Peter Gray

And this was his way of telling us that.

So ultimately, the result of that was that we found a very alternative school, a school that it's a place where there are all sorts of opportunities for learning, but no coercion about it.

The name of the school, for people who are interested, it's the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, still in existence.

It's actually been in existence for over 50 years.

It's a school that is based on the principle that children learn best when they direct their own learning, when they make their own decisions about what they want to learn.

It's a democratic school.

It's run by the school meeting where everybody has a vote.

students and staff members.

The students are there from four on through late teenage years.

The children are not segregated by age.

Part of the

philosophy of the school is that younger children learn naturally from older children and older children learn how to be caring and leaders by interacting with younger children.

So this is a school he went to and he went all the way through what elsewhere would be called high school.

It changed my career because as a concerned

parent, I, like many listeners here, might wonder, well, boy, what's going to happen if I allow them to go all the way through high school here?

So I've been doing a very different kind of research at Boston College.

I've been doing brain research with rodents.

But I decided, you know, I need to find out what happens with the graduates of this school.

This school had already been around long enough that there were graduates.

And so I did a study of the graduates and found they're doing very well.