TCS is a parenting philosophy designed around error correction which recognises that no matter how sure we feel, we may be mistaken, and that children are people and may be right. It also recognises the grave dangers involved in propagating ideas through force instead of persuasion.

TCS doesn't mean attempting to create a problem-free state, it means simply actually starting to solve problems rather than being stuck. Happiness is not being without problems, it is being in the process of solving your problems. Being TCS doesn't mean miraculously developing perfect knowledge and rationality and becoming perfectly non-coercive and a godlike paragon of every virtue known to man overnight; it means starting from where you are and making improvements and correcting mistakes as best you can, as you go along. That, after all, is all one can do.

TCS is an educational philosophy in the broadest sense, in that it is about the conditions under which human minds do and do not thrive, and about how people learn and how knowledge is created, and it has far-reaching implications for all relationships and for all areas of life. It is a whole new world-view. It is the first and only educational philosophy in existence which is not inconsistent with the prevailing idea of how knowledge grows, and with other ideas which are widely held in other spheres.

Correcting a few common misconceptions about TCS.

We hold it to be true that many of the ideas that we now believe to be true, including some of those that we believe most strongly to be true, are in fact riddled with errors.

One important concept in TCS is that of common preferences. Common preferences are policies that all parties after a successfully resolved disagreement prefer to their initial positions: everyone gets what they want.

“Finding common preferences” and “solving problems non-coercively” have exactly the same denotation (meaning), but somewhat different connotations (suggested implications).

Optimism, which is both the feeling that problems can be solved and the enjoyment of solving them, breaks the chains of the self-fulfilling prophesy of endless suffering.

Computer programmers have a word for it: “executed”, but what are we really talking about?

To argue that there can never be such a thing as parenting and people so good that they don't ever resort actively to hurting their own immediate family(!) is rank pessimism. Wherever we are on the scale of moral evolution today, we can always go up a rung tomorrow. Unless we prefer to turn away from growth and start claiming there are no more rungs, of course.

Karl Popper's general idea of how a human being acquires knowledge – by creating it afresh through criticism and the elimination of error – applies equally to non-scientific types of knowledge such as moral knowledge, and to unconscious and inexplicit forms of knowledge. Thus we see ourselves as trying to extend Popperian epistemology into areas where, by its inner logic, it applies, but where Popper himself resolutely refused to apply it.