Whose ends?

Why the standard justifications for coercion don’t make sense.

The dark side of John Holt

John Holt was so critical of school that sometimes he appeared to suggest that even children who want to go to school should not do so.

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.

Children as subhuman aliens

Are children really such an alien species that the way they feel about being thwarted is so completely different from how adults feel?

Scientism vs morality

How scientism allows one to escape from the merely human arena of morality with a single bound. Parents’ disputes with their children are over a moral issue—what they should do, or what should be done to them. While professionals may have some expertise over factual issues, that does not entitle them to pose as authorities on the moral issue. To assume that it does is anti-rational. It is scientism.

Time out is not taking time out

There is a difference between sitting on a chair to relax, and enforced sitting on a chair. Or is being strapped in the electric chair also not a punishment?

Common emotional blackmail

Using love as leverage to double-bind children to obey—threatening to withdraw the relationship—is wrong. Children have a right to our love.