Is your baby trying to tell you something?
Young babies’ language decoded! Your babies can get their needs met.
autonomy
“What does education taking children seriously look like?”
Children learn the same way everyone does when they are completely free of others’ expectations and other interfering impediments to learning. They learn by wondering about something, thinking about it, finding out about it, perhaps reading about it or discussing it or looking it up on the internet, all driven by their own curiosity.
The inefficiency of subjecting unwilling children to unwanted mathematics lessons
When a child WANTS to learn mathematics, the learning is effortless and remarkably swift.
“What do you do about vaccinating your children?”
Children should not only not have any medical procedures performed on them without consent, they should be in control throughout. That applies to vaccinations and everything else.
“At what age should children first leave the house on their own, visit their friend next door on their own, go to the cinema on their own, hitchhike from coast to coast on their own, etc.?”
In a relationship characterised by consent, on those occasions when the other person is warning us that our proposed course of action may be unwise, and explaining why, we have every reason to trust that such warnings are not attempts to thwart us and ruin our fun, but are actually important—that it is actually in our best interests to heed the warnings.
Taking Children Seriously: a new view of children
Taking Children Seriously is a new VIEW of children—a non-paternalistic view: children do not actually need to be controlled for their own good. An Oxford Karl Popper Society talk.
Home education in Britain
Most home educators in Britain favour autonomous curiosity-driven learning, vs formal homeschooling.
Whose ends?
Why the standard justifications for coercion don’t make sense.
Is Taking Children Seriously revolutionary?
Taking Children Seriously is neither utopian nor revolutionary. It is fallibilist and respects tradition as well as the growth of knowledge.
Where is the choice for the child?
When children know that if their parents deem them to be watching too much TV, their parents will ban TV-watching, they self-coercively limit their watching out of fear of losing it altogether.
What if a child wants to buy something the parent is boycotting for moral reasons?
When a child wants us to buy something we find morally objectionable, we have to remember that it is our child buying it, not us. You have no jurisdiction over your children. What they do can’t be morally wrong for you.
Children are autonomous sources of ends
Children are not a means to our ends, they are an autonomous source of ends—their own ends.
Solving problems takes creativity
Learning involves changing preferences. Resolving disagreements involves changing preferences. People’s preferences are not fixed: they naturally change all the time. Problems are soluble!
Violating parents’ rights of conscience
When I criticise parental coercion, parents sometimes complain that I am violating parents’ rights—the right to interact with their children according to their own conscience. Children too should be free to act according to their own conscience.
Autonomous learning, autonomous life
This 1989 workshop advocated taking children seriously, not just ‘autonomous learning’.