#110 – On discipling children and towards a better childhood

Imagine a man who demands that his wife sleep at a fixed time every night, forbids her to indulge in certain foods she loves, and confines her to an institution for seven hours a day, where she is subjected to more discipline and has ideas instilled in her that are deemed “good for her”. If this oppression were not enough, the man does not let his wife do anything without his permission, and society expects the wife to be grateful to her husband for all that he does for her.

If, after all this, the wife gets angry or starts crying or shouting, refusing to obey another command by her husband, the husband dismisses her, saying that she is throwing “just another tantrum”.

While the situation described above would be condemned in today’s society if applied to an adult relationship, a simple substitution of characters reveals a depressing truth. If one replaces the wife in the plot with a child, and the man with parental authority, then it becomes evident that I have just described a typical period in life for most people today, known as childhood.

The act of “disciplining a child” is another way to describe the act of coercing a child. Such coercion is generally contrived not for the child’s benefit but for the convenience of the authority engaging in it, as it serves to instill obedience. Although this “disciplining” may sometimes be performed with the intention of benefiting the child, it rarely achieves this aim. The underlying assumption behind carrying out such coercion against children is that the self-discipline exhibited by an Olympic-level athlete, a world-class ballet dancer, a genius mathematician, or even a regular, civil person, stems from an authority figure instilling such discipline from a young age. However, this assumption is misguided.

A person is naturally interested in things. As John Holt eloquently expressed, “Children do not need to be made to learn about the world, or shown how. They want to, and they know how.” The discipline demonstrated by the person who is the best in the world at their craft is entirely different from what is implied by “instilling discipline in the child”, an equivocation of the word “discipline”. The latter refers to coercive control, which begets obedience and usually results in the death of the child’s passion, as he is unwillingly forced to do something he does not like rather than pursue what he actually wants. But the Olympic athlete or genius mathematician who spends hours perfecting his craft, testing and stretching to the limits of physical and intellectual capacity, does so because he wants to.

A task may be incredibly challenging, but precisely that a challenge exists may make it valuable and exciting to you.

What one needs to learn something is curiosity about the subject and the freedom to make mistakes. Those preconditions are in stark contrast, of course, to the ways of our current educational institutions. In school, mistakes are abhorred, and children must learn certain things despite their genuine inclination toward the topic.

Knowledge is not poured into minds as water is into a vessel. Instead, one creates it within their own mind by guessing ideas and correcting errors within them. Even if some knowledge has already been “established” by others and instantiated in books or other physical substrates, a person must still recreate that knowledge within their own mind. This learning process occurs by making conjectures—about the explanations found in sources such as books, or those found in a university lecturer’s words, for example—and correcting prior theories that conflict with the newly acquired understanding. Thus, learning is not a passive, top-down process but an active one. Indeed, it is an individual act of knowledge creation.

Failure to grasp this fundamental epistemological theory regarding how knowledge is created can have vast practical implications, like how one treats children, and thus affect our future.

Childhood does not have to entail coercion. The fact that it does merely represents cultural ignorance, a problem that can be addressed through knowledge, just as it was in the case of African slaves in the 19th century or the granting of equal rights to women. Indeed, I can imagine a world where our descendants will look back at how we treat children today in the same way we now look at the treatment of women in the past—as a different kind of person, subjected to paternalistic control over their decisions—with horror.

Much of the content expressed here is inspired by an educational philosophy known as Taking Children Seriously cofounded by Sarah Fitz-Claridge and David Deutsch. Errors are my own!

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