Taking Children Seriously

A few important articles to get you started.

More discussion with a radical unschooler on the subject of education and coercion.

Parents often fear that a child might make the wrong decisions about what to learn.

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 criticism sometimes levelled at TCS parents, that they must be doormats, is in terms of education actually more appropriate when applied to conventional parents.

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

Are schools inherently coercive, or is that just a property of all (or nearly all?) existing schools, and come the revolution, could there be TCS schools?

Despite having been influenced by our very own David Deutsch, John Holt was not as close to TCS as we might have hoped.

How close is the thing we TCS folk call “coercion” to “coercion” in everyday usage?

Do not assume that a child is acting irrationally just because he or she wants to go to school.

Did you hate being bossed about by your parents and teachers? Have you developed a life strategy of “my way is the only way” to prevent others coercing you? The problem is that in applying this to your children, you do to them the very thing you hated as a child – and you cause them to grow up to do the very same thing to their own children.

An argument about children's legal rights, addressing the issue of how children might be protected under the law even if their legal rights were the same as adults'.

If so, this might help.

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.

Unschoolers have an aphorism, “Never offer, never refuse”, and think of that as being at one end of a continuum, and school or “school at home” being at the other. In this 1995 post, I explained why this continuum misses the point. I was rather delighted to be told that TCS education is somewhere other than at the extreme end, though. ;-)

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

Don't be misled by the title. This discussion is not just about what to do in a case where a child heates wearing an eyepatch, it is about how to think about problems in such a way that you can solve them.

Correcting a few common misconceptions about TCS.

It would be nice to be able to be perfect. Unfortunately, we're human, and we have to do the best we can now, not wait.

Why freedom in the matter of academic study is inseparable from freedom in the matter of chores, bedtime and everything else.

Video games are not about any obvious direct product. They are about interacting with a complex autonomous entity.

There are many situations in which it is right to lie. But it is wrong to mislead children about their parents' real values and beliefs. It is wrong to mislead them about right and wrong.

Surprisingly, you might think, the answer is yes.

David Deutsch is very untidy and very successful.

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?

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...

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.