Taking Children Seriously

A few important articles to get you started.

Misunderstandings and miscommunication are common occurrences, so it is wise not to jump to negative conclusions.

This piece by Elliot may help some understand TCS ideas about coercion and solving problems.

The implication of saying that there are things children must learn to study is that the children may not want to learn them, because they won't know that they are valuable until later. But if you can't enumerate them all, then how do you know, when you are forcing your children to do one of them, that you are not preventing your children from doing another? Also, if you can't enumerate them all, how do you think the children are going to learn the ones you are unable to enumerate? In fact, I believe that not only can you not enumerate them all, but you can't KNOW them all, that you can't even know a millionth part of them.

What Karl Popper has to say that is relevant to education.

TCS parents do not force their children to study. They do not try to manipulate them into it. They do not push them. They do pay attention to what seems to interest their children and facilitate their exploration in that sphere, and in any related spheres the parent thinks the children might find interesting. But if children are not pushed, how could they ever become, say, a mathematician? What would this process look like? David Deutsch paints a word picture that may help.

Why I always shudder when I hear such questions.

Many parents worry that eating a lot of junk food might lead to ill-health. Elliot's post may set some minds at rest.

In the often-tense period before Christmas many parents are especially likely to tell their children that if they don't go to sleep promptly Santa Claus will not bring them any presents. Or that he will bring them only a lump of coal.

Links and articles to be added to this index should be sent to: home-edtakingchildrenseriously.com.

Appearance, Reality and Education Law The interesting case of Phillips v Brown

What's Wrong With Home Visits? Why you might want to choose some other method of providing evidence of education to your local education authority

Treat Information About Local Education Authorities With Caution Why you should think twice before praising any particular LEA

Unschooling and Karl Popper

Unschooling and Academic Education 1

Unschooling and Academic Education 2

Is Unschooling Non-Coercive?

Unschooling and Schooling as a Continuum

The Dark Side of John Holt

From Unschooling to TCS, With Lots of Children

“How do you excite 8 yr olds about mathematics?”

Child Seemed to be Doing Nothing Academically

For all those who hate school: Who Wouldn't be ‘School Phobic’?

Surprisingly, you might think, the answer is yes.

These days, we all have lots and lots more stuff than we ever had before.

When your child's room is such a mess there is only a rumor of a floor.

Why does the combination of children and medicine often go so horribly wrong?

The subtext of the ideas presented through soap operas gives a very powerful access to the themes of our culture.

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

This is a slightly modified version of a 17 May, 2000 Debate List post.

Sarah Fitz-Claridge

In discussions about TCS, people sometimes leap to the conclusion that TCS involves children being left to run riot in other people's houses, destroying family heirlooms and generally distressing everyone they come into contact with. Of course that is not TCS but permissive, uninvolved parenting. But for those who are unfamiliar with TCS, perhaps it is worth saying something about this again.

In such discussions, someone usually asserts that children must be forced to obey the rules of the house they are visiting:

The fact is that when I stay at somone's house, I defer to a reasonable extent to their rules and wishes

When I go to other people's houses, I try to abide by their wishes in respect of their property and so on. I try to make my visit add to their lives rather than detract from them. I try to be sensitive and (to the extent that I think they will want this) helpful in a non-intrusive way. I avoid violating their privacy, and I try not to...

Posted by David Deutsch on the TCS List on Mon, 15 Jul., 2002

A poster wrote:

It's is also usually the case that what people really mean is not that “children (or women, or people of color) cannot be trusted to make decisions for themselves” but that “children cannot be trusted to make what I feel is a good decision for themselves”. In other words, the child might choose differently than I want him to.

Another poster replied:

This argument ignores the fact that women and people of color are mature adults while a 3 yr old isn't.

And that argument ignores the fact that a white man is white and male, while women and people of colour are...

Is “time out” time off, or is it serving time?

Posted by David Deutsch on the TCS List on Sun, 13 Oct., 1996.

[A poster] wondered whether TCS can be a fully general theory of education, given its apparent incompatibility with the needs of military education and organisation:

This may be an appropriate opportunity to mention the single area where I find TCS educational theory to be implausible: military organisation. I am not yet able to imagine a military force in which which the fighters learn and organise along TCS lines and have the whole achieve the effectiveness required to pose a credible military threat.

Historically this difficulty is represented by the overall success of regimented armies over tribal armies. Regimentation, such as gave the Romans their important military edge, was accomplished through...

This is a slightly modified version of a post which appeared on the TCS List on Sun, 29 Sep., 1996.

Sarah Fitz-Claridge

Parents whose children don't go to school often worry that their children do not appear to be doing much academically, or not doing much that seems worthwhile or valuable. If you are such a parent, it is worth subjecting your theories of what constitutes “worthwhile” or “valuable” to the strongest criticism you can. Try to think about learning and education much more broadly.

Sometimes, previously-schooled children ask for assignments, and then when they get one, lose interest and don't complete it. The reason for this phenomenon may be that doing an assignment takes the intrinsic interest out of the subject-matter. But it is of course quite normal, and indeed good, to start things and not finish them. Contrary to the theory that one should always finish things one starts, it would be irrational to act otherwise when finishing no longer seems a good idea.

Forget assignments. They are a complete waste of time for all concerned. If your children ask you for assignments, they are probably asking you to help them discover what interests them. In most cases, instead of designing assignments, the thing to do would be to try devoting that creativity to the problem of helping them discover a new interest or passion. The capacity to find things one enjoys is a vital form of creativity, and one of the most easily damaged by academic-style coercion. Conventionally the evidence of this damage is systematically hidden (because parents and teachers make children spend most of their time jumping through worthless hoops) until it is far too late and they are adults who are mysteriously unable to find any fulfilment in life despite the ‘marvellous opportunities’ afforded by their extensive education and extra-curricular activities.

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.

Originally published in Taking Children Seriously, the paper journal (TCS 30).

Sarah Fitz-Claridge

There is a very nasty syndrome which parents sometimes inadvertently pass on to their children while trying to help their children have better lives. I call it the Keeping-One's-Options-Open mentality. Here is one example of what it looks like:

You study hard to ensure that you pass your school exams. In Britain that would be GCSE exams at the age of 16, which you do to keep your options open so that you can do A-level exams at 18 if you want to. Then you do A-levels to keep your options open in case you want to go to university.

Then you go to university to get a good degree (not necessarily one that you will enjoy) so you can get a good job. Then you take the wrong job (a ‘good’ job) and kowtow to your boss so that you can get promotion and thereby security, to keep your options open after retirement.

This is a very common syndrome in which people sacrifice themselves for the next phase of life, which itself consists of nothing but sacrificing themselves for the following phase.

A friend of mine, whom I'll call Henry, has this syndrome badly. He is so desperate to keep his options open and set himself up financially that life is passing him by. He is living for retirement, and totally forgetting to live now. And as retirement looms, he is increasingly fearing it. In this lifetime of unhappy sacrifice, he has systematically sacrificed his real interests, and has destroyed his capacity to acquire any. When I think of Aristotle's dictum: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’, I think of my friend Henry. What has his life been for? It was supposed to have been for him.

And the most frightening thing of all is that in his desperate wish to help his daughter have a good life, he has successfully instilled in her the very same syndrome. She now studies hard whether she enjoys it or not in order not to end up in a dead-end job. Henry's job, apparently, is not a dead-end job, but it does take all his time from when he gets up to when he goes to sleep, almost every day, and this has been the case for the many years I have known him – and there is no reason to expect that to change.

What if children want to risk doing something that you think might be distressing for them? For example, what if they want to spend the weekend with their very coercive grandparents, or play with a neighbourhood child who is rather violent, or go to boarding school, or play Truth or Dare?

Sarah Fitz-Claridge, 1992

‘School phobia’ is a dreadful label for some children's perfectly understandable response to being compelled to go to school against their will. They are not phobic, any more than a conscientious objector is a coward; they are refusing – and in most cases very nobly. Over the years, I have spoken to many worried parents of school-refusing children. The outrages these children have been subjected to in the name of ‘education’ disgust me. They have been saddled with a pseudo-medical label that has deliberate connotations of ‘mental illness’ – with all the stigma and the implied (and not-so-implied) menace that goes with that. Their perfectly reasonable dissent, and their desperately courageous resistance to being hurt and harmed has been cynically redefined as ‘overdependence,’ ‘psychological instability,’ and ‘immaturity.’ They have been psychologically tortured under the guise of psychiatric or psychological ‘treatment’ for a non-existent ailment. Their parents – also demeaned by labels such as ‘overprotective’ – have been threatened with court action unless they physically force their terrified, traumatised children into school every day. Many such parents who have sought my advice have themselves been in a terrible state of stress and trauma. Why don't they just comply? Because they know that forcing their child to go so school is immoral, psychologically harmful, and inimical to their child's education.

Or do they know that? Parents often do not seem to know it consciously. Or if they do, they also ‘know’ the contradictory idea that it is right and important for children to be schooled, because the law, the psychiatric, psychological, and educational professions all say so. They may be nice people in many respects, but as a result of their own parents' coercion, they are simply unable to see how damaging and wrong it is to force a child to go to school.