Who Decides?
Life learners trust kids to learn. We believe that learning is innate and
doesn’t require teaching, texts or tests. We know that children are not
blank slates or raw clay, to be written on or molded into shape by adults.
We allow kids to learn by living. And our trust is well placed, as they grow
into responsible, well-educated, sociable adults.
However, those of us who are dedicated to the philosophy of
self-initiated learning do not always trust our children to make
all their learning and other life decisions for themselves. It
is easy to agree with our kids’ choices when they make the ones
we want them to make. But is it really freedom to be allowed
only to make choices about things for which an adult is
confident the decisions will be “correct”?
What – to take a common example – do we do if our unschooled
child yearns to accompany her friends to school? We might try to
convince the child that home is better than school. We might let
her try school for awhile, hoping that she will find out quickly
how unpleasant it is. Or we might consider sending her to a
small alternative school. The venerable Sudbury Valley School,
for example (see sidebar), embodies all the self-directed
learning principles that unschooling does. But even in this
democratically-run institution, attendance is compulsory. Call
me an anarchist, but I have always believed that it is
impossible to completely understand freedom unless you are
free...and that you aren’t truly free if you are compelled to do
something, even if it is “for your own good.” While
attending a Sudbury Valley School is
a big improvement over the public school experience, it seems to
me to be a faux-democracy, where children have a democratic
experience within the broader context of coercion.
So your local independent school may only partially solve the
“who decides” conundrum.
Veteran alternative education networker Jerry Mintz is familiar
with many democratic schools around the world. In his book
No Homework and Recess All Day (Bravura Books, 2000), he
has this to say about compulsory attendance at school: “It is
important to look at this in terms of children’s rights. All
people should have a basic right to have control over their own
lives and their own education – up to the point at which their
actions affect somebody else. When you look at it this way, you
can’t be exclusively concerned with how effective this
particular approach is....If you feel like working on your stamp
collection, and that’s how you’d like to spend your time, who is
to say that you should really be spending your time joining a
book club? It’s just none of anybody’s business.”
Or is it? The choice between a stamp collection or a book club
is quite a bit different than, say, the choice between walking
down the middle of a busy road or on the sidewalk. Or between
eating healthy food or candy. Or playing outside or on video
games. So where does a child’s business becomes a parent’s
business too? When my daughters were young, my solution to this
sort of dilemma was always to ask, “What is the worst that could
happen?” In most cases, the problem turned out not to be a
problem when examined in this manner; in other cases, the
yardstick I used measured the child’s safety, other people’s
safety, followed by my own principles and level of comfort. It
turned out that there were relatively few situations where are
they were not able to make their own choices safely.
The trouble with the notion that controlling children’s behavior
over important issues is acceptable is that there is no
consensus about which issues are important and which are
trivial...and the definitions might vary depending on our mood
or the situation. At any rate, how do we know that even very
young children are not capable of making good choices about
things we might feel are on the important list? My daughters
taught me that children are more able to make good choices than
most of us give them credit for...and certainly don’t need to be
subjected to as much benevolent protection as our society
provides. As a T-shirt that my daughters wore when they were
toddlers said: “Kids are people too.” What the shirt merely
inferred was that kids have rights too.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child put those rights on
the world’s agenda; it is the most widely ratified treaty in the
world. Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1989,
the Convention promises children around the world the right to
life, liberty, education and health care. It provides protection
to children in armed conflict, protection from discrimination,
protection from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment
or punishment, protection within the justice system and
protection from economic exploitation, in addition to many other
fundamental protections. Despite the convention’s near-universal
ratification (only the U.S. and Somalia have not ratified it,
although the U.S. has signed it and thus signaled its intention
to ratify), many children are still denied their basic rights.
Even in the developed world, the essence and the delivery of
these rights is often so protection-oriented as to be
counterproductively restrictive and paternalistic. The term
“paternalism” in this context refers to preventing others from
doing harm to themselves, or providing for their needs without
giving them rights or responsibilities. A paternalist, by
definition, believes that she knows more than the person she is
trying to prevent from harming himself. The paternalist destroys
the freedom of choice of the person “harming” himself in
exchange for his well-being.
But as life learners, I believe we should be doing everything we
can to protect our children’s rights as well as their
well-being.
A number of non-coercive parenting philosophies are aimed at changing the
rights-as-protection paradigm. They demonstrate how to provide for
children’s needs and to keep them safe without stomping on their rights.
Taking Children Seriously (TCS) is a philosophy founded by libertarians
Sarah Fitz-Claridge (formerly Sarah Lawrence) and David Deutsch, a physicist
at Oxford University who pioneered the field of quantum computers. TCS is
based upon the idea that it is possible and desirable to raise and educate
children without doing anything to them against their will and without
making them do anything against their will. The TCS print journal and
website provide a wealth of information about what it means on a day-to-day
basis to take children seriously.
But the founders recognize that this is easier said than done. Writes
Fitz-Claridge, “TCS holds that all human beings are fallible and can make
mistakes. You can feel 100 percent sure that you are right, when actually,
you are mistaken. We think that there is such a thing as truth, and right
and wrong, and that through conjecture and criticism, human beings can come
to know and understand truths about the world, including moral truths.”
The issue of children’s rights and responsibilities – and those of life
learning parents – merits continued conjecture and criticism.
Resources
The Freechild Project, PO Box 6185,
Olympia, Washington 98507-6185 USA
www.freechild.org
Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO),
417 Roslyn Road, Roslyn Heights, NY 11577 USA
www.educationrevolution.org
National Youth Rights Association,
PO Box 5882 NW, Washington DC, 20016 USA
www.youthrights.org
Taking Children Seriously
www.takingchildrenseriously.com
Parenting Without Punishing
www.nopunish.net
Wendy Priesnitz is Life Learning's founder and editor, and a
pioneering advocate of child-centered learning and unschooling.
She is also a journalist with 35 years of experience and the
author of nine books.
