“The mind introduces irrationality (entrenchments, a block against thinking in that area) as a defence mechanism to prevent too many areas of the mind from getting enmeshed in an intractably unsolved problem.”
– Sarah Fit-Claridge
From the archives: The original post was posted on 19th March, 1996
There seems to be some confusion about rationality and its implications for parenting so I want to address that issue.
The argument goes that children are inherently irrational or lacking reason, and thus incapable of making sensible choices in some cases, and unaware of their limitations. This assertion is often “supported” by examples of cases in which children have “behaved irrationally”, but such examples prove nothing. They are merely examples of problems between coercive parent and child. One could provide many examples of adult “irrationality” too, but no one is making a similar argument that adults should be coerced for their own good.
Contrary to popular belief, I am not arguing that children are perfectly rational—any more than adults are! That is not the important issue. If it were a good idea to coerce all persons whose rationality was in question, no one, adult or child, would escape coercion. But in our society, adults are allowed to behave irrationally and make decisions whose effects are regrettable for them. Adults may make mistakes; children are considered too young to be allowed to do so. The vast majority of human beings are rational but not perfectly rational. Therefore, let us agree that children (and adults) sometimes think and act rationally and sometimes irrationally, and consider the implications.
In considering what to do when a person is acting irrationally, we first need to ask how can we be sure that the person IS acting irrationally? That requires a judgement, a human interpretation of the other person’s thinking and actions. And human beings are fallible. We make mistakes. We can’t know with absolute certainty that we have not made a mistake in any thinking process, and that includes a thinking process in which we judge another person to be acting irrationally. It may seem self-evident to us that Jim is acting irrationally, but we may be mistaken. There may be a perfectly good explanation for his actions that we just have not thought of. Most of the examples parents come up with in support of the idea that “children are irrational” fall into this category. That is—I can usually think of rational explanations for whatever behaviour the parents are complaining about. The point is, whether it seems self-evident or not tells us nothing about the truth of the matter. Many ideas are “self-evidently true” and yet in fact false. This has important implications.
Suppose that you make a judgement that Jim is acting irrationally, but your judgement is mistaken. You coerce Jim (because you believe that is the best thing to do for him at that time). You stop him doing whatever he was doing and sabotage his rational thinking process. You force him to stop acting on his theory and instead enact your false theory. You have done objective harm.
Because, being human, we can never be certain that we have not made a mistake in this way, the default has to be to allow all competing theories to compete. If we reject a theory because of its source (a child, say) we may, given our fallibility, be mistaken and thus do objective harm. If we entrench our theory—force the child to enact our theory—we may be entrenching a false theory, and thus do objective harm.
Given that there are many conflicting ideas floating around about what it means to be “rational”, it seems sensible to elucidate its meaning in the context of the growth of knowledge. As I often say about the meaning of “coercion”, I don’t care what word you use, just so long as you know what I am talking about. If you don’t agree with the way I use “rationality” and have a different idea of the meaning of that word, I ask you to substitute another word of your choosing rather than change the meaning of the word in this context. It is the meaning that is important here, not the word.
The process that I am going to describe is the best theory we have of how knowledge grows, and is the work of Karl Popper and David Deutsch. It is a universal metaphysical theory, not a scientific theory. A scientific theory must be empirically testable; it must make predictions that are falsifiable. This theory is universal, but as it does not make any testable predications, it can’t be refuted empirically. It is a different sort of theory—a metaphysical theory, a philosophical theory—which if or when it is refuted, it will be refuted by argument, not by empirical tests. This appears to cause a few worries for those who pride themselves on their “scientific” approach, but it might help them to remember that Popper’s brilliant work on the logic of scientific discovery is metaphysics, not science.
To the extent that a problem-solving process is rational, knowledge may grow. Great creativity is required at every “stage” of the process, as we shall see. The rational process through which knowledge grows applies to all types of knowledge, from that in science to that of a child learning to read. It also applies to the growth of creativity—the growth of the meta-knowledge of how to solve problems.
The growth of knowledge starts with a problem (in the widest sense of the word). If a person thinks about something that isn’t a problem, or fails to think about something that is a problem, that is irrational, and knowledge is not growing. Note that by “problem” I mean a conflict of theories (or ideas, if you prefer) in the mind of the person. Trying to alter theories that are not problematic must put the person in a worse problem situation—by his own standards—than he was in before. Not addressing a problem does nothing to solve it. Making children learn their times tables in case they need them in later life is an example of forcing violation of stage one of the rational process. It is an example of addressing a non-existent problem: there was no conflict about that issue in the mind of the child before, but one is being introduced by coercion from the parent.
Next, new theories are formed, to solve the problem. They must be tentative—that is, they have to be formed with the intention of solving a problem and with the intention of being dropped if they do not solve the problem. In other words, they must be purported attempts to solve a problem. They must be new theories, or else new variants on old theories. It is irrational to keep trying an old theory that has just been refuted. Any entrenched theory is a barrier to the growth of knowledge, and this is where most parents have major problems with rationality. All the rules parents make are entrenched theories and thus irrational and inimical to the growth of knowledge, inimical to problem-solving, inimical to good relationships with their children. If the new theory proposed is that one entrench an old theory, that is irrational. If the new theory says “don’t execute stage two”, that is obviously a violation of this stage. That is often what is forced on a child by coercion. The child has identified a problem and is prevented from thinking up any potential solutions.
Stage three of the rational process through which knowledge grows is criticism. The tentative theories are criticised, in attempts to refute them. If a theory survives these attempts at refutation, it becomes the tentative solution to the problem. Any entrenched theory is by definition not open to criticism, and thus violates the rational process at this stage. If a theory is immune from criticism (which is the case when a parent overrides opposition from the child) then it can’t be rejected even if it is false. Not allowing rejection of a false theory is obviously a problem in terms of rationality and the growth of knowledge. If, instead, all theories are open to criticism, then we can be more confident that false theories (theories which do not solve a problem, by the person’s own lights) will be dropped in favour of any real solutions there may be amongst the rival tentative theories. You might say that it does not matter if a theory is entrenched if it is true. The problem is, given that you are a fallible human being, you might be mistaken. It might be false. If it is true, criticism will not refute it, so there is every reason to maintain openness to criticism for all theories.
The criticism must be rational. For instance, the criticism must not take the form of comparison of the problematic theory with an entrenched criterion, because again, that entrenched criterion might well be wrong, and you’d never find out, unless it was open to criticism.
Thirdly, the criticism must be directed at whether the proposed theory solves the problem, rather than at any other attribute of the theory, such as who proposed it. Theories should be judged by their content, not by their source. It doesn’t matter who proposed it. What matters is whether it solves the problem. This is where there are major violations of rationality by adults in their dealings with children. In terms of the growth of knowledge in an individual mind, what matters is whether it solves a problem in the mind of the person, by his own lights, not whether someone else thinks it a good thing.)
Stage four is error elimination. This is the step which coercion directly violates. In violating this stage, one is failing to drop a refuted theory, or, more rarely, dropping an unrefuted theory. It is not so common to drop an unrefuted theory, because usually, anti-rational processes in the mind don’t actually drop theories. They tend either to suppress ones they “don’t want” or entrench ones “they do”. However, a person might drop a part of his personality in the face of coercion. For instance, a child whose painstakingly made model is destroyed by an angry parent might react by ceasing to care about that model-making interest that had given him so much pleasure.
Sometimes in the face of coercion the problem just gets entrenched—so, for instance—the impulse to be this one person is there at the same time as the knowledge that one can’t be that person. In other cases, the person despairs, gives up hope, and (as in the case of the child model-builder) just drops that side of his personality. (This can make the person happier, BTW, as, for many people, could cutting off their heads altogether! But nevertheless, the person is, by his own lights, in a worse problem situation than he was before the coercion.)
Stage five is: new problem. If one rejects a theory because it causes a new problem, that is irrational. If one rejects a theory because it is not a once-and-for-all final solution—for instance, one of our opponents on the Frost Programme (TV) debate about home education argued that because the benefits of home education are not available for all, home education should not be permitted—that is a violation of stage 5. The rational process does not take one from a problematic state to a state devoid of problems; it takes one from a state that is less preferred to one that is more preferred. There is always a problem situation, but the problem situation resulting from a process in which a problem has been solved, as above, is preferable, by the person’s own lights, to the previous problem situation.
In reality coercion violates all five stages, not just one. If you think carefully about what it takes to violate any one stage, it really takes violation of all four of the others, because for instance, to drop a theory that has not been refuted, you have to first attack or think about a theory that is not problematic—one of your values. To drop the theory that you were asked to drop is problematic: to drop it, you have to kill a lot of values which were not problematic in the first place. They were just fine until the parent came along and destroyed the model or whatever. It is because failing to solve a problem widens it, that irrationality is then introduced. Irrationality is always introduced by the victim. Always. Because the coercer does not have access to the victim’s mind. Just like everything else in the mind: it is always introduced by the victim. And the irrationality is always introduced as a defence mechanism to prevent too many areas of the mind from getting enmeshed in an unsolved problem.
Why would you ever try to prevent the growth of knowledge in your own mind? The reason you prevent criticism of a problematic theory, or you act on a theory that is still problematic, or you violate any of these five steps, as caused by coercion, is that at some point you make a decision [not consciously] that not doing it will result in the problem being too big to solve. People who fail to do this then go mad.
[Note added 2025: Readers can be forgiven for getting the mistaken impression that the above is a set of categorical imperatives, and that the ‘stages’ can be simply followed by an act of will. In fact, it takes creativity and growth of knowledge throughout (in other words, all the ‘stages’ are needed for each ‘stage’, to identify a problem, to criticise conjectured possible solutions, and so on), and there is no recipe for creativity.
One or two readers lost the Popperian plot, concluding that unpersuaded parents are wicked (as opposed to innocently mistaken and lacking knowledge, or possibly even right), and that such parents need to be coercively educated out of their coercive educating of their children—not quite seeing the incoherence of that.
I also gave the impression that ‘enacting a theory’ is about taking a bodily action like obeying your parent’s command to tidy your room, or eating the cake you have decided to eat. That is an oversimplification: the enacting is about what is happening inside your mind.
Some might also get the mistaken impression that I was suggesting that victims could by an act of will choose not to be coerced. That is not true. It takes creativity and growth of knowledge, and particularly when a parent is using their own creativity to compel their child to comply against the child’s will, it would take exceptional luck for the child to be able to resolve that mental conflict rationally.
Another possible mistaken impression you might get from the above piece is that coercion is just about one person doing something to someone else against their will. Actually, it is about what is happening in your own mind, which might or might not involve someone else saying or doing something to you. Coercion anywhere in the system including just within your own mind (‘self-coercion’) is an obstacle to creative rational thinking in that area. (And again, that does not mean you can simply choose not to coerce yourself. It all takes creativity and, in effect, luck!)]
See also:
- What do you mean by ‘problem’?
- The primary function of teachers is to coerce children
- Biting lessons
Sarah Fitz-Claridge, 1996, ‘Coercion is irrational’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/coercion-is-irrational