Peter Gray

So they went off into the ocean, aimed at another island that they wanted to get to.

But a big storm came up and they ended up shipwrecked on an uninhabited island.

And nobody found them for 15 months.

Unlike in Lord of the Flies, these kids took care of themselves.

They did not war with one another.

They recognized, our lives are in danger here.

They figured out how to find food.

They figured out what's edible, what's not edible.

They actually planted a garden.

They created a garden in case they were there for a long time.

They always had one child on watch for passing ships to try to flag them.

One of the boys broke a leg

and the kids figured out how to set the leg to protect it, and it actually healed up.

They took care of one another in a remarkable way.

They survived, and so this is a story that's the exact opposite of the fiction Lord of the Flies.

Finally, it kind of reached a crisis point near the end of fourth grade where his mother, me, various adults from the school, including the school principal and some psychologists all met with him about you have to follow the rules.

He'd been very deliberately rebelling in ways that obviously the school, the teacher couldn't really tolerate.

But it was all a message to us that he was

really unhappy in school.

He needed something different.