Peter Gray on Video Games

Peter Gray, my favorite education blogger, has recently written two posts I can highly recommend:

As always, Peter does a great job of supporting his point with research, and writing some sobering posts about video games is a much-needed service for democratic schools, as well as for parents everywhere. It’s also nice to see how much his well-founded and academic post matches what I wrote about game addiction two years ago based only on anecdotal evidence.

One more link: While we’re on the topic of Peter Gray, here’s an interview he gave, very much worth watching:

Blog status comment: Over the past 10 days, I’ve had 4 exams (which, remember, I really don’t like having). Real posting will resume soon; comments are sporadically open, depending on how thick the spam is coming in – but I hope to fix that issue soon, too.

2 thoughts on “Peter Gray on Video Games”

  1. interesting post.
    i agree with the author in many things.
    most i like his opinion about the videogames. but i am glad that there is an FSK (how you call it in english? free self controll?). no small kid should play games like doom or fear or games, where you hunt and snuff people for getting points.
    also i am not sure about the point that kids should always do what they wanna do. i think about kiddies that are hanging around in front of television and drinkin one coke after another and gettin fatter and fatter and getting an heartattack at the age of 13 because they always decided on their own what to drink and what to do.

    1. There’s an important difference between allowing a child to be free and not caring what they do. If you allow another person freedom, or rather if you refrain from trying to limit their freedom, it’s possible to have an honest and open relationship, in which case you can express your worry about stuff like excessive consumption of junk food and TV. Children are usually pretty attentive and open to this stuff when it comes from someone they can trust, which has to be someone who isn’t busy oppressing them. Besides, children who are free and in a supporting, healthy environment don’t generally end up vegetating in front of a TV – that’s not the behavior of a free person, but of a person trying to run away from something.
      One has to be careful not to judge free children based on experience with children raised in oppression. Peter Gray has written often about how psychology makes this mistake, with “developmental psychology” actually being “psychology of children in traditional schools”, as though the traditional Industrial school is the neutral, natural environment for children to be in.

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