Committed to finding ways out of the coercion/self-sacrifice mire of conventional parenting. We are variously critical rationalists, libertarians, home educators, attachment-parents, but we take our ideas where we find them.
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This blog is turning into a monoglogue, which is not what I meant at all, as the man said (if you don't know this poem take a look, it's beautiful, although I'm not quite sure why). And my ideas are in danger of waning...
If anybody else wants to blog, and believe me it doesn't matter how often, or what you think your writing genius is like, all you need to do is say something about parenting and be roughly on-message consentuality-wise, please email rationalparentingATyahooDOTcoDOTuk (or see the email us on sidebar).
Especially if you like ranting, blogs are a great place for rantology and who knows, it might start some good debates if you did.
If not, however, rest assured that we won't be disappearing even if things slow down a bit for a while. The blogosphere is still so new, and specist blogs like this one even more so, that nobody can predict the growth and/or deline trends at this stage with any certainty, and while it's still fun to post mini-thoughts about parenting (big long articles being somewhat beyond this particular author's concentration span at this point in her parenting career) that's what I'm sure I shall do.
Brian Micklethwait has been posting some interesting stuff on his education blog. I particularly like the assessment of the state of British schools in this latest post:
"It is not possible to imprison the proletarians of Britain without the use either of physical force or the threat of expulsion, and without any disruption to the minority of pupils who would quite like to make use of their prison time to do some learning. This simply cannot be done, no matter how wonderful you are."
If you add into that the idea that imprisoning children under threat of force or expulsion is completely out of order morally, then you start to see the scale of the problem. The fact that some kids don't mind school is neither here nor there: sending them regardless of their feelings is a violation of their rights that can't be sustained forever. Young people are not being persuaded that school is good for them, and in many cases they can't be persuaded because it isn't: in many cases, earning money, or staying home, or even hanging out on the streets is actually better for them than what they are being offered in the classroom.
As social evolution progresses and young people get more and more better alternative things to do with their time than either school or slaving up chimneys/ down mines, one might expect the degree of force required to keep them sitting quietly in classrooms all day to increase; yet we seem find instead that routine institutionalised physical violence against small people no longer feels morally comfortable, and rightly so.
We need to get rid of this idea that schools offer the only kind of learning that can possibly be useful, and start asking children what they actually want to do and how they would actually like to learn. "They don't know what's good for them," won't wash. If we can't explain it more convincingly, we should be questioning our own ideas. Otherwise we're just pretending to be infallible, which is exactly what most kids hate about the worst kind of adults with power over them.
I don't know if things are getting worse, or if so, by how much. I do think they will change eventually, and that resisting change is always more dangerous than assessing things honestly and realistically.
Sometimes people make mistakes, including wanting the wrong thing. Sometimes they are impervious to reasoning about their preferences in such circumstances. Sometimes, the best wisest more excellent communication fails to get reasonable ideas across to someone who is in the wrong.
Sometimes, when this happens, human beings need to take action which hurts the other person.
However, there is no requirement, ultimately, for any of this crap to arise within family institutions. Families are environments for new knowledge-growth, and it is entirely possible for them to be efficient enough in their theory-making that the range of their mistakes is nowhere near dangerous, destructive, or criticism-impervious enough to require those mistakes to be addressed with the use of force. Almost all mistakes in families can fairly easily be open to immediate criticism. This is why trust is so fundamental in parent/ child relationships. If you trust and care for others, you generally react swiftly to their moral criticism, by entering into rational debate (talking about it, sensibly).
Why would a small reasonably-treated child who trusts his parents as helpers not do this? Only if his parent had already given him a bad theory that prevented him from doing so, in which case the parent is being irrational: which doesn't negate the theory saying that he can be more rational: rational enough that coercion never needs to happen, because problems can be solved in better ways.
We can't all solve everything brilliantly and flawlessly: but we can do it without hurting our own children, and those we love. It's not such an outrageous claim, really, when you think about it. We can't be right all the time; but we can be wrong without actively damaging small people. Of course this must be possible, even though we haven't worked out all the nuts and bolts yet. It's only a matter of establishing better more efficient ideas about how to help kids learn while still having room to grow ourselves.
The fact that shit happens doesn't mean that shit happens anywhere and everywhere, or that all types of shit are liable to necessitate coercion. We can gain the knowledge required never actively to coerce our kids. This is taking some time. Which doesn't in any way invalidate the theory. What we can't do is innoculate them against ever being coerced by anything in the world.
And I think this is good. It doesn't take much energy to blitz-clean a house, when you really feel like doing it (not talking perfection here, just reasonable-with-small-kids-ness). But sometimes one can't be bothered with tidying things away, and then it can be very nice just to do what one likes instead and sit in the middle of the chaos watching everyone still being just fine, and the world not collapsing about one's ears. Really. Try it.
