On Schooling (coerced learning) vs.
Unschooling (self-motivated learning)
An open letter to all parents
Henry H. Lindner
Do you think that "discipline" and schooling are
the right and necessary means to your child's mental and emotional development?
Do you believe that parents and teachers must force children to do and to learn
what is good for them? Do you believe that children are lazy and stupid and
won't learn anything unless forced to do so? If so, you've imbibed societal
delusions that have no relationship to fact. Your false beliefs and coercive
approach to children are a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you treat children
like lazy idiots, they come to define themselves that way, and that’s
just what they become. There are two and only two paradigms for child development
and learning:
1. Coercion – The child is born lazy and
stupid, and must be forced to learn the facts, rules, and behaviors that adults
and society think are “good” for them.
2. Respect and Support – The child has a natural
desire to learn, to love, and to mature. Our job as parents is to supply all
their needs and support their self-directed, self-motivated development.
There is no middle ground between the two positions—you
may think there is, but they are contradictory. Which is the correct
approach? Which approach produces the kind of child and adult that we all want?
Consider the following: What are the mental/emotional qualities are most
necessary in a young teen about to leave home and live on their own? What do
they need in order to become moral and responsible adults? Let's enumerate:
1. Self love and respect: They must love themselves, believe
in their essential goodness, and believe in the efficacy of their own minds. If
so, they will follow their own intuition and reasoning, and question every
dubious belief, idea, or procedure that they encounter. They will be concerned
with truth, not with bolstering a low self-image.
2. Rational selfishness: Believing that they have a right to
be themselves and to enjoy their own lives as long as they allow others to do
likewise
3. Rational self-protectiveness: Knowing what is good for them and
what is not good in the short and long run.
4. Rational assertiveness: Able to assert their own wishes,
needs and desires in their relationships with other persons so that they are
not unduly influenced to their own detriment, used, or abused by others.
5. Curiosity and inquisitiveness: The desire to know and understand all
things that touch upon their lives. Self-teaching. Perpetual learner.
6. Healthy ambition and energy: the desire and the motivation to
achieve something that is good for themselves and for other persons.
7. Carefulness and cleanliness: Loving their surroundings, their
work, their abode, and their belongings as they love themselves. Taking care to
avoid mistakes and injuries. Watching out for themselves and their belongings.
Now I assert that forcing a child to obey your
commands as a parent, and then sending them to school to obey adults for the rest of
their formative years either inhibits or completely prevents a child from
attaining every one of these criteria of healthy psychosocial development.
Let's take them in order:
1. Self love and respect: If you constantly try to force an
immature human being into mature or socially-conditioned modes of behavior, you
send them the message that they are not Good. You inform them
that their natural inclinations, desires, and behaviors are wrong and
that they must now, and for the rest of their lives, suppress their natural
self and be what you and others want them to be. This is self-loathing, not
self-love.
2. Rational selfishness: If you teach them not to be
"selfish" but instead to share their toys, do what's good for others
instead of for themselves, and obey parents and adults, you are preventing them
from developing a healthy and natural ethical personality. Your message: Life
is not about people cooperating to mutual advantage, it’s about using
force to make everyone do what you think is “good”.
3. Rational self-protectiveness: If you force children to obey
yourselves as parents, and to obey teachers in loco parentis, you
prevent them from being aware of, and protecting themselves. You destroy their
will at great peril, for they will be incapable of protecting themselves from
the desires and coercion of others for the rest of their lives.
4. Rational assertiveness: In order to create obedient
children, parents and teachers must break their wills. What school allows
children to voice their objections to being controlled all day every day? If
you want assertive children, you must let them be assertive, from birth on.
5. Curiosity and inquisitiveness: A child can turn their attention to
the richness and mystery of the world only if their needs are being met and
they are free to think and to grow. Forcing a child to memorize reams of data
for hours everyday, before and apart from their own questioning, only makes
them sick of all “learning”. No wonder schooled children never
touch a book outside of what they’re assigned to do. Once removed from
school, it takes months for a child to regain their curiosity and motivation to
learn about their world. And if they’re over 13 or 14 years of age, they
may never regain it.
6. Healthy ambition and energy: 17 years of daily coercion in the
home and school are enough to drain even the most energetic child of joy and
energy. They become quite cynical and do little but game the school system in
order to get their degree, get a job, do the minimum necessary, and amuse
themselves with mindless entertainment and sport.
7. Carefulness and cleanliness: These require self-love and respect.
If you have these, you also care about your house, your work, your belongings,
etc. If you loathe yourself, you don’t care about much else either.
Look at the evidence. Look at the mentality of high school
graduates in America today. Look at their inability to organize their own lives
and protect themselves. Look at teenage pregnancies, drug abuse, violence, and
suicide. On the contrary, look into the biography of nearly every great thinker
and innovator and you'll find a lack of formal schooling or a hatred of same.
If you're an American, start with our own. Mark Twain, one of our greatest wits
and writers quit school after 6th grade. Thomas Edison was expelled from school
after a few weeks of second grade and was home schooled—he became the
greatest inventor in American history. Ben Franklin: one year of grammar
school, one year of tutoring, no formal education after age 10. George
Washington attended school irregularly. In England, Michael Faraday practically
created modern electromagnetics. He performed all the seminal experiments that
Edison later repeated. He never attended any school. I could go on and on.
Einstein stated that schooling almost destroyed his interest in knowledge. Find
an innovator or free thinker and look into his childhood. Read the works of
adults who have taught and raised children and realize just how destructive the
process of schooling is. Read John Holt, Grace Llewellyn, John Taylor Gatto,
A.S. Neill, and others. Do your research.
I propose that all true knowledge and understanding is
self-desired, self-sought, self-discovered, and self-assimilated. School
"learning" is performance of tests and task under coercion. It is false
learning, it looks like learning but it's merely performance. Consider
carefully what you, and the adults you know, actually remember and use from
what was learned in school. Consider how little interest most adults have in
truth, even when it comes to things they encounter everyday in their work. Most
of them just go on following some routine or other and never think much about
it. Few ever pursue any new knowledge or understanding.
Compare what you learned in school with what you’ve
learned by your own initiative since you graduated. Which of these collections
of knowledge is more meaningful and useful to you? How many adults are doing
any job that depends on any courses they took in school? How many adults need
or have any interest in any mathematics beyond simple arithmetic? Math is,
unfortunately, used as a tool of authoritarianism. It's something that adults
can force on children to assert their power over them. Imagine the response if
the government were to propose that all adults take high school exams in math,
and that those who scored below 70 be required to attend night school! Can you
hear the screaming? And what would this achieve? What do we achieve by forcing
math on children? Nothing but making them hate math, as with all knowledge that
we attempt to force on them.
Let me tell you about my journey. I was raised in a
supportive but very controlling, conservative home environment. I was a
straight A, 98th percentile, top-of-the-class student through high school,
college, and medical school. I excelled in math, and first year college physics
was the easiest course I ever took. I got great grades because I had an
insatiable curiosity to learn everything, and an ambition to excel.
(Unfortunately, I made other students feel quite inadequate.) Since I excelled
in the system, I never lost my belief in my ability to learn and understand
things as well as anyone else. Most kids are not so fortunate. Around the age
of 23, in med school, I began reading books on my own; whatever interested me.
I combed through bookstores and read psychology, politics, philosophy,
economics, physics, cosmology, etc, and I haven’t stopped yet. I realized
that through all those years, with all those great grades, I hadn't really
gained much understanding of the important things in life. I realized how
school had given me a superficial, forced familiarity with all knowledge, but
no understanding of anything that mattered--not to mention a lot of false ideas
and a deeply ingrained tendency to conform to other's wishes.
As I built my own base of knowledge and understanding, in my
own way, I realized the extent to which understanding can only come from
within, from one's personal questioning and search for answers. I realized how
school was a process of forcing answers on kids when they're not even asking
the questions--answers that never mean anything and are quickly forgotten,
answers and interpretations that are often wrong. I've learned much more about
this natural, unforced process of learning from my first experiment, my 8 year-old
daughter, who has become a good reader and highly knowledgeable about the
natural world without any "teaching" whatsoever. (It would be OK if
she weren't reading yet; I mention this just to show how false is the claim
that children need to be schooled to learn to read.)
Most of us were raised in coercive households and schools.
Even though of us who know that that system wasn't right retain many of the
prejudices and beliefs that we inherited from our parents and the system. It's
perfectly understandable. We think that our children must learn this and that,
because that's what society says--that's what the schools teach them. And in
Pennsylvania, the law attempts to force us to run them through a standard
curriculum, just as the Prussians who invented universal schooling intended. So
even though we want our children to have a freer, happier life, we're caught in
a bind. We want the child to learn freely and naturally, yet we want to assure
that they learn everything that the school kids are being forced to learn. We
give our children a MIXED message, "Learn what you want
to learn, when you want to learn it, but make sure that you teach yourself x,
y, and z or I'll be very disappointed." So which is it: Are children to be
trusted to learn what they need to learn to get along in life, or must they be
forced to learn what you or other adults think they must learn, before they
have any need of that knowledge?
In a word, most of us are caught between two INCOMPATIBLE
theories of child development--the schooling theory and the natural learning
theory. As far as I'm concerned, the schooling theory doesn't even deserve
serious consideration--it's part and parcel of authoritarianism and has nothing
to do with any concern for the child's development. It presumes that children
are born lazy and stupid and must be pushed to learn everything that adults
thing they "should" know—as soon as they are capable. It is
born of, and requires disrespect for the child as a person. It produces adults
who have little intellectual development, no curiosity, and no will of their
own. To force learning on a child is to contaminate their self-image (they're
too lazy to learn this "important" stuff), destroy their love of
learning, and severely limit their future ability to learn and grow.
Feed them whatever they're interested in until they're
satisfied. You (and all we adults) have no idea what they're learning or what
effect it is having, or what they'll grow up to be. We happen to live in a
world where all this TV programming and computer gaming is available, to ration
it is senseless and only frustrates the child. It’s best to let them get
their fill so that they can move on. Let them enjoy it until they become bored
with it (they will).
Of course, always involve them in the real world as much as
possible--even if that is just having them do their part in household
maintenance. Take them places, do things with them, buy them books, CD's, and
video games. Make sure that they have access to nature and science shows on TV.
In my opinion, ADD is itself a reaction, a rebellion against
being coerced and controlled. After all, no neurological cause has ever been
detected. Some children’s personalities appear to be such that they tune
out or act out when controlled, whereas others can be compliant with little
outward sign of disorder. Some children have high energy levels and are
irrepressible. Society gives the non-compliant behaviors a syndrome name so
that they can treated (suppressed) with drugs. Society doesn't ask if the
universal, 12-year sentence of total behavioral control and forced data
memorization may itself be the problem.
I say never force children to learn anything outside of their
necessary duties in the family and home. The child can see and understand the
need for these tasks. He cannot see the need to learn who George Washington is
and what he did, and he will not until he is much older and begins to wonder
how his society got to be what it is. To force him/her to learn such answers
before he can even ask the questions is to forever prevent him from ever having
any curiosity regarding the subject. To associate knowledge with coercion in
your child's mind is one of the worst things you can do to him. Coercion
prevents and perverts the child's emotional/intellectual growth. All meaningful
learning is the child's own accomplishment. It is initiated and directed by
their own curiosity.
After a child has been schooled, it takes a long period of
non-coercion before they can regain their curiosity and desire to learn things.
Schooling/coercion produces a serious personality distortion that does not
disappear overnight. There's nothing you can do to shorten the length of
recovery except to avoid further coercion. Let them lie around all day--after
they've done their chores. Let them watch TV or play computer games. They
apparently never got enough in the past if they want so much now. Let them
become so familiar with games and cartoons, plots, and gags, that they become bored
with them. They WILL eventually get bored and start looking elsewhere for
mental stimulation.
Once they are given freedom, they will eventually realize
that they alone are responsible for their own lives--what they do, what they
learn, and what they become. This realization will bring a great change in
their behavior and attitudes. The longer a child has been coerced at home and
at school, the more difficult, prolonged, and partial is the recovery. At
Summerhill, A.S. Neill noted that after the age of 13 or 14, coerced kids could
not recover completely, they simply could not become self-motivated,
self-directed, self-regulating individuals.
If your children are demonstrating active or passive
resistance, ask yourself what they're resisting. What are you trying to force
them to do or learn? Why are you doing it? Do you think you must because that's
what schools do to children? As parents who love and respect our children, the
only thing we should demand of our children is that they respect our rights and
manage their own and the household's affairs to the extent that they are able.
We should never, ever force them to do or learn anything beyond that. Life will
make its demands on them soon enough. We should not burn them out on obedience
and performance before they even need to face adult responsibilities. Let
reality be their guide. Keep them out of school. Buy or borrow any book, CD, or
device they want inasmuch as you can afford. Take them places, expose them to
the world of nature and to technology. Answer their questions honestly.
Yes, I'm saying that what society is doing to every child,
what it did to each of us, what it taught us to do to our children, is all
completely wrong and destructive. However, just consider our past. Consider
where the human race has come from in its long history of Kings and Queens and
total control of slaves, serfs, and citizens. Human society has a long way to
go before it realizes that is must replace coercion with cooperation. We are
fortunate if we can see what is wrong with our society and protect our children
from its worst effects.
So take your kids out of school. Please stop pushing your
children just because schools do. When they no longer have any coercion to
rebel against, you'll see how they will slowly recover their natural love of
life and learning. Then you can sit back and watch them learn and grow.
As to how to produce the paperwork needed to keep your kids
out of school, that's a manageable technical issue about which many people have
written at various website and in e-groups. Check out the homeschooling
websites and forums in your state.
What must we, as a society, do to correct this
institutionalized abuse of children? It’s quite simple. Eliminate
coercive government schooling; put an end to the government monopoly; apply the
Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitution to children and free them from 12
years of involuntary servitude to the State. We must free parents and
children so that they can produce a new society based upon love and mutual
cooperation. Let the free market produce every variety of childcare and
learning centers. Let us reintegrate children into society. Let every adult who
wants to teach do so. Remove all legal barriers to work and apprenticeship. Our
children have nothing to lose but their chains.