Most problems are solved without any explicit communication. To the extent that people think of ‘finding common preferences’ as requiring or implying the need for explicit discussions, that is an understandable but very unfortunate misunderstanding.
Whatever might happen in the future, it will still not have been right to behave immorally today.
We may subscribe to the values of rationality and taking children seriously, but when it comes to detail, we may well be mistaken about particular aspects of it. So instilling anything, including those ideas we most value, is a mistake. We want our ideas to be corrected. We want our children to be able to correct our errors, not be saddled with them.
Children are no less creative and rational than adults, whether or not they yet have the explicit language in which to express themselves.
Subjecting anyone of any age to coercive education (unwanted criticism) is not taking them seriously. Nor is it even taking the valuableness of criticism seriously! Let alone taking the growth of knowledge seriously.
Even if childhood coercion has virtually no effect, it would not change what it is right or wrong to do to people. And it is not right to do things to people that will impair the growth of knowledge.
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.
A discussion about Karl Popper’s epistemology, reason, the growth of knowledge, relativism and certainty.
Taking children seriously means taking a child’s wish/decision to go to school seriously too.
Taking Children Seriously is neither utopian nor revolutionary. It is fallibilist and respects tradition as well as the growth of knowledge.
Karl Popper’s theory prevails because it solves problems other theories of the growth of knowledge fail to solve, it is a better explanation than its rivals, and it unifies ideas previously thought to be unconnected.
Creativity is not caused by problems, otherwise anyone who had a problem would solve it straight away. The only way to solve problems is through a creative rational process.
How (logically) coercion interferes with creativity in the mind.
Taking children seriously is such a joy compared to the constant battle or successfully suppressed children of conventional parenting.
Reason keeps a child safe because the child has the correct theory (that the stuff is dangerous); coercion is risky because the child’s theory is not based on the reality of the substance, but upon the possible punishment for an infringement of the parental rule.
People’s notion that young children are irrational or that teenagers are obnoxious colours their view of what is happening in reality. They see irrationality/awfulness where none exists.
Most children are performing constant defensive actions to maintain some kind of equilibrium in the face of constant coercion, and when they get tired, their coping strategies begin to go wrong. Tired adults also sometimes behave badly too.
Parents discuss children’s rationality.
Any rational system has virtually no knowledge compared with what is possible. The whole point of rationality is what to do in the face of ignorance. It is not what to do when one already knows everything.
About the worry that a very young child’s brain and cognitive function and reason might be insufficient to prevent them inadvertently killing themselves by running into the road.