Beliefs about children

In lay circles, I commonly hear children being described as attention seeking, manipulative or doing things deliberately to ‘get at’ their parents. Parents are advised that they can’t ‘give in’ to children and must ‘come down hard’ on their behaviour because otherwise it will keep happening. In the education sector, this view is translated into the exhortation that a child has ‘got to learn’. Cognitive behavioural theory The assumption behind this demand is that children will not mature, grow or develop naturally but must be forced to do so right now. Similarly sour views of children are often promulgated by even those commentators with credentials that might suggest a more informed opinion, such as the following (which I have embellished with italics): • ‘Kids, when they are little, are in a way sort of nuts! They are not born reasonable and unselfish, they are born unreasonable and selfish’. • ‘When students are not given the limits they need, they will act up in order to make the adults around them take notice’. • ‘Children are not born good; they have to be disciplined, otherwise they are a threat to the rest of society’. • ‘If students are given the freedom to do nothing, that is most likely what they will do’. • ‘Today’s youth is rotten to the core, it is evil, godless, and lazy . . . It will never be able to preserve our culture’. * Sir Rhodes Boyson was an ex-school principal and British Conservative MP advising the government on educational policy, culminating in The Conservative Education Reform Act of 1988. It would be comforting if these negative views of young people were all, like the last one, written on clay tablets over 3000 years ago but, as you can see, the previous quotes are far closer in time to this millennium. They clearly imply the belief that children will not choose to put in effort to learn or engage in prosocial behaviour unless forced to do so (Kohn 1996a). To that end, punishment is typically used either to incite people to improve their behaviour in future, or to achieve retribution for a past wrongdoing. While the first, utilitarian, purpose might seem the more likely in schools, Weiner reports that punishment is instead commonly applied as retribution, particularly when students’ failure is perceived by their teachers to be volitional. Even when punishment is used for utilitarian purposes, Kohn (1996a) questions the underlying assumption that children are so intent on behaving badly that they will not desist unless inflicted with pain. Thinking of children in these harsh terms inexorably leads to authoritarian attempts to control their behaviour. Paradoxically, seeing children as fragile also leads to the same conclusion, justified by the claim that they ‘need’ limits to feel secure (see, e.g., Trusty & Lampe 1997). Not only is this ageist (such generalisations would be questioned if applied to adults on the basis of their sex, race or culture), but there is no evidence for the claim. It confuses limits with structure . Thus, in the absence of evidence about its truth, humanists reject what Miller (1987) terms this ‘poisonous pedagogy’ and assume instead that children are equally capable of altruism as they are of being thoughtless. This assumption, although also unprovable, seems logical in the face of statistics that there are more murders of people aged under one year than there are of people aged over one. It would be self-destructive if babies were programmed to threaten the goodwill of the caregivers on whom their survival relies, so it is assumed that they are instead programmed to try to work in with adults.