Sarah Fitz-Claridge - Taking Children Seriously

The episode opens with the thesis already stated: children should learn what they want, what interests them and how to solve problems, and they do not learn that by being institutionalized for 12 years and bossed about by an authoritarian teacher who doesn't know very much. The host introduces Sarah Fitz-Claridge as a writer, coach and speaker with a fallibilist worldview. In the early 1990s she started a journal that became Taking Children Seriously, after being surprised by the heated audience reactions she got when she talked about children. The host says he is broadly sympathetic but disagrees in places, so he will play devil's advocate, and he calls her an original, first-principles thinker about how society treats children.

She defines Taking Children Seriously as an educational philosophy built on the idea that human beings are fallible, parents included. Because of that, parents should not interact with their children coercively. They should try to create consent and look for solutions to problems that do not involve coercion. Her reason is that coercion settles questions in an irrational way: it rests on the theory that might makes right, which she says is false.

It embodies the theory that might makes right, which is false.

She calls this a genuinely new view of children. In her account the standard view resembles how women were seen before emancipation, or black people when they were slaves in America. The claim is not that children are denied personhood. It is that they are thought not quite able to control their own lives, so they need a benevolent, patriarchal parent, in the way a husband or slave master was supposed to see that nothing went wrong. She does not accuse parents of wanting to be dictators. She says this is the view the whole world holds: children are not quite rational and creative, so they must be managed and controlled until they become citizens who can take responsibility for themselves.

Her alternative is that children are creative and rational from birth. People are born with human minds and not only animal minds, and she finds it incoherent to imagine rationality and creativity being switched on at some later stage. Her main evidence in this passage is language learning: a baby could not learn a language without being creative and rational. She restates the approach as a non-coercive educational theory, a way of raising children without coercion. The host places his own position between hers and the conventional view and asks her to move him closer to hers.

The host's first objection is that, unlike women or other races, children really are a different kind of thing, biologically different from adults, so perhaps they are entitled to fewer rights. Fitz-Claridge answers that this is the same circular argument used about women and black people in the past: their skin is black, so they obviously differ from the rest of us; they are women, so they are obviously not men. She predicts that people will one day look back on today's view of children with the horror we now feel toward those old arguments. The host agrees, especially given how schooling works, but presses further. Differences between races are superficial, and differences between genders are minimal next to those between a two-year-old and an 18-year-old. He adds that a chimp is quite possibly smarter than a two-year-old, so why does the chimp not have the same right against coercion?

She rejects the comparison. In the relevant sense children of any age are the same, because they have creativity and rationality. A newborn knows nothing beyond genetic knowledge, as an animal does, but by about two years old the child is speaking and doing many things no chimp or other animal will ever do. In her explanation, the child has spent those two years forming inexplicit conjectures about what words mean, what we call different things, and a huge number of other matters beyond language, while the animal does none of this.

She also heads off a misreading. She is not saying that a baby should be left to its own devices; the contrast she draws is between coercion and non-coercion, and adults do assist their children. Adults also know more than a baby, so the question is whether that greater knowledge justifies coercing the child. Her answer is that coercion amounts to saying might makes right, and that is not justified. When the host asks for a definition, she describes coercion roughly as causing someone to do something, or not do something, against their will, and as imposing your will on someone else against theirs. She adds that there are subtler issues beyond this rough statement.