bright child would simply be pushed toward a mental illness diagnosis and drugged into submission.
We chose to homeschool, but since then I have watched many families I know, often without the flexibility I had to cut back on work and take on homeschooling, fall to the cycle that is now familiar.
Getting a child treated, potentially with medication, could help an entire classroom achieve higher scores, especially if the child’s behavior was disruptive to others. And in some parts of the country, children with disabilities were not counted toward a school’s overall marks, a carve-out that could boost scores.
The way it was
When I started homeschooling our child, the first question I had to answer is what kindergarten at our house would look like. My husband and I talked about what we remembered about kindergarten: finger painting and storytime, singing songs and playing games. Neither of us remembered what we saw when we had toured kindergartens for our older child: Schools touting their test scores, classrooms focussed on making sure kids could read sight words before the start of first grade, “remedies” (aka punishments) like cutting recess time for underperforming kids.
Before the 1980s, American children usually had recess breaks throughout the day. By 2016, only eight states required daily recess in elementary schools. And when researchers studied what had become of lunchtime, they learned that children often had just 20 minutes to not only eat but stop to use the bathroom after class, walk to the cafeteria and wait in line for food.
In our childhoods, there was no such thing as homework most nights until junior high school. Perhaps in elementary school we’d have “work” to do at home, but I never brought home a packet of worksheets. I remember interviewing my family about our family tree, gathering items like bottle tops to donate to our art projects, and reading, reading, reading and more reading.
Then we went off the deep end
I once violated the “no politics” rule on a homeschool email list by referring to “the execrable Arne Duncan.” When I got moderated, I had to laugh. I thought that statement was just a statement of fact in our crowd, not politics.
The demands on performance in higher grades trickled down into younger and younger ages. In 2009, the Obama administration offered greater funding to schools that adopted new national learning standards called the Common Core. These included an emphasis on reading by the end of kindergarten, even though many early childhood experts believe that not all children are developmentally ready to read at that age.
It’s important to remember that most parents have no basis to question their public school’s approach. I was hanging out with a friend whose younger child was in kindergarten one time and she expressed concern that her child might have a disability—because he hadn’t quite mastered the 30 sight words he needed in order to “graduate” to first grade. She was shocked when I pointed out that my academically advanced middle schooler hadn’t been able to read one sight word at the end of kindergarten. Phonics instruction had been a complete disaster—his brain was simply not ready to read. Once he matured, my “failure” of a kindergartener had the sort of brain that got him three degrees—one technical and two humanities—from a top university.
“On the edge of normal”
We had a wonderful pediatrician, and he had a phrase that he got to employ multiple times in regard to our children. He said:
“I want you to know that this is completely normal. It’s on the far edge of normal, but I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.”
Thank goodness for his reassurance, because we were being told left and right that our kids were, in some way, wrong. From preschool onward, I was told that even our well-behaved older child had a variety of disorders by teachers who were responding to parents’ eagerness for a diagnosis.
At that point, the best thing to do is to prove that your child has a mental disorder. With a doctor’s diagnosis, at least, adaptations are possible. In this way, the rise in diagnoses is also a revolt against education policymaking that strips away the particulars of people, treating them as interchangeable data points.
Our older child was highly sensitive and was lucky to have God’s Gift to Unusual Preschoolers, Teacher Cari. She let him attach himself to her as she went about her work, unconcerned that a 2-year-old might have some sort of “disorder.” Before Cari he had another teacher who had confided in me that I might want to seek an autism diagnosis.
Neither party has the answer
The situation with our public schools is many years in the making, and it’s been a bipartisan train wreck. While Democrats listened to people like Arne Duncan, who “cured” schools by firing everyone the children had bonded with so one day they’d come to school to be greeted by strangers,1 Republicans kept cutting funding and forcing the idea that parochial and charter schools would somehow do better.2
The answer here isn’t just political; it’s social. Our culture drives our politics, and as a culture we have been too ready to listen to technocrats. I love technocrats when they apply systems thinking to complex modern systems. But children’s development hasn’t “modernized.” We humans developed our complex brains in the village structure, where children were both allowed the freedom to play but also given the responsibility to be part of society.
As Peter Gray once said in a talk I went to, “Hunter-gatherers give their children machetes. We need to give our children tools and expect them to use them wisely.”
And really, no one has the one right answer
Teaching human beings is a complex, human-centered activity. The reason that the technocrats have failed so badly is that you can’t engineer the human population the way you can the highway system. Research that says “kids learn this way” always leaves out enough kids that a school based on it will fail.
The best teachers understand that every child has a distinct way of learning. This is especially true for children who fall outside the ever-diminishing definition of normal.
Schools need to be flexible and inclusive, less dependent on rules and more dependent on great, well-educated teachers.
There are plenty of examples of successful school systems in other cultures that are tempting to emulate. But we already have the perfect model: American public schools in the 60s and 70s produced the thoughtful, creative, flexible thinkers that we need. Of course our curriculum needs to be updated—my early 1970s social studies textbook stated that “One day man may go to the moon!” (Emphasis mine.) And of course we need to fund our schools as we used to in order to attract great teachers back into the classroom with a livable wage, comfortable facilities, and respect.
But the idea that school should be a loving, fun place will never need to be updated.
https://www.npr.org/2010/04/19/126111829/duncan-prescribes-drastic-measures-for-schools
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/23/nx-s1-5397175/trump-federal-voucher-private-school