Idzie on Nostr: I often see adults claiming that kids are "resisting learning" or "wouldn't learn ...
I often see adults claiming that kids are "resisting learning" or "wouldn't learn unless forced to" and what they ACTUALLY mean by that is that kids are not learning or would not learn exactly what the adults demand that they do.
This is an expression of frustration with children's noncompliance, because even a lot of "progressive" and "radical" folks think that, as long as they insist that its for their own good, children should obey them.
This is not only subjugation and thus completely unacceptable as a way to treat other people (children are people), it's also completely counterproductive.
People naturally resist compulsion. It actually feels like shit to have someone with far greater power than you attempt to control almost all aspects of your life, including what you think about, focus on, and do. We KNOW that. YOU know that.
If you make what you call "learning" into something forced, you introduce it as something to be resisted.
If adults are to stop attempting to coerce kids into "learning" (sometimes better termed "memorizing") what they want them too, that necessitates coming to terms with the fact that children (being people and all) have their own unique interests, passions, and goals, their own familial, cultural, and geographic contexts... In short? They're going to want to learn wildly different things, the same way you and I, as adults, choose to focus on very different topics and build very different skills.
The ethical necessity to stop perpetuating adult supremacy means confronting a whole lot of harmful beliefs about what "education" is supposed to be and what it's supposed to look like. It also means actually creating anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical places for kids to spend time in, because limiting their options to either the authoritarianism of State schooling or nuclear families, regardless of what those families are like, is such a miserably constrained set of options.
#youthliberation #selfdirectededucation #schoolabolition
This is an expression of frustration with children's noncompliance, because even a lot of "progressive" and "radical" folks think that, as long as they insist that its for their own good, children should obey them.
This is not only subjugation and thus completely unacceptable as a way to treat other people (children are people), it's also completely counterproductive.
People naturally resist compulsion. It actually feels like shit to have someone with far greater power than you attempt to control almost all aspects of your life, including what you think about, focus on, and do. We KNOW that. YOU know that.
If you make what you call "learning" into something forced, you introduce it as something to be resisted.
If adults are to stop attempting to coerce kids into "learning" (sometimes better termed "memorizing") what they want them too, that necessitates coming to terms with the fact that children (being people and all) have their own unique interests, passions, and goals, their own familial, cultural, and geographic contexts... In short? They're going to want to learn wildly different things, the same way you and I, as adults, choose to focus on very different topics and build very different skills.
The ethical necessity to stop perpetuating adult supremacy means confronting a whole lot of harmful beliefs about what "education" is supposed to be and what it's supposed to look like. It also means actually creating anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical places for kids to spend time in, because limiting their options to either the authoritarianism of State schooling or nuclear families, regardless of what those families are like, is such a miserably constrained set of options.
#youthliberation #selfdirectededucation #schoolabolition