Pre-publication draft

“Once the children become conscious of their education qua education, they are likely to start thinking about their ‘education’ instead of their own interests. Thinking about one’s learning is not the same as learning, and these things tend to conflict.”
– Sarah Fitz-Claridge

From the archives: Posted on 27th December, 1996

[Note: This post, titled “School Mentality: Beware!” was a PRE-PUBLICATION FIRST DRAFT. Please do not quote or link to this draft. Instead, see the published version, which can be found here: Objectifying education sabotages learning. It was published in the paper journal, Taking Children Seriously 23, in 1997. A shorter version of it was later published by Education Otherwise: Beware the homeschooling mentality. I am only putting this draft up to make the conversations easier to follow if you are reading every post from the beginning, as some readers like to do. If you are not doing that, you might prefer to read one of the published versions instead.]

This is a draft of an article which will appear in Taking Children Seriously in a forthcoming issue. If you wish to re-produce it (other than on the Taking Children Seriously list) please ask me first. Thanks. Criticisms appreciated.

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Non-coercive parents want to help their children find out what interests them and help them pursue their own passions. They want their children to be free from the constraints of externally-imposed curricula and from the stultifying educational hoops other children are required to jump through in school. They want to give their children full access to the world, and would not dream of restricting their access to television or any other source of information. In these and many other ways, non-coercive education does not look like conventional education.

This can raise a problem for some parents when, for legal or social reasons, they are obliged to satisfy other people that they are providing a proper education for their children. Under the pressure of such situations, parents may lose sight of their non-coercive objectives and slide into a damaging school mentality.

They might find themselves thinking about what the children’s peers are learning in school, or wondering what conventional wisdom says children “should” know, or what skills they “are expected” to have, by such-and-such an age. They might worry that the authorities will judge their children’s education “unbalanced” or to have significant “gaps”. Assuming that they resist the temptation to pressurise their children into “filling” such gaps and distort their education so as to make it “look” better to the conventionally-minded outside world, parents may nevertheless find themselves taking defensive measures such as assembling a portfolio of their children’s work, or keeping a diary of “educational activities” their children engage in, or making a note of “key skills” that their children appear to have acquired.

The children’s education is then ‘objectified’. It becomes an object in its own right, under scrutiny.

On the face of it, there is nothing coercive in that: the children are as free as ever to pursue their interests, and the parents are just as determined as ever to avoid the pitfalls of a conventional education. Perhaps some parents can indeed prevent their monitoring from doing any harm. They are able to avoid the objectification of their education becoming entangled with the way the children think about themselves. However, I believe that once the education has become objectified, there is an inherent tendency for the non-coercive approach to be undermined and for the children’s learning to be progressively distorted and damaged. That is why I want to point out some of the dangers of this sort of thinking.

If it were not for external pressure, why would non-coercive parents want to know about the school curriculum? There could be innocuous reasons; but if the reason is to find out what the children may be expected to have studied, what exactly do the parents intend to do with that knowledge? If they have no intention of manipulating the children into “filling in the gaps”, why do they want to know about the school curriculum? Parents who sincerely do not want to harm their children’s autonomy may nevertheless end up doing so inadvertently because of their fear of being judged inadequate as parents or educators. Familiarising oneself with the school curriculum may, for some parents, lead directly to such a conflict.

What if parents read up on the school curriculum just to get ideas for what their children might become interested in? Again, there’s nothing wrong with that, in itself. Part of a parent’s job is to provide a stream of such ideas. On the other hand, how likely is it that children will just happen to become interested in subjects studied in school, or topics covered in the school curriculum, at just the ‘right’ times and in just the ‘right’ order and in the ‘right’ proportions? There may indeed be some overlap between some children’s interests and the school curriculum, but this is a dangerous way to think about what they might become interested in. A better way to approach this might be to make a point of being on the lookout for nascent interests, and to make great efforts to facilitate interests that arise. Parents who have a school curriculum in mind may systematically tend to miss vital clues about a child’s evolving interests because those interests are nowhere to be found on the curriculum. Children’s interests arise out of who they are, so it would be better to think about the individual child and to ask what might be of interest to that particular child, rather than to look at a school curriculum for ideas.

To “prove” that their children are receiving a proper education, some parents keep diaries of educational activities or portfolios of their children’s work. Why not? The danger is that in making themselves continually conscious of their children’s education as education, they may then inadvertently convey this to the children. This will cause problems. Once the children become conscious of their education qua education, they are likely to start thinking about their “education” instead of their own interests. Thinking about one’s learning is not the same as learning, and these things tend to conflict. It is none other than our old enemy, the conflict between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.

Under those circumstances, education becomes performance. Children’s creativity and growth of knowledge is diverted into the problem of how to perform—how to be seen to be meeting the external standards implicit in the school curriculum, how to produce paper “evidence” of their studies, or how to show “progress”. Instead of pursuing the interests and solving the problems which arise naturally out of their own personalities and problem-situations, the children focus upon the semblance of education.

If parents keep portfolios of their children’s work, they may inadvertently convey the theory that their children should produce paper work for the portfolio, and finish work started. They may exert subtle but very damaging pressure on their children to perform. If they keep diaries of their children’s “education”, they may be thinking more about education conventionally-construed than about important things such as what their children enjoy and are interested in or might become interested in, and how to facilitate those interests. There may be some parents for whom these things will not corrupt their minds and skew their problem-situations—and worse, those of their children—but for many at least, this is a risk.

It may be best not to keep one’s children’s work at all. Keeping it “for grandma”, or to give the children when they have grown up, is manipulative; keeping it secretly is a form of lying. For many children, keeping their work at all will be enough to change the focus of their thinking from content to product, and likewise to change the focus of their endeavours from autonomous learning to performance.

One (conventional) educationalist recently questioned the wisdom of my suggestion that one should not keep children’s work. “But children like to see the progress they have made,” she said. “If parents don’t keep their work, they won’t be able to see how far they have come.” Children in school may indeed “like to see the progress they have made” but that is likely to be no more than a sad reflection of their focus upon performance and externally-motivated production of “evidence of education”.

The carrot of “good progress” is, by logical necessity, backed by the stick of “poor progress”. Whether it is intended that way or not, keeping work and showing children their “progress” is one of the sticks used to beat children into performing “better”. The children are motivated by the pressure to keep “improving” their performance and to stay ahead of their peers. It is coercion, with all the deleterious effects that entails. Children’s work should remain their own private property, not to be looked at by anyone unless they want to show it. And if they do want to show their work, is it a way of begging for a carrot, or is it for a less sinister reason? Are they excited about having solved a problem they were working on? Are they seeking criticism and help solving a problem? Or is the purpose of showing their work to get affection and attention from their parents? In that case, the child is being manipulated with praise or attention. That is to say, the parents are coercing their children by the implicit threat that they will withold affection or attention. Consider whether the children’s learning is self-directed or other-directed: autonomous or externally-motivated.

Where parents have already embarked on the sort of monitoring I am criticising, they might find it useful to consider whether the work their children are “choosing” to do bears a suspicious resemblance to the work their peers might be doing in school. For instance: are they using textbooks? Do they “do projects”? Do they “love their fun maths workbook”? This may be nothing to worry about, but just how likely is it that any text book or workbook would answer the burning questions a child might have—and keep doing so? It seems a very artificial way to have one’s questions answered, and I suspect that workbook-loving children are primarily performing—jumping through hoops—or possibly admiring their own improved performance—rather than pursuing an interest and solving their own problems. Beware of anything which looks like conventional education: it might be just that.

I should add that if you do conclude that the children are merely “performing” rather than following their intrinsic motivations, the cure is not to manipulate them further by denying them the praise, etc., that they seem to be asking for! The cure is to go back to the root of the problem and stop the monitoring, curriculum-browsing and other pressure that has diverted them from seeking their own path.

One of the most common mistakes made in human relationships is to impede the growth of loved ones as persons. People sometimes form a view of a person and fail to notice that the person is trying to improve his life, or is otherwise growing and changing significantly. They continue to interact, as it were, with the old person. In effect they condition the relationship by the view that the person is stuck in his old self. They may define the person by his past mistakes or strengths, or simply by who he once was, and thereby sabotage his growth—and their own too.

This is especially true of children, who are growing and changing very fast. Parents tend to see them as the younger children they were rather than the older, wiser people they may have become. Persons are dynamic, evolving entities, not immutable selves. One danger is that the children may themselves adopt the stultifying parental theory. Or they may find that every time they take a positive step, their parents inadvertently push them back to where they were.

Keeping children’s work makes it much more likely that the parents will be defining their children by who they once were. Worse, the children themselves might adopt such theories. If instead, children pursue their own passions, unconscious of their progress qua progress, their learning qua education—in other words, if they are pursuing rather than performing, if they are engaged in the process rather than looking at the process as an object of scrutiny—they will be less likely to self-consciously define themselves by moments in their pasts, less likely to grow up thinking that they once had such-and-such an attribute so they will always have that attribute. They may be more likely to grow and learn. Let children look—and move—forward; don’t encourage them to look back. For that matter, don’t encourage them to look at their learning at all. Learning is one thing. Looking at one’s learning is something quite different.

See also:

Sarah Fitz-Claridge, 1996, ‘Pre-publication draft’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/pre-publication-draft