Taking Children Seriously

Why you should think twice before praising a particular LEA (local education authority).

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.

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.

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.

How to help a child to try school safely.

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.

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

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. ;-)

It is often asserted (usually by school teachers) that if children are not forced to go to school or, at the very least, to study an externally-imposed curriculum, there will be big gaps in their knowledge at the end of their education. Is this true? Is it any less true of children subjected to a standard curriculum? Is it a problem? And if so, which children will be better able to fill any gaps later: those who have been subject to a curriculum, or those who haven't? Mike Fortune-Wood has the answers.

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

Tom Robinson has a satirical ‘warning’ about TV and books. Essential reading for all except those who don't appreciate satire.

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

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’?

David Deutsch is very untidy and very successful.

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.

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.

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.