Respecting childhood autonomy

I explained yesterday that one of the most beloved figures in British home education was a raving lunatic who publicly advocated small children being able to work down coal mines, drive cars on public roads and have sex with any adult they cared to. I pointed out that these views made him very popular with the more thoughtful type of paedophile; the kind of man who seeks justification for his depravity. As a result of this, I was told by one person commenting that I had sunk to a new low! The most curious comment was by Elizabeth, who felt that my post was ‘beyond the pale’. She went on to say that ‘It would not be taking a child seriously to stand by and watch while they make a bad choice‘. In other words, if her child makes a sensible and wholesome choice, she allows it. If the choice is bad, she will seek to prevent the child from exercising this choice. How this differs in any way from conventional parenting, I have no idea.

At any rate, the general view seemed to be that no parent would follow Holt‘s advice on matters relating to sex. Let us assume for the moment that this is true. If parents who advocate childhood autonomy would not go as far as to allow their child to choose to go to bed with an adult, how far would they be prepared to go down the road of childhood autonomy? An apparently innocuous example which several parents have mentioned on this blog is the question of teeth cleaning. I have seen this topic crop up elsewhere on home education blogs, forums and lists. Let us then take it that some home educating parents who allow their children autonomy do not compel them to clean their teeth. This is of course not in the same league as allowing them to have sex with adults, is it? Indeed it is not; it can be worse.

Like most adults, I was forced to clean my teeth twice a day as a child. I did not always want to, but this made no difference. Many children, particularly two and three year-olds dislike teeth cleaning and parents almost invariably ride roughshod over these objections. Not some home educating parents though. They believe that children should be allowed to ‘choose’ not to undergo teeth cleaning if they are strongly opposed to the practice.

When I reach for the toothbrush last thing at night, it is not because I have been thinking about dental hygiene and the latest research on caries. It is rather a conditioned reflex. I have been trained, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, to clean my teeth before I get into bed. This is what parents generally do with their kids around teeth cleaning. They make the child get into a fixed routine of doing the thing every night until it becomes a part of the child’s innermost being. Eventually, the child will internalise the procedure and feel guilty if he fails to clean his teeth regularly. This is excellent. The results of neglecting teeth cleaning can extend far beyond a few cavities in the baby teeth. Only recently, a piece of research was published which suggested that regular teeth cleaning is associated with enhanced female fertility:

http://acovi.com/bad-dental-hygiene-can-affect-fertility/226077/


There is also a well established link between heart disease and poor oral hygiene. This is quite apart from the obvious danger that decayed teeth can lead to abscesses in the gums and below teeth. This can bring about blood poisoning and every year, people in this country die from such things.

A three year-old child is quite unable to make an informed choice about the long term implications of failing to maintain healthy teeth and gums. He is unlikely to be concerned about fertility or heart disease. All he cares about is the momentary irritation of the sensation of the tooth brush tickling his gums. Establishing a routine of dental hygiene is vital in early childhood and must become second nature to the child. Only then will he be sure to maintain the practice into adult life. It must become a conditioned reflex, a Pavlovian response to getting ready for bed at night.

Failure to instil the teeth cleaning habit in small children, while being done on the grounds of respecting their ‘rights’ and autonomy, runs the risk of shortening their lives and impairing their fertility. This is dangerously irresponsible. This is one example of respecting the autonomy of the child which we all know is currently practiced by some home educators. There are others, equally damaging to their child’s future physical and mental heath. The failure to set the developing child’s body clock correctly for a diurnal life, caused by not insisting on regular bedtimes, for example. Under the guise of being liberal and right-on, these parents are harming their children and laying up problems for their future. Holt’s ideas about all this are monstrously wrong and following any of his advice is likely to harm children. Chuck out How Children fail and destroy any copies you come across of Escape from Childhood! The man was a dangerous crank.

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The ultimate autonomy

No suggestion made during Graham Badman’s review of elective home education caused more anger than the idea that home educated children might be at increased risk of sexual abuse than those at school. Why do professionals suspect this? There are probably two main reasons. First, home educated children often seem closer to their parents than those at school. Antagonism between parents and children, common with school children and which typically reaches a climax during adolescence, is thought to be normal. When people see a teenager getting on amicably with her father, they think it is a bit creepy! One only has to look at the clip on Youtube of me and my then fourteen year-old daughter, when it was hinted that there was something unnatural about a girl of that age who seemed to be happy in her father’s company!

There is another reason why some professionals are uneasy about home education, which has to do with its ideological basis. Two of the big influences on British home education are AS Neill, who ran Summerhill school and John Holt, an American teacher. Both had strange ideas about children and sex. Neill believed that children should be free to have sex whenever they wanted to and without restriction. This was part of his school’s ethos and probably a reaction to his Scottish upbringing during the late 19th Century. John Holt is something else and since he is so popular with home educators, his ideas are still influential. He is actually very popular and influential with another minority group, which I only found out last week.

I was talking to a friend of mine who is involved in child protection; it does not matter in what capacity. She is quite interested in and not in the least hostile towards home education. During a conversation, I happened to mention John Holt’s name and she wrinkled up her nose. ’Oh, you mean the paedophile’s best friend’, she said. I was a little puzzled about this. I know the views which Holt expresses in books like Escape from Childhood, but this was the first I had heard of paedophilia. She showed me some sites advocating paedophilia. These were not pornography sites, but places where adults argue the theoretical basis for their being able to enjoy sexual relations with children. I will not provide links; I dare say that those interested enough will be able to find them. She then showed me John Holt’s name scattered about on these awful sites. Militant paedophiles seem to have adopted him as their guru! His writings provide, just as they do for home education, justification for the practice of paedophilia. This is, to say the least of it, unfortunate.

Now I don’t know whether any readers here are aware of Escape from Childhood, but I have a copy in front of me. It is not the best known of Holt’s work. In it, he says that not only should children not be compelled to attend school, but that they should also be free to have sex with adults if they wish. He explains the reasoning behind this; I don’t personally find it convincing. And yet here is a rather alarming thing. There are essentially two types of autonomous home educator in this country. One type imposes the normal rules of childhood upon children, with the proviso that education is the child’s choice and that the kid is free to choose what and when she learns. In the more extreme form, that advocated by the Taking Children Seriously movement for instance, the child has complete freedom to choose everything. There are no bedtimes, the child is not made to clean his teeth, wear clothes, get up in the morning. If he wishes, he can eat nothing but sugar. Children are completely masters of their own lives. We have had people on here supporting this type of lifestyle.

The problem is that if you give children that degree of autonomy, then it is only a short step to giving them the freedoms which John Holt supports. That is to say the ability to choose to go to bed with anybody of any age. Holt does not see why a nine year-old girl should not have sex with a forty year old man and this too is the logical extension of the arguments advanced by some militant autonomous educators. Now I have no reason to suppose that any of them actually put John Holt’s advice into practice, but the very fact that one of home education's favourite writers is also the darling of the more articulate paedophiles might be enough to raise eyebrows. When people start following his advice on childhood autonomy, you have to ask yourself how far they are prepared to go along the road which he advocates. I have an idea that Holt’s popularity with both home educators and paedophiles might be the cause of some of the child abuse notions which have in the past gone the rounds.

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Pro-home education or anti-school?

I have lately been reading an interesting book which denounces school. It is called School is Dead and was written by an associate of Ivan Illich's called Everett Reimer. It is not a new book; it was published in 1971. The thesis is that schools are little more than tools of capitalist society and that they are useless for education.

Most of the ideologues of home education, those who provide the theoretical underpinning for the practice, are American. I am thinking of Gatto and Holt, the Moores and so on. Their influence though has heavily permeated the British home educating scene and this is a shame. I say this because the core idea expounded by these people is essentially that schools are bad. This negative idea, that 'Schools are bad' seems to have a lot more strength for many home educating parents in this country than does the positive one of 'Home education is good'. In other words, one often gets more of a sense of home educators in this country being anti-school than one does of their being pro-home education.

Now I dare say that a lot of this is caused by the fact that many home educating parents have taken their children out of school following a series of bad experiences; bullying, failure to meet some special educational need and so on. This sort of thing is bound to give one a jaded view of schools. I don't think though that this can be the whole explanation to the trend which one sees of a lot of parents who are not just anti-school, but anti-traditional education in general. Not only do they reject school, they also reject formal qualifications and anything which smacks at all of teaching. This attitude manifests itself in the delight which some home educating parents openly express when a paedophile ring is unmasked at a nursery, or a child dies of an asthma attack because the teacher didn't give him his inhaler at once. In other words, they are pleased about these events because it all goes to show what dreadful places schools are and how wise they have been to take their children from them.

Now I may be wrong, and I am happy to be corrected here, but I fancy that those who do not send their children to school in the first place for ideological reasons are less apt to this wholesale condemnation of school. This would be logical really. if your child has never come home in tears after being bullied by another child or humiliated by a teacher, I suppose you might be able to view school through rose tinted lenses and kid yourself that it's not that bad really. I am certainly not in the least opposed to the institution of school as such. I am aware that it does not suit everybody, which is why I am glad that parents have the option in this country to educate their own children if they wish to do so. I take it as given that children in general need to be educated in reading and writing and taught various things. Schools are a convenient and cost effective way of achieving that end. And it has to be said, most children seem to like school well enough. It does not seem to do them any harm and in most cases actually teaches them a good deal.

I think it a pity that we are compelled to rely upon Americans for our theories of home education. I have of course read the books of people like Jan Fortune-Wood, but they lack the clarity and intellectual strength of John Holt or Raymond and Dorothy Moore's writing. Alan Thomas is better, but still does not quite hit the spot. It would be good to see a British John Holt emerge. I have an idea that the anti-school, anti-examination, anti-teaching and anti-many other aspects of formal education view which is so common among home educators in this country is not doing anybody any favours with the establishment. Most civil servants and MPs, as well as local authority officers, learn about the rationale behind British home education from the internet. If they constantly see things which suggest that parents are motivated by dislike of schools and determination not to teach or enter children for GCSEs, it is liable to alarm them. Actually, it alarms me and you could hardly hope to find a more dedicated home educator than me! When MPs and civil servants become alarmed, their instinctive reaction is to restrict or end some activity, so this could have practical consequences.

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The joys of freedom

Here is a quick quiz for home educators. Which well known advocate of home education was in favour of abolishing the age of consent so that adults and children could have sex without any legal restraint? No? Well it was the same one who argued that children should be able to vote at the age of three. And use heroin if they wished. Anybody guessed yet? Last clue, he did not think that there should be a minimum age for children to be able to drive a car on public roads. Well, I can see that nobody is going to get this one. Step forward John Holt, darling of the home educating parents.

I have never been a particular fan of John Holt's, regarding him as a smug windbag whose writing is unendurably prolix and twee. Still, I am aware that he is enormously popular with many parents. I had forgotten though quite how raving mad he was and it was not until I began leafing through my old copy of Escape from Childhood that I remembered another reason that I dislike him so much; the creepy way he talks about children. The problem with this book, which is not one of his most popular, is that it alternates the fairly reasonable with the completely barking. Reading it is thus a disconcerting experience; like some weird mixture of A S Neil and Aleister Crowley. Some of what he says is pretty unexceptionable, especially to autonomous home educators. For example;

'Young people should have the right to control and direct their own learning, that is to decide what they want to learn, and when, where, how, how much and by whom they want to be taught and the right to decide if they want to learn in a school and if so which one and for how much of the time'

There, who could object to that? (I am tempted to add, only somebody who actually cared about their child, but we'll leave that for now). Enough to say that many home educators will be applauding such noble sentiments. A couple of chapters later he suggests that we should abolish the age of consent entirely and allow any child to have sex with anybody she pleases, child or adult. He concedes that not everybody would agree with such a move, because:

'Some people have voiced the fear to me that if it were legal for an adult to have sex with a consenting child, many young people would be exploited by unscrupulous older ones'.

Well he got that right! How does he deal with this objection? Well you see it seems that we are 'caught with the remains of old myths'. He says, in effect, that only repressed people or old fuddy duddies would object to this liberating proposal. He does seem to have a bit of a thing about children though. After talking of the ridiculous idea, in his eyes, that small children might not have any sexual urges, he says:

'But we cling to this view of children for many reasons, not the least of which is that pretending they have no sexual feelings makes it easier for us to ignore or deny the sexual part of their attraction for us'.

Have a look at the chapters entitled The Child as Love Object and How Children Exploit Cuteness (The little minxes!) Here is Holt talking about an overweight ten year-old girl he had in his class:

'Now that she was no longer cute, but had become a sugar addict, fat, lazy and inactive, seduction failed more and more. But she had nothing else. Seduction was all she knew.'

Yuk! Would you want this man to baby sit for you? I find something deeply odd about a man of over fifty who refers to 'a six year-old friend of mine.' In view of whjat he had to say about the age of consent, one cannot help but wonder whether this friendship entailed his taking the kid to the pictures and then back to his place for coffee! In the chapter The Right to Use Drugs, he makes the surprising claim that:

'Most children have smoked tobacco (probably marijuana) before they are twelve years old.'

He wrote this in 1974 and I don't suppose that it was true then that most eleven year olds were smoking dope any more than it is today. He is all in favour of children taking heroin. The irrational objections to this drug are a caused by people believing more old myths.

'What really enraged people about heroin and marijuana was and is the belief that when people take it they don't want to work. So the public was sold the idea that heroin use was a terrible danger.'

In other words, just like those of us who would not want to see our eight year old daughters in the sack with a man of thirty, so too only old stick-in-the-muds would wish to prevent their children from fixing up some heroin. It's sheer repression! I won't even quote from the chapters which urge that three year olds should be able to vote and that there is no reason why an eleven year old should not take a car on the roads.

The truth is that John Holt was a very strange, some would say completely mad individual. He certainly said a few interesting things about education, if you can be bothered to wade through all the folksy anecdotes. His attitude to children in general though is appalling and dangerous.

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The dark side of John Holt!

I have always had something of a soft spot for those organisations having a name which is impossible to oppose. The Pro-life movement, for example. Who could possibly be against this? What would that make you; pro-death? I have been reading up recently about another such group, Taking Children Seriously. Well I hope that all of us as parents do this! In fact I actually take children, within their limitations, a good deal more seriously than I do most adults. I find their opinions more interesting, I prefer talking to them and I have far more patience with them than I do for adults, most of whom I find very slow and uninspiring company. I have for a while been planning on writing a post about Taking Children Seriously, but usually get sidetracked. I am afraid that this has happened once again, this time by the very first words which caught my eye as soon as I went onto the website of this rather unusual movement.

A few days ago, I put up a link to an article about TCS. To summarise, those adhering to this philosophy feel that we should treat children as being rational beings in precisely the way that we do in general other fellow human beings. We should not seek to dominate them or impose our will upon them, any more than we would upon an adult. This is all fair enough. I have never had any use for those who feel able to strike children with impunity or even to grab hold of them and drag them by main force from one place to another. Regular readers will also know that my only concern in the debate on home education is the rights of the children involved. I couldn't care less about the imaginary rights of their parents! It might have been supposed that I would have felt a good deal of sympathy with the followers of Taking Children Seriously. So I did in the past, before I actually read the sort of things which David Deutsch and Sarah Fitz-Claridge, the founders of the movement, have to say.

Before I go on, I must mention a curious thing, which was also touched upon in the article to which I posted a link. That is that people who follow this philosophy often comment online about matters relating to childrearing and education without specifically mentioning TCS. This is because it is a controversial approach and many people simply dismiss anybody connected with it as a being a bit of a crank. One has to read between the lines and look for phrases such as 'common preference' and 'Popperian epistemology' in order to identify those who adhere to this school of parenting.

A difficulty about Taking Children Seriously is that taking the advice of its founders could end up under extreme circumstances in killing your child. On the website is a piece by David Deutsch which explores that dilemma faced by parents whose toddlers refuse to be strapped into car seats. I have had a good deal of experience of this actually. One of my daughters would have the most spectacular tantrums about being strapped into the car seat when she was two. It made no odds. We still did it. This is because a two year old cannot possibly appreciate the fact that she might end up flying through the windscreen of the car and being killed if there were a car crash. This is quite wrong according to David Deutsch; the correct approach being either to abandon the car journey or allow the child to remain in the moving vehicle unrestrained.

Now to John Holt! I am sure that readers are dying to here about his dark side. What could it be? Was he really a secret kiddy fiddler? Did he beat his wife? Spank his children? Well no, none of those actually. It's a shame, because this might have raised him in my estimation a little. He always strikes me as the most irritatingly bland and pompous individual with his interminable, folksy anecdotes about the children he has met. Hearing that he used knock his kids about would have made him more human somehow. In fact all that he did was to express regret that some child chose school over home education. Oh and he used punishment and threats to keep the kids in his classroom quiet. Even this proved to be a shocking revelation because I can't see him doing anything of the sort and having read all his books, I am sure that I would have remembered this. In fact it was just that he used to write a big Q on the blackboard and this as the signal for the class that he wished them to quieten down a little. What a bastard! It's next door to child abuse!

I recommend readers to go the Taking Children Seriously website and read some of the stuff there. I shall be writing something a little more detailed in a day or two about this.

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