Episode 14: On Play

[MUSIC PLAYING] You're listening to Community Crafted Education, where we explore alternatives to conventional K-12 education and their potential impacts on society and culture. I'm Eric Wairn, Director of the National Hybrid Schools Project. Today, we're joined by Peter Gray from Boston College. We'll talk about self-directed and play-based learning. All right, we're here with Peter Gray from Boston College. Peter, thank you so much for joining us today. Very happy to. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah, so you've written a lot about self-directed education and play-based learning. Can you just tell us a little bit to start about your background and how you got involved in this line of research? Sure. So I started off as a neuroscientist studying the brains of rats and mice and the binding of certain hormones in the brain. And meanwhile, I had a son who was very rebellious in school. He hated school. He went from kindergarten through fourth grade fighting the teachers every minute that he was there. His mother and I were constantly called in as if we could do something about it. And we eventually realized this just absolutely was not going to work for him. We had to listen to him. We had to be on his side. We finally decided instead of fighting him about it. And we found this extraordinarily alternative, very radically different school called the Sudbury Valley School, which there's only a couple miles from where we live. At that time, around 1980, this would have been in the late 1970s. Two miles was an easy walk for a nine-year-old or a bicycle ride. So this was very convenient. But this was a school where there's not only no required courses, but there aren't even any courses offered. If a group of kids decides they won a course, usually they could talk a staff member into leading one. If they want a staff member to lead it. But it only goes as long as the kids want it. That's the way the school operates as a democratic community where it's one person, one vote. There are children there from age four on through high school age, through typically mid to late teens. And children are there free to do what they want, as long as they follow the rules of the school, all of which are democratically made, none of which have to do with learning. They have to do with the kinds of rules that any reasonably large group of people has to have. So they don't interfere with one another. And so that some kind of order is kept. Rules like if you take something out, you have to put it away. Even if you're four years old, you've got to put it away or you've violated a rule. So that's the way the school operates. And of course, my wife and I were delighted that our son was now happy again. This was his idea of exactly what a school should be. But I was somewhat concerned as many parents would be. You know, they have your child go to something quite so different, so extraordinarily different. I mean, this is not like a Montessori school, which is a little different from a typical school. This is radically different. So I was open to it, but I guess my major concern at that time was, well, suppose he stays here all the way through what elsewhere would be called high school. And he at some point decides that he wants a career that requires going to college. Can he go to college from such a school? You know, the college is always say that they have requirements, certainly not only a high school diploma, but certain kinds of courses. And do the graduates of the school get in? So I began kind of asking about the graduates and heard some stories. They tended to be favorable stories about what the graduates were doing. But being a scientist, I wasn't that happy with just a few anecdotes. So I decided, even though this was way outside of my specialty, I decided to do a study, a formal study of the graduates of this school. They were already at that time, something like 90 people that I counted as graduates that had left the school somewhere, typically in their late teens, mid to late teens, with no intention to go to secondary school someplace else that were either going on to higher education or a career or some other move that wasn't secondary school. And had been there for at least two years. And some of them had been there for what elsewhere would be called their K through 12 education, all of their-- all of what we think of as the typical school years never, never been in an actual classroom. And so never taken a test. And so managed with the help of a person who was David Chatton off as his name, who was a part-time staff member there at the time to locate the great majority of them. And believe it or not, the great majority of them, of those we located, responded to a rather long questionnaire. We gave them about their experiences at the school. They're in memories of what they did, what they liked, or didn't like about being at the school, and about their life after leaving the school. And the result of that was number one. I found that a good number of them went on to higher education. They somehow got in. And they was interesting to hear how they did it. I got in to four-year colleges if that's what they wanted to do. And had no apparent problem doing well in the college that they were in. Many of them were in careers. I counted about 50% of them were in careers that seemed to be direct extensions of passionate interests that they developed and played when they were children. Every one of them-- this is almost unbelievable. Essentially, all of them said they were happy that they went to that school. They had no regrets about it. When I asked what they felt was the advantage of being there, they felt like they were more responsible, more able to run their own life than people who go to typical schools because they'd been doing that all along. If they went to higher education, they went for a reason. They didn't go-- obviously, these are people whose parents allowed them not to attend a regular school. They certainly weren't going to push them into college either. So these were kids who, if they decided they wanted to go to higher education, they had a reason to do it. And they wanted to get the most out of it that they could. And they went kind of for the right reasons, rather than just because this seems like what you're supposed to do when you're that age. So they seem to be people very much in charge of their own life, knowing what they wanted to do. They seem to be people who were content with life. And so this was kind of a revolutionary finding to me. It was eye-opening. It was, of course, it comforted me as a father. You know that my son-- this wasn't going to be the dead end to his life. But even more than that, it was absolutely intriguing to me intellectually. And so over gradually, over a few years, I gradually changed my career. I sort of gradually gave up the Rowland Lab at Boston College. It turned-- fortunately, we hired somebody else who could use it. And turned to looking at the question of, well, here they are. They're at this school where it looks like they're just playing. There is doing what kids would do when they're free to do what they want to do. And yeah, by any reasonable definition, they're becoming educated. I define education as everything that a person learns that helps them to live a satisfying, meaningful, and moral life in these people's lives, and to be living that kind of life. So any reasonable criteria, they were well educated, even though nobody educated them. They educated themselves. And so this, of course, is what we call self-directed education. And so since then, I've been writing, thinking, doing various kinds of research about self-directed education. and not only have become a scholar of it, but have become an advocate of it. - Yeah, this is great. So could you talk a little more about the idea of play? So I take it that, you know, at the Sudbury school or schools like it, the kids will find something that they're interested in academically. But there's more to the idea of play-based learning. Could you talk a little bit about how kids learn through play? - Right, so if I can just back up a little bit from that, the way I think about self-directed education, it drives from certain basic drives that all children have, unless they have some kind of serious brain damage. All children come into the world with an extraordinarily strong curiosity, which leads them to want to explore the world around them. They begin even as babies doing this. And unless we squash it in school, that curiosity remains. So children are curious. They want to understand things. They're constantly expanding their realm of curiosity. Curiosity is how children are biologically designed to acquire information, to acquire knowledge. There's really two aspects of education, if you think about it, whether you're thinking in terms of standard schooling or any other way of thinking in education, there's two aspects of it. One aspect is acquiring knowledge. The other aspect is acquiring skills. Curiosity is the drive for knowledge. Play is the drive that leads children to practice skills. Play is doing things. (laughs) And children come into the world biologically designed to play at all the basic skills that human beings have to learn everywhere. The basic human skills, to play a language, to play a building, things, to play an imagination and hypothetical thinking, to play games with rules. These are all things that human beings have to learn and children play in ways that practice those things. Maybe most of all, the most important thing that people have to learn for a satisfying and meaningful life is how to get along with other people, how to make friends, how to keep friends, how to negotiate, how to compromise, how to cooperate with other people in such a way that you're helping them and they're helping you. This is the, we are intrinsically social beings. We absolutely depend upon our abilities to get along with other people. And so it's not surprising that children come into the world with an extraordinarily strong drive to play with other children. And in our society, more so than today than has ever been true in our past history and more way more so than occurs in traditional societies or hunter-gatherer societies, we deprived children of the opportunity to do that. We segregate children outside, we don't anymore. What I call the normal child environment is one where children are more or less constantly surrounded by other children to play with. But we don't provide that opportunity very much. So what a school like Suddair Valley provides is that opportunity. The opportunity for these educative instincts that I'm describing to manifest themselves fully. And isn't it amazing that they work even in our modern society today, they involve more for a hunter-gatherer society, but given the right context, given the kind of environment that a school like Suddair Valley provides, they still work today. So now to go on with your question about play, a little bit more about play. So I define play as an activity that has four characteristics. The first characteristic is that it is self chosen and self directed. It's something that the players, the children in this case, decide themselves to do and that they're in charge of. They take, they direct it. So right off, one of the functions of play is that this is a vehicle through which children learn how to initiate activities and direct activities. And when they're playing together, they are learning how to initiate things together and directing together, which requires discussion, negotiation, compromise, attention to whether your playmates are having fun or not. These are extraordinary human skills, none of which can be taught, but can only be learned in practice and play, social play, is that practice for children? So that's the first characteristic in play. Self-show is the second characteristic is that it's intrinsically motivated, meaning that you're doing it for its own sake. At least consciously you're doing it for your own sake. From an evolutionary perspective, we could say there's good reasons why you're doing it in this way. There's things that are being gained from it, but you're not doing it with a conscious idea that you're gaining from it. You are doing it just because you want to do it. So I said that a lot of the kids at the Sudbury Valley School that I studied went on to careers that were direct extensions of passionate interests when they were children. Well, how do you develop a passionate interest? Play is following your passions. Play is how children discover their passions. So doing what you want to do, doing things that you want to do, even though you're not being rewarded for it, even though people might be trying to discourage you from it, but you really want to do it. This is how you discover and manifest your passion of interest. It's how children play at a lot of different things. They develop the variety of skills by playing at these things, but at least some children, a good number of children, find certain things that just really, especially they love to play at. These as they become older, we call them hobbies, maybe rather than play, and they can even evolve into careers as I've seen in so many cases of self-directed education. So that's the second characteristic. In Trins, you're doing it because you want to do it. It's how you discover what you want to do. It's to some degree, complementary that it's how you discover who you are as a person. So the third characteristic of play is that play is always directed by mental rules. People talk about unstructured play, but in my definition, there's no such thing as unstructured play. Play is always structured, but it's structured by the children themselves. They are either creating the rules, or they're following rules that they have chosen to follow, if they're playing a formal game, or if they're playing a game that they've played before, and the rules have already been established of how they're doing this. So another thing then that children are learning when they're playing is how to follow rules, and how to create rules, how to control their impulses. You know, it's an interesting thing about play that it's freely chosen, but when you choose to play, you are voluntarily for a period of time giving up your freedom. In play, you can't just act willingly, unless you call time out. You have to do what you and your playmates have agreed you're doing. You're not just randomly piling up sand, you're building a sand castle. You're having a play fight. You are pretending that your apprentice is going to that at the ball, and you have to remain within the rules, within the boundaries of what you have decided that you're playing at, so play is how children learn to structure their activities. It's how they learn to create rules, how they learn to abide by rules. It's how they learn to enforce rules when their playmates are violating rule, how do you encourage them to get back into the game by following the rule? So that's the third character, and the fourth characteristic is even though play always has rules. The rules are never so rigid that they dictate exactly what you do. There's always an incredible amount of opportunity for creativity within play. It's always creative. Play is the most creative thing that anybody ever does. You are even to the degree that has rules. There are largely rules that you and your playmates have created. And within the game, in almost any move, there's more than one thing you can do, and you're making choices and you're creating this activity that you're involved in. You're creating the sandcastle, or you're creating this scene at the King's Ball, or whatever it is that you're doing. So play is how children exercise and develop their capacity for creativity. Not only is play creative, but especially for young children, it's highly imaginative. If you are imagining yourself in a world that is in some ways different from the real world. At your gaining skills, it's some ways connected to the real world, but it is an imaginary world. And so among other things, you are practicing hypothetical reasoning. You're practicing, let's suppose that the kitchen table is a bridge. And there's a troll under the bridge. And if there's a troll under the bridge, then we better not go under the bridge or some other three year old or four year old might say, well, we need to give the troll a cookie. So it doesn't eat us. This is hypothetical deductive reasoning. Piaget thought children were incapable of that until they're 11 or 12, but in fact, we see this all the time in the context of play in little children. So what I hope I have demonstrated here in describing what play is, is the extraordinarily important things that children are practicing and learning all the time when they're playing. Yeah, this is fascinating. So I want to talk a little bit about some of these new school models. So we have lots of people who are now moving out of conventional public and private schools into various kinds of micro schools and hybrid schools and homeschooling, where they're more interested in the kinds of education that you're talking about. But they're new. So hybrid schools, for example, where the kids go to a school site two or three days a week and they're homeschooled the rest of the week have been around for a few decades, but the scale of it is sort of new. So people are coming to this from a homeschooling past or from a conventional five day public or private school past. So sometimes there's a poll among parents or teachers or administrators back towards accountability on the home days. So you go to school for two days, we're going to say, OK, you can go to school at home for two or three days, but we have to keep pace. We have to cover the material. Or we have to be-- we have to remain on top of our assignments, whatever it is. So what would you say to someone who's new to this kind of thing? They're drawn to maybe the homeschool or the play-based aspects of education, but they still feel some of that draw back to accountability. How do you sort of detox them from this feeling? That's a good question. So I think that-- so there's two thoughts I have about this. One is what would I say to the individual parent? And what I would say to the individual parent is, look at the evidence. We, by now, it's no longer schools like Sudbury Valley, practice of unschooling, which is homeschooling, where the children are in charge of their own curriculum, their own learning. No curriculum is imposed upon them. Don't worry if they can't read by six or seven. They'll eventually learn how to read all of this. There are now multiple studies that show what works. Everybody eventually learns how to read. Even kids diagnosed with dyslexia learn how to read when you pull the pressure off of them. We don't have to worry about it. But nevertheless, parents are going to worry. And so it's important, I think, to get the evidence. I think it's important for individual parents to connect with other parents who have done this or are doing it so that they get social support for it. Where creatures of norms, where creatures necessarily that are strongly affected by how we think other people are judging us. I did a study of unschooling parents many years ago. And one of the questions that was over 200 parents in this study, mostly moms. And one of the questions we asked was, what's the hardest thing about it? And to them, the hardest thing was overcoming the feeling that everybody else was criticizing them for ruining their children by not sending them to a typical school and coupled with that, overcoming their own inner voice, that is questioning whether they're just doing something crazy. And all of these people were people who were far enough into it that they'd finally overcome that. But this is what they went through. They had to go through this period. Now it's extraordinarily helpful in this period since we are such social creatures. We do depend upon kind of acknowledgment from other people that what you're doing is not crazy. You're not ruining your child, even if your own mom thinks you're ruining her grandchild by not sending them to school. So being connected with other people doing it, being in sort of regular connection, talking about it, sharing stories, and so on, I think is really very, very important. So I think that helps. And at this point, there's some literature. Read the literature. Read the books and the articles by people who have done this and studied it, and so on and so forth. That should help assure you that this works. I also think it's important to recognize that this does not mean that there's no role for adults. Children are designed to grow up in communities where among other people there are adults. And the adults plan to important role. The adults among other things are models. I would say most important models for morality. I think that one of the primary characteristics you want in a school like Sundry Valley is adults who are fundamentally really good people, kind people, moral people who represent moral values. I think that's one thing that children gain from adults, from parents, from other adults that they're involved with. You want to be a model of healthy, moral, socially responsible adulthood. Children are designed to grow up in a community where adults are part of the community. And they look to adults for models of what it's like to be an adult. So that's extremely important. It's also important to be helpful, not to impose your help when it's not being asked for, not to do more than the child is asking for, because then they'll stop asking you. If you overwhelm them, they'll ask you one question and you go on with an hour's lecture. And they won't ask you another question. So are they asked for advice? And you just give them way more advice than they really wanted. So being responsive to what they really want and providing what they want, when you can do it, that doesn't mean that you're going to spend tons of money because they want this or that. But it means that to the degree that you can, and to the degree you can do it without spoiling them, and to the degree that these are things that will really help them do what they want to do, adults try to provide that for them. So I think those are roles of adults. But the other way I want to address that question that you asked, there's another way to think about it. And let me back up with a little bit of history here. So way back in the 1960s, there was a movement called the free school movement. There were a lot of little schools that were kind of like Sundari Valley. And in fact, Sundari Valley was one of those schools at that time. It started in the 1960s. It started. It deliberately didn't call itself a free school. It called itself a democratic school. Because free implies sort of anarchy to some people. And that you can just do anything you want. But Sundari Valley was very clear. This is a school run by the rule of law. But the laws are created by-- democratically-- by the students. This is a school design to sort of model, at least, the ideals of American democracy, where we make rules. We-- that the people who are affected by the rules make the rules. We have systems of accountability, of enforcing the rules, that involve also the trial by your peers, all of this kind of thing. That was part of the school, which made it a little bit different from many of those other so-called free schools. But what happened over time with those schools, with the exception of Sundari Valley and just one or two others, is that they died out. Why did they die out? And I think there's two reasons. One is they were parent co-ops. And parents were-- even though the founders of the school had certain principles about self-directed education, once parents got involved in making decisions, they pushed the school more and more in the direction of a more typical school. Well, let's have at least these courses, and let's encourage our children to do these courses. and that's, yeah, man, pretty soon. And it was no longer self-directed education. And original founders were no longer interested in it and laughed. And then the other thing that would happen is it would be sort of squabbles between the parents. And so people would leave because they would get mad at one another. Some people thought it should be this way. Some people thought it should be that way. One of the reasons Sudbury Valley survived is that it is very clearly not a parent co-op. And it is very clear the staff members at the school have always made it clear. And it is now 56 year history or 57 year history have always made it clear to parents you have the power to enroll your child in this school or not. You have the power to take your child out anytime you want. But you have no power within the school. It is hard for a lot of parents to hear. That is true at public schools. That is true at all other schools. But at this school parents feel like they ought to have a say. It shouldn't be just the kids and the staff members. But what the founders of this school realized if they were going to stay pure to their principles they had to have a kind of basically a kind of a constitution that could not be violated. And that parents could not come in and moreover that the day to day running in the school had to be by the people who are there every day and are part of the school. And they did not want parents to be part of the school there every day partly for the reasons that I have just described because parents would want to change things. But also because of the pretty strong belief on the part of these staff members and I can understand having mixed feelings about this and I myself at times have mixed feelings about it. And the children benefit by spending part of their life away from their parents. The part of growing up is learning how to deal with people without your parents there. And that you're even if your parents are there not interfering just the very presence of your parents makes it different from you. You're not going to be you're going to be influenced by what you think your parents are judging you on right now. Even some staff members at the school have had kids who went to the school and it was always awkward both for the staff member and the kids when that happened. And so there's always been the feeling that so parents are welcome to bring their kids there welcome maybe to come in and say hello to people but they're not welcome to hang around during the during the school day. During a visiting week when parents are trying to decide at the school they're welcome to hang around for a little while to get a sense of what's going on. But and this is hard for a lot of parents. And this is especially hard for the kinds of parents who are attracted to homeschooling because by definition parents who are attracted to homeschooling our parents who really like to have their kids around them or be around their kids. So this is a little bit of a this is a little bit of an issue that I think new small schools have to think about what should be the role of parents are not the role of parents in this setting. Yeah. So you've brought up a couple of things that I you've anticipated a few things that I was going to ask you about. So I'll kind of wrap them together. So one one might be that people you know hear about self directed learning or free schools and think that it's kind of sort of politically or culturally sort of left leaning. But you know I know a little more about classical education. And even there now you hear people talking in terms of wonder and discovery and experience is right. So maybe there's a more a more specific cultural transmission expected in those kinds of schools. But I think you know it seems like the divide is more between large technocratic schools on the one side and smaller, freer, more individual schools on the other side more than it is kind of politically left or right. So one of the things we like to talk about here is kind of the benefits to American society of lots of these little different kinds of schools popping up. And I think one of them might be that you have friends that you didn't know you had or you didn't expect to have who are very different from you. So you talked about you know one benefit of more self directed schools being that maybe more people learn how to sort of handle their business on their own right. And the rule of law means something even at a very local level right. So can you can you talk more about kind of maybe improvements in culture that we might expect to see if more people of all kinds got into self directed play based learning. That's a really interesting question. So one take on that question is yes. So you know I said I mentioned the sort of the free school movement in the 1960s and 70s and one reason why it failed. There's another reason I think why it why it didn't succeed. Not only were those free schools in a sense free but they were also generally left-wing politically strongly so. They were part of a kind of radical political beliefs at that time. And so they would be kind of a turn off to people who didn't subscribe to those beliefs. You know I've heard stories I haven't didn't see it myself but you know you go into this little free school there's pictures of Chairman Mao on the wall at that time back when the radicals believed Chairman Mao was this amazing liberator before we knew the whole story. So the so this would be a turn off you know this is not representative of the range of political and viewpoints and in society. So another reason that Sundry Bailey survived is Daniel Greenberg who was the primary philosopher behind this declared right at the beginning this is not a school that has a political stance. This is a school where we have a free marketplace of ideas. The school itself takes no political stance except that we believe in democracy and we believe in American democracy. But the whole range of issues that separate republicans from democrats or libertarians from either one and so on and so forth. And it should not be surprising that the school has always attracted across the whole range of political beliefs. Not too surprisingly there's a fair number of libertarians who are attracted to the idea of freedom but would not be particularly attracted to the equivalent of Chairman Mao on the wall. Go there are attracted to the so the so the idea Daniel Greenberg's phrase was a school should be a free marketplace of ideas where all ideas on the table free speech is really emphasized and valued and that we respect people's opinions and everybody is free to talk about what they're interested in and the school itself takes no position more over because anything posted in the school would be seen as representing the school's opinion. You also can't post on school boards posters and so on that represent a particular political position or point of view. So you can talk about them all you want but it can't be something that looks like to somebody coming into the school like this is the school's position on this or that. So I think that that's important. I do agree I want to want when I think of potential and danger of a lot of little schools is that so this school becomes the libertarian school and this school becomes the political radical school the left wing school this becomes you know the free market you know I don't know whatever you want to call it school. So we already have a society where too many people are just talking to others who are like minded and are not really kind of hearing from people who have different opinions and broadening their thinking or at least the questions they think about in that kind of way. So I think one of the arguments that sometimes people make for public schools is that everybody's there. And that are how rough it is everybody's there. No matter how rough it is everybody's there. You know of course what are the problems again with that if you're in a public school is it also means that you can't say anything controversial because you're going to offend somebody if you do. So it all becomes pretty bland and boring. But I do think that people creating small schools to the degree possible, it's great to try to keep politics out of any kind of official definition of school, make the school welcome, make people of different political persuasions, feel welcome at the school in order to have diversity of opinion at the school. Yeah, this is great. This is fascinating. I have one more question for you, Peter, which is so all these people who are working in hybrid schools and micro schools about these various types. What's the most interesting thing that you're working on right now that they might like to hear about? So what I'm working on right now is not directly related to schools but the people in their audience might be interested in it nevertheless. So I've become very concerned. I've been concerned for a long time about the fact that we live in a society that is very unfriendly to children, that where children are not really capable of being children. A childhood involves being, as I said earlier on in our discussion, being with other children away from adults, a good part of the time, it involves doing things independently. In a certain sense, the whole purpose of childhood is to gain independence over time, become ever more capable of managing yourself so you don't need to be cared for by your parents and at that point you're an adult, right? But that can only occur if you have increasing opportunities to do things independently. And decades ago children in our society did have those opportunities. You could walk to school by yourself, you could go off and play in the park with your friends when you're five or six years old in the 1950s when I was a kid. And even in the 1970s when my son was a young kid. But nowadays you can't do that at those ages. You can't even do it at 10 or 11. Somebody might call 911 and report a loose child out there. So we have become a society in which children are overprotected, they're over governed, they're over, over, they're watched over all the time. And they don't have adequate freedom to play and explore and do things that they might want to do, including things that are a little bit risky and realize that they can manage risks, that they can manage themselves. So I have been working in various ways for some time in how can we change that society. Some of it has been through regular schools bringing opportunities into regular schools for free play, for assignments by teachers to do something on your own outside of school. That's a little bit risky. But my latest venture is to work with pediatricians. I wrote an article in the American Journal of Pediatrics a couple of years ago pointing out to all the converging evidence that the high rates of anxiety and depression among young people today, the high rates of suicide, can be attributed to the lack of opportunity for children to play and explore, do the things that bring pleasure to them. And also the things in which they learn that they can manage the bumps in the road in life. So they're not torn or sunder when something goes wrong. And so quite a number of pediatricians have bought into this idea. And so what we're doing is developing a program in which pediatricians in their discussions with parents and children, that most almost all children see with their with their parents see a pediatrician once a year from birth on, often into the teenage years. And so pediatricians have the possibility of all pediatricians bought into this. They could have enormous influence where instead of talking just about the importance of keeping up with your vaccinations, good nutrition, good sleep, safety in the home, and so on. They also talk about the importance of growing amounts of independent activity. And so we're we're equipping pediatricians with little prescription pads for prescribing independent activity. We're creating brochures. This is still at an early stage. I've got a big grant proposal in right now to do a major experimental study. We have a large pediatric clinic and New Hampshire that's interested in carrying on this study. So this is my latest bit of excitement. I think it will I think that and we're creating at the National National Institute for Play, where in the process of creating a website that parents can go to, which will provide a lot of information about how you can provide more independent activity for your children. So we're hoping that parents everywhere will learn about this site. We don't really have it up yet. We'll learn about this site when we've got it really going. We're going to have what we're called a play parent club on it where parents can talk with one another, find others in their community wherever they are who are interested in more play for their kids and possibly conform play groups with for their kids in the community where they're located. Well that that sounds great. How can people track what you're working on with that? Well so at this point at this very soon we will have the website. I will be talking about it on my sub stack and so I'm not quite ready to do that. Yeah. But that will be available. I've got a book coming out I've written the manuscript for a book called Restoring Childhood, which will be published. Unfortunately there's a long gap between when the manuscript is when the publishing date is but that'll be in September of 2026. The book called Restoring Childhood, which is all about what we need to do as a society to allow children to be children so that they grow up confident and feeling a sense of agency in a sense that they can manage their own life and are far less likely than they currently are to become anxious or depressed as a result of negative experiences in their lives. Yeah well it's a few months away but we'll be on the lookout for your book. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. Thank you for listening to Community Crafted Education, a podcast hosted by the National Hybrid Schools Project and Kennesaw State University's Michael J. Cole's College of Business. If you have any questions about the topics we discussed on today's show or want to learn more about what we do, please look up the National Hybrid Schools Project or reach out to us directly at coalscollege.com/hybrid.