Sarah Fitz-Claridge - Taking Children Seriously | The Lunar Society #15

Key Takeaways

what what children should be learning is what they want is what interests them is how to solve problems they don't learn that by being institutionalized for 12 years and bossed about by an authoritarian teacher who doesn't know very much they they just it's it's it's an insane idea hey folks and welcome to the lunar society podcast today i had the great pleasure of talking about sarah fitzgerald sarah is a writer coach and speaker with a fallablist worldview she started a journal that became taking children seriously in the early 1990s after being surprised by the heated interactions that she was getting when talking about children she has spoken all over the world about her educational philosophy and you can find transcripts of some of her talks on her website at fits-clearage.com and the link to that will also be in the description so we had a very interesting conversation i'm broadly sympathetic with sarah's worldview though i do have my differences so i had a lot of fun playing devil's advocate but whether you agree with her or not sarah is an incredibly original and first principles thinker about how our society treats children so without further ado here's sarah fitzgerald [Music] so sarah can you explain what taking children seriously is yes taking children seriously is an educational philosophy that takes seriously the idea that human beings are fallible and that includes parents so instead of interacting with our children coercively we are trying to create consent with them we're trying to find solutions to problems that don't involve coercion because coercion decides issues under an irrational institution it embodies the theory that might makes right which is false so we don't do that it's actually a new view of children in that the standard view of children is a bit like the view of women before they were emancipated or say black people when they were slaves in america it's it's not that they're not people they are people this is the standard view but they're not quite able to control their own lives you know they need a benevolent patriarchal uh parent husband slave master to just make sure that you know nothing goes wrong for them and of course it's it's not that parents are trying to be dictators over their children it's just that is the view that really the whole world has about children that they are not quite the same as the rest of us they're not quite rational and creative and so we need to manage and control them to make sure that they turn out to be citizens who can be responsible for themselves so i think instead that children are creative and rational and they're creative and rational from birth you know we're born with human minds not just animal minds but we have this human mind as well and it just doesn't make sense to think in terms of rationality and creativity being turned on at some later stage and so it's there from the beginning and you know how does a child learn language a baby learn language if they're not creative and rational so seriously you could say is non-coercive educational theory it's about raising children in a way that doesn't involve coercion yeah uh just just for the audience my position uh currently is somewhere between yours and the conventional view so hopefully you can nudge me closer to your view um so now one obvious counter argument is that you know when it came to women or other races we view them we viewed them as a different kind of thing but children are literally a different kind of thing right like they're biologically different from adults doesn't this mean that they're entitled to different rights perhaps fewer rights that is the same circular argument that was used in the past about women and black people well their skin is black so obviously they're not the same as the rest of us well they're women so obviously there's a there's an actual difference there they're not men they're not white men it's the same circular argument it's yeah it doesn't make any sense and although those sorry go ahead i think that there will come a time in the future when people will look back at how we view children now and they will be as horrified by that as how it seems to us when we look back at the arguments that people made in the past about black people and women yeah no i actually do agree with that especially given how uh the schooling system works um but now here here's a just to continue that argument with uh between different races these are superficial differences right and between uh uh different genders they're not entirely superficial but they're minimal when compared to the difference between a you know a two-year-old and an eighteen-year-old like there seems to be uh such a difference in the kind of person we're talking about um it's entirely likely that a chimp is smarter than a two-year-old right now why is a chimp not entitled to the same rights against coercion no no that's that's that's false um in the in the relevant sense children of whatever age are the same because we have creativity and rationality if you if you're talking about a baby who's just been born and knows nothing except genetic knowledge like an animal has genetic knowledge but basically that's all they have but that child by the time the child is two years old or so the child will be speaking and doing many other things that a chimp or any other animal will never be doing and that's because of this creativity and rationality you know something has happened in those two years and it's that the child has been forming inexplicit conjectures about what words mean about what we call different things and about a huge number of other things it's not just language obviously whereas a chimp or whatever animal is doing none of those things yeah so in case in case your question is sort of suggesting that i'm saying leave a baby to its own devices that's not what i'm saying what i'm saying is coercion versus not coercion i'm not saying that we don't assist our children of course we do and we do know we do know more than a baby um so the question is what do we do with this greater knowledge do we think that it justifies coercing the child or not and when you're coercing that is you're you're basically saying might makes right and it doesn't yeah so i guess it would be useful um to define coercion in this context how do you think about the coercion of children what does that mean well coercion is is causing someone to do something or not do something against their will roughly speaking that's that's a way of putting it i mean there is more to it than that i i think that we can look at more subtle issues than that but basically you're you're talking about imposing your will on someone else against their will so that's what i would say for coercion right um so i i remember vaguely that chimps uh they did like an experiment where chimps and uh children were given like something like an iq test but it was like a very basic one and it turned out that um chimps actually had higher working memory so i but they obviously have a lower capacity to learn and um you know learning requires creativity and we can talk about that as well uh so the reason that children are entitled to a right against coercion is because of the fact that they can learn right as opposed to it's not just their intelligence it's just like what they could become it's that they are creative and rational beings and a chimp is not a chimp a chimp has genetic knowledge which allows a certain range of behaviors and things it can learn but it's it's limited whereas human creativity is not limited and that applies equally to children as it does to adults although i mean a two-year-old is limited right it's not as if a two-year-old can do anything that an adult human can do well and why don't these limits um entail certain sorts of limitations on the rights that child has as well well i would say that children actually are more creative and rational than adults not less and especially young children if you look at the enormous amount of stuff that young children learn and how difficult it is for many adults to to learn things i if anything they have more creativity and rationality not less yeah yeah although uh if we if we're if we're going to apply that uh criterion i mean there are many things that adults can do that children can't do uh one of them is just having like formal verbal arguments about and like reasoning through different um different possibilities you know you can talk to an adult and say uh you know is this career choice the best career choice for you and you can go through reasons pros and cons you really can't do that to a toddler and what people would say that this is the basic definition of rationality right like can we engage in a conversation where we're both able to uh make explicit our positions and go through the you know the different parts of our argument we can't do that with children well um actually we can but if you just define rationality to exclude young children then obviously you're going to say look uh therefore young children are irrational but rationality means your ability to actually learn create new knowledge and so as i said babies are clearly rational because they they learn language that's clear evidence of rationality right uh so we'll have to come back to that because that's uh that's that's going to be a longer discussion um let's talk about something we probably both agree on which is um the treatment of people who are teenagers or younger than teenagers um the impact that mandatory schooling has on people within this age range because i would say that actually people in this age range should have a presumption against coercion and uh that the schooling system is um a real affront to their rights against coercion well one thing i just want to um say about that is if you're imagining that you can raise a child from birth with a coercive top-down authoritarian dictatorship sort of relationship and then suddenly switch at whatever age you think that they become rational in your sense by that time you've already wrecked your relationship with your child and i don't know how how it's going to go well it's um we need to start from the beginning with a view of children that they are rational they are creative they are reasonable rather than thinking that you can just change course at some later state let's state later stage yeah although is that is that true i mean um you know most parents i would say almost all parents raise their kids um at least to a certain age as if they are inferior to them and they must obey them and you know um most kids have a healthy relationship with their parents maybe not healthy in the way you would define it probably but uh they don't resent them in any sort of um explicit sense right there's not a animosity there i think that there is actually a lot of resentment and i'm not sure that i would say animosity but i think that there is a lot of resentment between parents and children both ways and there is people are and it's and it's the parents as well because they have this view of children that is not at least as far as i'm concerned is not correct it does create friction and it does pit parents and child against each other so it does cause problems instead of solving problems your coercing the child and and then of course sometimes parents who have this authoritarian mindset um are also tend to be self-sacrificial with their children like they're thinking right i've got to do this for my child but it's it's not that the child is requesting something and they are sacrificing in that way there's just a lot of with coercion tends to come self-sacrifice and the whole thing is not rational and problem when problems aren't solved people it hurts people and that includes the parents as well not just the children yeah okay can you talk about what education would look like if you were when you're parenting somebody or when you're within a i guess a school-like context how should children be educated uh children should children should be supported to learn whatever they want to learn and how they want to learn it and very few children actually would want to go to school that the school is such an inefficient way of learning anything and it's so it's so authoritarian this this whole structure of the school system is is this incredibly authoritarian structure so i i think the vast majority of children if not under psychological or other pressure to to lie would say that they definitely wouldn't choose to go to school they might choose to go to some kind of formal education later when they have decided that they want to become a doctor say then obviously they're going to go through formal education but it that might not happen until later yeah and it's not mandatory in the same sense absolutely not yeah the child gets to choose the school system is uh is i think it's a sort of throwback to the past when people were trying to turn out good factory workers it's uh you know we in our knowledge-based society now and moving forward that's not we're not looking for good factory workers who will obey and just do do the mindless task that someone is setting them we're looking for people who are creative who come up with new ideas that will solve problems so that the world will be improved and we'll make progress and will be ended and you know right system is just damps down people's creativity it's stultifying for yeah majority of people right uh the objection people have to this view is even if you want people to be creative and come up with their own ideas there's a certain base of knowledge of the need to be able to engage with problems on the frontier in the first place and that you need children are just not going to want to go through the preliminary steps of that are necessary to get up to that high level where they can get to solving their own problems and therefore you need to coerce them at a younger age to learn the basics so that they can eventually become creative the problem with this body of knowledge idea is that if everyone has the same body of knowledge where are the new ideas going to come from if you think about it in the past before schools the new ideas came from people whose history was completely different from other people's history who had learnt something for the sheer joy of learning that thing they didn't think oh i have to do this i have to study this body of knowledge these this foundation of knowledge and then i'll have all the ideas i need to come up with something new no it's new ideas are more likely to come from people who who haven't got the same body of knowledge as everyone else so i i just think that's that idea is a mistake right and furthermore even if that idea was true the idea that the modern schooling system or anything that even closely resembles it gives you a useful body of knowledge in the first place is um it is it's rebutted by an experience of just like visiting school for one day right yes you're memorizing the difference between like alliteration or an assonance or uh you know what date was this battle fought and you know some person is droning on and also the idea that then they get to decide when you can use a bathroom or when you can eat um like somehow that this this level of coercion is necessary to give people just uh a basic foundation to be able to interact with the world uh that seems improbable to me absolutely i i'm 100 with you yeah yeah um so brian kaplan who was actually my first guest on this podcast he wrote a book called cases against education and uh he homeschools his own kids the basic idea is that people are much less educated uh than you would expect given the 12 years of mandatory schooling they have you know people don't know the basics about how government works how uh the basics about math or science or anything once they leave college um to astonishing degree uh the one thing he did say though was when he homeschools his kids the one thing he forces his children to learn is mathematics because he has noticed uh that people who are in the unschooling movement that the children who are raised up this way they seem fine in every way except for the fact that they uh struggle with even basic arithmetic and so he he supposes that children are just not going to want to go through the basic steps of math and math is actually an important subject that is required in many uh problem areas so it's important to force your children to learn math um well for start i don't think it's true that children taken seriously don't know how to do arithmetic i think that's that's ridiculous yeah i don't know i don't know which which unschoolers he's he's talking about some of them do have some strange ideas such as not allowing children to learn or trying to stop them learning stuff until later so i i don't know but in terms of the mathematics idea that we must co-ask our children to learn mathematics well for a start i disagree that most people need mathematics i don't i don't think that's true to the extent that it is true it's people learn it naturally anyway um but also i think it's it's this idea is patently false if you think about it every new idea in mathematics every discovery in the field of mathematics was discovered by someone who was not being coerced to to learn maths it was discovered by someone who who was found mathematics a joy a delight fascinating and that is that's how they came to discover it and so yes it might be the case that most people don't feel like that's about mathematics probably a lot of that is to do with the horrendous coercion in school about mathematics it's enough to give anyone a lifelong aversion to it but even apart from that assume assuming that it's true that most people just are not into maths well most people don't need maths i i just don't think it's true that we have to coerce anyone to learn anything it's just not true people who haven't been coerced who've been taken seriously have no trouble at all learning whatever they need to learn when they realize that they need it it's it's we don't need to go through 12 years of torture or even you know a year or two of of torture at home with with home education under coercion to learn mathematics that's ridiculous i just right i loved i'm of two minds on this uh uh on the one hand i think you're right in the sense that i remember reading there was some superintendent who in in his or her district decided that children would not be required to learn math before the seventh grade and it turned out that the children who learned math in the seventh grade were no more behind after eighth grade in mathematics and the people who had been learning math since you know first grade so maybe it is true that you can pick it up at a later date um but i worry so you know there's there will always be people like you know gauss or newton who just are intrinsically uh motivated to learn math and you know maybe for them maybe for these people who are going to make the advancements in their mathematical knowledge they'll be able to do that without a course of education system but what about the people who um would want to become programmers but they realize by the time they become 18 that they just they just don't have a strong enough um grasp on uh mathematical concepts to be able to take further steps in and towards becoming an engineer or just towards even balancing their budget right i i don't think that's true i think that peop when people are pursuing their own interests it just all happens naturally and it is in no way if someone wants to be a programmer or an engineer or a doctor and they and maybe they only suddenly realize this later on in their childhood although i think in many cases people have this kind of drive earlier on in their childhood but even if it is later in their childhood people can learn later i mean for example uh not not that this is about mathematics but um karl popper's phd thesis was not in philosophy it was in psychology education educational psychology and yet he became one of the most important philosophers ever so there is an example of someone who changed his direction late in his life relatively speaking and i i think the same is true for maths i i just don't agree with brian kaplan about this all right and i do agree with you that the presumption um you shouldn't just coerce children just in case it happens to help them exactly um like you might uh my position is probably a little bit milder than yours uh but i think there should be like a very good reason uh which of course children not just like in case they happen to need this skill um if there's a very good reason surely you can persuade your child of that reason if it is a good reason right although children are not are not known for being easily persuaded well maybe that's because of the way that they are thwarted left and right throughout their childhood and so then they don't trust the adults around them because they cut they've how how is a child who's been thwarted and coerced their whole childhood to know when you're saying something that actually is important that is actually in their interest rather than just another thwarting for this for some silly reason right so now another worry about this uh way of raising children is the view that school uh teaches people um even if the knowledge itself is not useful or necessary just the act of um just like getting instruction and following it that teaches people self-control discipline executive function it lets them know how to engage with authority and with hierarchy when they enter the real world so they'll know how to interact with their boss or how to you know exist within the company within the community and so on um that's that's ridiculous to the extent that they will encounter authority work situations that kind of thing later on they can they can learn they can learn how to navigate that kind of thing then the idea this idea of teaching children self-discipline by coercing them by by disciplining them is is an equivocation on the word discipline it's it's it's making a it's suggesting that the discipline the self-discipline that say um a concert pianist or an mma fighter has is is the thing that that self-discipline is what you instill by coercing children that's that's rubbish in in the case of the olympic athlete or the mma fighter or the concert pianist this is something that they that they live for and it's it's their own passion and so they are pursuing it fully wholeheartedly it that is a completely different thing from disciplining children disciplining children says don't pursue your passions wholeheartedly you need to do what i say so it's it's like the opposite it's actually training children not to be able to follow their passions with full heart and really going for it yeah that's a good point um now there's a concern that why should we expect the passions that children have to reflect the actual skills and knowledge they will they should have to be able to function well in the world um you know people have plenty of passions but maybe maybe there's certain things that children need to learn regardless of what their passions are um and that the child is not in a good place to understand what what these things are that he must he or she must learn and because he has not been he or she has not been exposed to the world yet to know what problem situations will arise well if you have a non-coercive relationship with your children then you can talk about these things and you can and you can express your your concerns about you know that you need to know this because of this and and you can have a conversation you can you can persuade by reason if you if you just impose it then the child probably is still not agreeing with you and you don't the effect of that is is not predictable so you might find that these little bits of coercion that you want to get in there because you're worried about some future thing that might never happen but sort of make everything go wrong in the present and really what matters is how we're living in the present not that we can't have goals and things that we think are important for the future and we can have those conversations but if you're making life miserable in the present then what you're teaching the child is that life is miserable and that you that in life you can't actually solve problems you can't get what you want so you might as well just give up yeah that is not conducive to anything important that the child will want to do to you know doing something important it doesn't help to have coercion added to that it just doesn't help it just it it it's telling the child to that he can't trust himself that he has to just live for the approval of someone else that's not that's not the kind of state of mind that that concert pianist is in or or that olympic athlete that's that's not how it is yeah yeah i know that's a very good point now um is it where we can actually know the psychological impact of this kind of uh the the conventional way of raising children i am skeptical that it does have the um on most people it has a traumatic a very traumatic effect because um just generally just changing people's personality or their um the way they interact the world it's uh it's just very hard to do that uh parents you can for example there's a lot of literature with twin studies where you know twins that are separated at birth and are adopted by different parents um regardless of how different the parents are usually most of the difference usually the twins are actually pretty similar even if they're raised in different households and so i'm skeptical of the idea that raising children this way will significantly uh will make them significantly different than they would have been otherwise now that doesn't mean that justifies the current uh treatment of children right like you don't you're not changing adults by coercing them but that's still me that still doesn't make the coercion of adults okay but it does mean that i doubt that there's some sort of deep psychological harm that's done by the conventional approach does the does suppose you're right that there's it makes no difference does that make immoral behavior unobjectionable no that yeah so just as i said yeah when it comes to adults we're not we're not looking at the adult and saying well um there's no ill effect from coercing my wife you know if i think she needs to be kept under control and you you show me the studies that show me show that there's a there's a bad effect so it's fine obviously when it comes to adults we don't use those arguments we you know we don't say oh the the research shows that um the corporal punishment of of children uh causes a problem you know later and therefore um you probably shouldn't do it we're not we don't say that when it comes to adults we say it's wrong to it's wrong to hit someone you know it's thinking about the effects is not the point that's that is an example of this different view that we have of children this this this view of children that is i think a mistake right yeah you don't get to lock somebody up for 11 years in an institution and say that it's not a big deal because it doesn't we can't tell if there's any long lasting effects yeah that's that's an immoral it's an immoral argument you wouldn't make the same argument of an adult about an adult right uh so now how do you respond to the needs and demands not the demand sorry but like the needs and wants of a a very young child who might have unreasonable demands or even a non-verbal toddler who it's even hard to know what the needs and desires are um well for a start i don't think it's unreasonable as i said i think that children have reason just like we do so it so uh with with pre-verbal i think that this is another example of of the difference in view actually because most people have this view of babies say as just being unreasonable and just crying and and so on they're not paying attention to the signals that the baby is giving and so the baby is ignore the baby's signals are ignored and so the baby starts really screaming and then parents do things like right i'm going to force the child to learn to sleep through through the night by ignoring her cries the the problem with that is number one you're you're teaching the baby that the baby can't have an effect on the world that problems are not soluble um but also as i say you're you are causing this conflict-ridden relationship to be created whereas if you're taking your baby seriously then you're paying attention and you are trying to make conjectures about what it is that the baby might be wanting or not wanting and so you're responding positively at a much earlier stage and so you don't have the screaming you know the sort of terrible stuff that you get in in most homes like this idea of um the terrible twos and temper tantrums that doesn't happen if you're taking your children seriously it just doesn't happen because you're never it's never getting to where it's that kind of a problem you're actually responsive to your child right uh uh so you have more experience with children than i do so uh i'll i'll defer to you there uh so i i just don't have a strong position on how children turn out based on how they're raised uh my i guess my null hypothesis is that uh until i see the evidence that it makes a difference or the evidence that like the kids won't have uh temper tantrums if they're raised this way um it seems safe to assume that they will um but probably just experience and life will let me know otherwise yeah why why would someone end up end up that upset if they weren't if their needs weren't being ignored at a much earlier stage it's it's i i guess you're gonna ask the same thing of okay so let's take a person who is an adult that is mentally ill right no he might have tantrums and but you would never suggest that uh or you could suggest that it's because well actually that's just a response to what's going on in this world but you could say well a better explanation for what's going on is that he's just mentally ill right and there's probably some things that are upsetting him the proximal cause of his tantrums is the fact that he's mentally ill and you can say the same thing about a two-year-old it's like okay so there might be things that are upsetting him or her but like the proximal explanation is just that these are the terrible twos well it's it's not true that is that's a myth that if you if you do raise children non-coercively you will discover that that's just a myth yeah yeah i'll have to find out for myself at some point when you're when you're paying attention to your very young child then you're noticing when you know when when people are not completely happy when there's when a problem when when there's a problem you see it in their eyes why is why is the parent not noticing that there's a problem until the child is in a screaming traumatic you know traumatized state on the floor like why is that happening right it doesn't need to happen it just doesn't need to happen and children who who have experience of their needs being met and not being thwarted they trust that there's you know that their needs are going to be met yeah so i think my parents philosophy on this was they explained it to me at some point uh and you you'll disagree with this very much but their idea was if you respond to tantrums uh you're teaching the child that the way you get a response is by throwing a tantrum whereas if you ignore the tantrums and then respond to the child when he or she is being more reasonable then you're teaching the child that uh you know tantrums are not the way you get what you want and but that if you're in another mood then that's the way you should interact with the world yeah using um dog training techniques on children is i think is just immoral and if you think about it from a young child's perspective what that is doing when you are shunning them ignoring them you're basically withdrawing love and it for a child a young child that is absolutely terrifying so i i think that if parents could put themselves in their young children's minds and see how it is for those children i don't think that they would want to do that and you know we are not animal i mean we are animals but we have a human a human mind so the question is whether you want to be training your children by dog training techniques by behaviorist operant conditioning or classical conditioning or whether you want to use reason right coercion decides issues under an irrational institution and so you can't get the right answer that way yeah um now one objection that i've encountered people oh sorry yeah one objection people seem to have when i uh talk about these ideas they worry that children in their natural state are uncurious um lazy or not necessarily lazy but just unmotivated by the kinds of things that would probably make them have a better life when they're adults so maybe they would probably spend all day like watching tv or playing video games or something like that they aren't going to do the things that we would optimistically hope they would do with their free time if we just let them non-coercively spend their days so they're not going to be you know exploring and learning and reading and all those things well speaking as one who was raised in the standard way not the way i'm suggesting i tried to do everything i could to escape from the the coercion and the fighting and the endless stuff that was my time was you know school and homework and ballet lessons and piano lessons and violin lessons and ballet lessons acrobatics and all the other stuff and i would escape to my room whenever i could and in my case this was before computers and computer games so in my case it was reading but i i think it's in no way surprising if children raised in the standard way need an escape into things like video games um who wouldn't it's it's so it helps people to relax and to calm down and it's so i think that a lot of that a lot of what you what you might see is laziness and um doing something that you might think is mindless although actually i don't think it's mindless at all i think it's very educational to play video games is is just needing to just calm down from all the stress of life in the in the coercive family and the with all the schooling and everything so there is that so for a start i don't think it's true that children well it's not true children left to their own i mean it's not left to their own devices but not coerced would do nothing but play video games but even if they wanted to do that i think that that might well be a positive thing now it is possible that it could be a negative thing it could be that a child has no other real options in which case obviously that's a mistake the parent is is not giving the child enough real options that are interesting that are engaged the child's interests and attention but apart from that with that caveat i think that doing things like playing video games and watching television are incredibly educational i mean if you think about it if an alien came from outer space what would the quickest way to learn about our culture be well it would probably be doing things like watching soap operas on television rather than someone trying to teach them in a school situation they would learn much more inexplicitly from watching television than they would get from lessons about it right people are mistaken about how educational these things are and it's completely mistaken to think that that children who aren't coerced are not curious it's the it's entirely the opposite do do we not notice how children's curiosity when they're a young child seems to just disappear in their later childhood i mean can it not be something to do with with the the way that they're educated and raised right yeah it would be astonishing if millions of years of evolution resulted uh would decided the the best way to produce a survival machine would be to have something that lays around for 18 the first 18 years of its life and does nothing right just like from first principles you can anticipate that there's probably a reason that um we spend the first part of our life as children and that you know you would just expect evolution to have trained us to be curious and to explore because you know that's probably the reason why we're children in the first place um yeah and as far as the video games go i always tell my friends when they make this objection that they're just gonna play video games all day it's like where's the evidence that this is any worse a time way to spend time than uh going to school right if you just look at the studies on the efficacy of school you know they're wasting their time there anyways but the fact is that they're getting they're suffering while they're spending their time there so at least they're not suffering while they're playing video games right um yeah i mean i think it's i think it's more positive than that but yes and what what children should be learning is what they want is what interests them is how to solve problems they don't learn that by being institutionalized for 12 years and and bossed about by an authoritarian teacher who doesn't know very much they they just it's it's it's an insane idea yeah yeah i i think back to you know uh like my years in schooling and it just the amount of um not only wasted time that i was bored or uh uh or just didn't want to be there but also the opportunity cost just the things i could have learned at a much younger age yes um right like this time in the child's uh um there's first of all the fact that you know children have a different sleep cycle than adults and so you're they're sleep deprived and that's probably messing them up messing up their development there's also the fact that you're using um all their time with homework and with schoolwork i think in the us it's like average of three hours a day of homework that's after eight hours of schooling um so where's the time for the child to do the kinds of things that uh would make them grow and would help them develop yeah as um pollyanna said in the book of the same name when will i have time to live and that was after she'd her aunt had told her that she was going to be having lessons in the morning and when will i have time to live right yeah though another point of that um you know twin studies literature so it actually also um makes the case against the sort of coercion of children right because if if you know forcing your kid to take taekwondo lessons and then you know making them go to school and you know getting them extra tutoring and homework if this stuff doesn't make a difference anyways like why are you making your child suffer in this way yes but of course i i think all these expedient arguments and trying to make a science of it are a mistake because you know we didn't end slavery because the studies said such and such we didn't emancipate women because the studies said such and such it was the arguments were moral and philosophical yeah and i think people can get into some very uh dark territory when they start thinking that they can turn everything into a science that isn't science it's scientism yeah and then speaking of the treatment of women uh that one question to ask is how could it be that every society that has ever existed has been wrong on this very basic moral question right but then the response is you know every society before the enlightenment before like 100 years ago was very wrong on the treatment of women so it's not that surprising that societies would universally get a moral question wrong um now the response is well at least there was a way there where one part of the population could did not have to experience the pain of another part of the population and so could some you know um oppress them in this way but when it comes to children we've all been children so it's if we all realize the um if you all experience the coercion and the trauma of uh this uh of the conventional way of raising children why are we not realizing that as adults yeah um with regard to uh how this could have evolved uh you might want to read david deutsch as the beginning of infinity i think it's chapter 16 the evolution of creativity i i think that the interesting thing is how we how we got from a static society to the enlightenment and creativity and all the rest of it so i i think of taking children seriously as like the final phase of the enlightenment or prop maybe not the final phase but it is certainly um one area that we haven't applied enlightenment thinking to so yeah i i think that as i said i think that in time people will look back on 2021 and how the people view children and they will be as horrified as we are when we look back at how women were viewed in the past all right but do you have an idea for why um despite having been children ourselves we still when we grow up to become adults most people still adopt the same authoritarian uh authoritarian practices that they experienced themselves and to which they presumably suffered from yes and again this is something that is in the beginning of infinity by david deutsch which is the idea of anti-rational memes so um whereas rational memes replicate themselves with criticism like criticism doesn't hurt a rational meme it's it's it's wonderful for a rational meme to be in a in an under critical scrutiny but anti-rational means um disable their holders ability to criticize them and so people brought up with these with in this where in this anti-rational way develop the same hang-ups the same anti-rational memes that cause them to do the same thing to their children i mean not that it's 100 you know that you can if you're aware of the idea of anti-rational means you can you can criticize them and and using creativity uh at least to some extent overcome them and that's how we have over the years things have have liberalized somewhat for children but we still have this view of children that is that is uh pre-enlightenment i think so but yes anti-rational memes uh is a is an explanation i think for why people grow up and do the same thing to their children yeah i do do you um is there a way you expect the evolution of these ideas will go will it be enabled by uh for example in the united states and maybe elsewhere as well there's a growth of something called montessori schools um which kind of approximate this philosophy of children where they can and will learn just by their own curiosity uh how do you expect this movement to grow i think that that that the shift will come in a similar way to the shift that came when women were emancipated it wasn't all in one go you know the women got the vote um i don't know which order things happened in actually but it didn't all happen at once and people and the the idea of women in the culture changed gradually and then there were certain things that happened like women got the vote that did make a difference but for example even in 1933 my own grandmother lost the job that she loved when she told her boss that she was getting married and she said that's just the way it was if you were if you were married you couldn't you couldn't have a job so even you know in my grandmother's lifetime uh things were still changing uh quite some time after women had got the vote in england so i think it's going to be a similar kind of thing i think um i hope that my book might make a difference you know that because once you see once you see this view how the view of children is like our view of women was in the past and black people in the days of slavery once you see that you can't unsee it you know it's it's sort of wow and i i think that people are going to start to see it and then that's going to start making a difference and it'll just be you know sort of domino effect and and then gradually children will be being taken seriously more and more so this is what coming out soon uh well i keep thinking it's nearly finished but um i'm i'm i'm doing a re another rewrite so i'm not sure when it will be but i hope not too long yeah i'm excited to read it i'd love to have you back on once it's published so we can talk about it absolutely love to right um oh just a question that occurred to me while you were talking about the treatment of women you know one of the ways obviously uh that society coursed woman and oppressor was they weren't allowed to work right because they were seen as incapable of making the decision um uh to work or to be able to perform well uh should we get rid of child labor laws if this similar kind of coercion is also similar kinds of rights are also um to be expected of children i i suspect and this is just a conjecture um i although i am a libertarian i'm not a utopian libertarian i'm a popeyrian libertarian so i don't actually know what the future will look like but i would imagine that at some point in the future some of these things will change the child labor laws definitely do cause problems for for example young entrepreneurs um i i've met someone who uh was a brilliant person and started a business at the age of i think it was 11 and um and he had to lie about his age and and so now he's been banned from that the particular financial online financial service that he was using because he lied about his age but you know those those laws are are do make it very difficult for children although it's weird because when i was a child lots of children worked not um not in full-time jobs because obviously they were at school but lots of children worked a lot more than they do now especially in america so i don't know i think that that will i think that that's one of the things that will change yeah yeah people have this idea because because of when child labor laws were banned of like the kind of dangerous jobs that children are doing that that's the kind of jobs that 11 years 11 year olds would be doing if they were allowed to now except you just imagine the job that a 14 year old does when he's allowed to like he's a clerk at heb or walmart or something he would just do that be allowed to do that at 11. i wouldn't expect that that is far more oh let me just connect my battery um i would expect that that's far more pleasing to the child than to be forced to stay in an institution whereas he gets to choose to work and he gets paid for his labor and you know he has a voluntary relationship with his boss and so yeah yeah yeah obviously in the past um parents forced their children to work in dangerous conditions you know out of desperation for survival um so you know i i under the people who who brought in those labor laws obviously had very good intentions it's just we're in a different problem situation now and certainly going into the future things things will be different so i'm sure that that will change oh um and how about sexual consent laws so age of consent was well at the moment because children because people have this view of children this is uh problematic uh those those laws do at least try to protect children but i can imagine sometime in the distant future when children are taken just as seriously as everyone else is taken when they might also not be needed i think that any kind of any kind of um sexual relationship where there is a different a differential of power and authority is going to be dangerous and so i don't know what what it will be like in the future so i'm just speculating but um many of these laws obviously were needed to protect children and maybe still are in some respects but may not in the future when children are taken seriously [Music] so [Music] 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