 So if anyone has any questions for these two gentlemen, you can walk up to the mics and Go ahead Hi, this is for Frank You're talk earlier when you're talking about attachment and Looking at the modern-day roles of attachment parenting or the lack of attachment parenting I just would like to kind of hear your views on what's happened, you know from infancy and beyond with that as in modern trends Compared to hunter-gatherer You know wearing our babies in our slings Co-sleeping etc Right. Well one trend I can speak to that I've tracked a little bit is Related to the sort of the pendulum pendulum effect from the germ theory that really came to the fore in the 19th century and Back then it was all about, you know starting with Louis Pasteur And this discovery that pathogens could make us sick and this Gradual dawning on the medical community that we had to be cleaner and cleaner and cleaner and by the early 20th century we got to the point where sterilization including children's environments became this obsession really and Then this idea that children should be raised in their individual cribs that should be sanitized and basically world-proofed That led to this this trend of isolation away from human contact and The big the big insight came with the Romanian orphanage story I don't know how many people have tracked that this is a this is a big story in massage school if you ever go there Where after the the reign of this particular dictator in Romania? They came in and they discovered that some of the orphanages where the children were so isolated and so neglected and so touch deprived that they failed to develop normally they failed to thrive and various cultures are Described in these terms as well as being high-touch and low-touch cultures American culture is a pretty low-touch culture and that's something that we're now starting to see maybe turn around a little bit And I would hope so That's the trend My question is for Peter Peter you painted a very idyllic picture of the children in the hunter-gathered societies in our modern world Though particularly as parenting we spend a lot of time in conflict resolution amongst the kids themselves And the kids get into a hassle Joey bit me in the leg What am I gonna do about it? What you didn't talk about though, and I'd love to hear it Is there the same kind of conflict in those societies and do the parents and hunter-gatherers? Are they the conflict resolution agents or do the children do it amongst themselves? from from what I've heard from the from the Anthropologists I've talked to and again. I haven't studied this directly There's remarkably little conflict The kids don't fight The They they never go tattling to their parents They never go to their parents to saw or to other adults to solve these solve problems amongst them Here's what I think and let me also say that I have also been studying children In fact my own empirical research is not in hunter-gathered cultures It's in a particular school called the Sudbury Valley school. That's 35 miles west of here It's a school that's been in existence for 45 years now And it didn't set itself up to model a hunter-gatherer band But I think in terms of the essential Environment for child development it models a hunter-gatherer band It's a school believe it or not where kids are allowed to play and explore on their own all day long The kids are age four which I said that hunter-gatherer bands It's age four that you have the age of that you're at the age of reason from age four on through high school age And they're all playing together All day long just like in a hunter-gatherer culture. There's woods there. There's a state park nearby. They can go into the park There's a pond There's computers of course. There's books. There's woodworking equipment. There's the kitchen The school operates on a per pupil cost of half of what the public school operates and The learning occurs through play and exploration now these kids There are about 200 kids and about nine or ten staff members the kids are not being watched There's no necessity for adults to stamp in and conflict resolution what there is however That's a little different from a hunter-gatherer band because there's in that in some sense I think you do need to make adjustments in a hunter-gatherer band. There's a total of about 30 to 60 people of whom less than half would be kids So there's not a lot of kids here You've got a huge number of kids and a relatively small number of adults what the school has based on our principles of democracy is a judicial system and The kids and there's this there's a democratic way of making the rules and the kids make the rules through school meeting and They enforce the rules through this judicial system. I think and at this school I had a I had a graduate student who spent Hundreds of days or at least at least a hundred and fifty days doing observations at the school And he said the most impressive thing to him was that he didn't see any bullying He didn't see any real conflict and when there was conflict they would resolve it like an older kid would step in and resolve it Or it would be resolved through the judicial system I think that there are several things that about both a hunter-gatherer culture and about the Sudbury Valley School That leads to no bullying One is they're part of a community that really identifies with one another in the hunter-gatherer band They're part of the same band at Sudbury Valley School. They're part of the same School community which they value they feel they own it. They don't feel like they're being forced by law to be there This is their place So they value the community and they value the others in the community Secondly age mixing is a tremendous factor in all of this When you put kids who are all the same age together they become competitive But age same play is a complete artifact of our school system. It never occurred beforehand There was never any such thing Kids always played in age mix groups and if you're an age in an age mix group What's the point of being competitive and what's the value in in in beating up a littler kid? I don't and also what you find is When you do find anything that verges on bullying the older kids are very protective. So you have a 11 year old that seems to be seems to be bothering a 9 year old or an 8 year old but a 15 year old nearby sees and he says hey cut it out You know and and there's something about a 15 year old who's much more effective at that than an adult is Because that 11 year olds really wants to be like the 15 year old in some sense You know adults are too far removed to think that they have any understanding of what it's like to be a kid But a kid who's just a few years older isn't so I think that that I think that plays a role that We have established a culture a in which Kids don't have much opportunity to solve their own problems And so they don't learn how to do it and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy We say hey see they can't solve their own problems. So we're going to have to solve it for them We get ourselves into that trap I've probably said enough about it Thank you Actually, there's not a waiting list and not surprisingly You know very few people in our culture believe such a school can work this school has been going on for 45 years It's more well documented than any other private school. I know of there are books studied There are books I did a study of the graduates and published it and the American Journal of Education as far as I know There are no educators who have paid any attention to that argument to that article There are books published based on studies of the graduates of the school There's no question, but what this school works and yet? Parents are not going to send there It's the rare parent who has the courage to send their child to this school because it runs a 180 degrees away from the sentiment of our culture what a four-year-old is going to be running around unwatched unheard of I Mean when I was four not maybe four but by the time I was five I could run around all over town That was in the 1950s It wasn't so unusual then but now you know you might be arrested You might you might have your child taken away from you if you let your kid do that You know this school. It's amazing that the school gets away with that legally at this point, but it does It does have it has made various compromises to do with the sentiment But most parents are just not going to do that because they don't trust their children They don't believe that their child can take care of himself or herself and they also believe in the myth That if you don't follow the typical resume if you don't go to grade one to grade two You take all the standardized tests Then you're cutting your options short in this culture You won't be able to go to college or at least not a good college and so on and so forth But this school has proven over and over again that that's not true Kids who've never taken a course who just have played and explored followed their own interests Throughout their childhood have gone on to schools like MIT and so on and so forth. Some of them are professors now They've gone into every realm Yeah, you know, we have certain beliefs in our society even many people say well, it's too bad This is true, but it's true and therefore I've got to send my child or teachers who will say this You know my job is to get the child into College and to do that I've got to get them to get these grades and do well and this is my job We we don't believe that we can be idealists, but we can We really can it's not that hopeless. We have we have an amazing society when you think about it There are all kinds of opportunities to make a living You know Anybody who has a real skill can find a way to make if they have a real skill and a real passion They can find a way to make a living and the task is to find out what your passion is But we have a school system that doesn't let people discover their passion because it doesn't give them time Everybody the no child left behind attitude, which is just the logical conclusion of what we've been doing all time means that everybody's supposed to go down the same path and You know, and so everybody's being trained as a scholar whether that's their orientation or not There are many graduates from the Sudbury Valley School who go on to become Craftsmen or artists and they're not scholars, but they're wonderful in what they do and there are others who go on to become scholars But that's because they became passionate about some scholarly Subject the real the real challenge is not you know It's easy to learn stuff when you're interested in it. The real challenge is to find out what you're interested in What's that is the tuition it's about seven thousand dollars a year for your first child And less after that Compare that to fifteen thousand dollars a year that the that the same town pays per pupil for public school education So this is not expensive education. It's way less than most private schools You won't find another private school that costs so little and why is that is because you don't need a lot of staff because the kids are learning self-directed and they're learning from other kids and When they do go to staff, they're getting Individual attention around exactly what they want and the staff members are spending zero time on discipline And are able because the discipline takes care of itself because of the structure of the school What's that? They bring their own lunch. Yeah, there's not a school lunch program They there is a kitchen and a lot of kids are into cooking and a lot of kids cook their Some sometimes as a money-making thing to the kids who let's say they're kids who want to buy a certain kind of playground Equipment they'll make money for it by cooking lunch and selling it Can you say again what the name of the school is the Sudbury Valley school, I'm sorry Sudbury Valley Southbury Valley Sudbury Sudbury Valley Have any have any of the students been followed after graduation and yeah, and in fact if you those who are interested This is the handout that I gave out in my talk my study of the graduates Oh, I guess my study isn't listed there But some of my other research that refers to that study is listed there if you also look at my blog It's psychology today called free to learn I have a number of Discussions of the school if you look at the school's website Sudbury Valley school You will find that there are about 40 other schools throughout the world that are explicitly modeled after Sudbury Valley About 25 of them in the United States and the others in other countries So this is a movement that is that is becoming a worldwide movement My questions for Frank In your talk you spoke a lot about the need for a more holistic community-centered approach to our Well-being because we are social animals and I know that a lot of people in the community myself included our Nontheistic shall we say do you think there's a need for or a place for a sort of secular spirituality in the paleo community do we need to figure out a way to practice something that is Exterior to ourselves, or do you think that just basic community stuff will fill that void I? Think it's this I Don't think it's something that can or should be imposed upon anyone, but I do think it's something that a Lot of people hunger for and it does have a place I think it's a human universal to drive towards something larger than ourselves and to Experience something that we would describe as spiritual and it is part of our history And whether you describe it in terms of brain science or just the desire to reach out into the universe I don't think it matters a whole lot, and it could range even from Environmentalism and ecology being a way to access something larger than ourselves I think that has a place all the way to traditional Disciplines and traditional religions. I think it all can't fit so it's a it's a hunger we have I Guess we're done with questions, and so as soon as we get the text set up for our next talk We'll begin with Nora get gout us