Coercion Equals Fear

Plato

Fear, the good the bad and the ugly. Fear is part of our genetic heritage. Humans are designed to be afraid. If a tiger is charging toward you, or you look over the edge of a precipice you had better be afraid. These are realistic fears that are meant to prompt us to pull back or flee. But many of us become afraid of things we should not be afraid of. Young children who are pushed (coerced, forced) to do things before they are ready, come to associate fear with any setbacks, mistakes, failures and criticism. But to fear these things is to stop learning. All learning is change and all change involves risk. Of course some risks are stupid, for the gain from them is nil. But we are not better able to access the risk of something we are trying to accomplish if we are overly afraid. Being too afraid at such times merely paralyzes us, so that we are incapable of making any decision. These are not life and death situations and we do not need to be very afraid. We simply need to make a logical assessment of the risk, the positives and the negatives and decide what to do.  

The worst of this is that parents and teachers only see their own efforts to try and make children afraid of one thing. But children are associating fear with doing seemingly everything. Parents, teachers, everybody they connect with, can introduce them to a new thing to be feared. These fears compound and mount up on one another to such an extent that the fears are magnified or exaggerated in the child's mind. They are already so helpless and the fears can keep piling on. To an adult it may seem there is nothing to be afraid of. But the child, through his generalized fear of failure, criticism, mistakes and setbacks may magnify it all out of proportion scaring himself witless as in the following cartoon of Calvin and Hobbes.

What do we want people to become? Do we want them to intrepidly rise to the challenge of the full glare of knowledge, to bend it, to change it and to channel it, or do we want them to be scurrying about in dark corners, clinging fearfully to the pale light of yesterday? For learning and knowledge are change. This change is something we can be part of, contribute to, or it can role over us scaring us witless. Fear is what holds back knowledge and learning and this fear comes from coercion.

Where does this coercion come from? For the most unfortunate it comes from their parents. For most of us it comes to us in the deceptive guise of education at schools. For all of us it comes through the norms of our culture and society. John Holt in his book "How Children Fail" identified the problem of coercion as well as any one could.

"There is one more reason, and the most important one, why we must reject the idea of school and classroom as places where, most of the time, children are doing what some adult tells them to do. The reason is that there is no way to coerce children without making them afraid or more afraid. We must not try to fool ourselves into thinking that this is not so. The would-be progressives, who until recently had great influence over most American public school education, did not recognize this - and still do not. They thought, or at least talked and wrote as if they thought, that there were good ways and bad ways to coerce children (the bad ways mean, harsh, cruel, the good ones gentle, persuasive, subtle, kindly), and that if they avoided the bad and stuck to the good they would do no harm. This was one of their greatest mistakes, and the main reason why the revolution they hoped to accomplish never took hold."

"The idea of painless, non-threatening coercion is an illusion. Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence. If you think it is your duty to make children do what you want, whether they will or not, then it follows inexorably that you must make them afraid of what will happen to them if they don't do what you want. You can do it the old fashioned way, openly and avowedly, with the threat of harsh words, infringement of liberty, or physical punishment. Or you can do it in the modern way, subtly, smoothly, quietly, by withholding the acceptance and approval which you and others have trained the children to depend on; or by making them feel that some retribution awaits them in the future, too vague to imagine but too implacable to escape."

"You can, as many skilled teachers do, learn to tap with a word, a gesture, a look, the great reservoir of fear, shame and guilt that today's children carry around inside them. Or you can simply let your own fears, about what will happen to you if the children don't do what you want, reach out and infect them. Thus the children will feel more and more that life is full of dangers from which only the goodwill of adults like you can protect them, and that this good will is perishable and must be earned anew each day."

Surely there is something really wrong with schools when so many children loathe and fear going to them as much as they do.

"No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory." Plato

Do we want mice or men? If we want people with a thirst for knowledge the answer is bravery. How can we make people brave? Why is one person (child) brave and another fearful? Although bravery is not the absence of fear, it cannot be arrived at by being inundated with fear. Bravery is the realization that something is more important than our fears, and that we should do certain things despite being afraid. Though the insight that allows people to be brave is readily available to be discovered, it just cannot happen if we are too deeply immersed in fear. As far as learning is concerned, developing bravery goes hand in hand with the development of two mindsets or patterns in our personal cognitive structures.  Firstly, we need to develop the mindset that most things can be accomplished through effort and persistence. Secondly, we need to develop the mindset that everything can and should be questioned and that many people approve of this activity.

To become intellectually brave we have only to come to believe that questioning and effort are more important than fear. Some of us were lucky, we had parents who praised our efforts and not only allowed us to question things (our knowledge, our beliefs, the very pillars that support the structure of society) but indeed encouraged us to do so. We went into the schools unafraid, and despite much effort to bring us in line we came out not too badly affected. Some of us were lucky enough to have a teacher or two who did not deluge us with fear, anxiety and guilt, but rather opened our eyes to the joy of learning. Many of us came out fearful but still brave enough to keep trying and asking questions. In his book "How Children Fail" John Holt talks about the bright, and the dull children, but he could just as easily have called them the brave, and the fearful children.

"The bright child is patient. he can tolerate uncertainty and failure, and will keep trying until he gets the answer. When all his experiments fail, he can even admit to himself and others that for the time being he is not going to get an answer. This may annoy him but he can wait. Very often, he does not want to be told how to do the problem or solve the puzzle he has struggled with, because he does not want to be cheated out of the chance to figure it out for himself in the future. Not so the dull child. He cannot stand uncertainty and failure. To him, an unanswered question is not a challenge or an opportunity, but a threat. If he can't find the answer quickly, it must be given to him, and quickly; and he must have the answers for everything. Such are the children of whom a second-grade teacher once said, 'But my children like to have questions for which there is only one answer.' They did; and by a mysterious coincidence so did she."

"The bright child is willing to go ahead on the basis of an incomplete understanding of information. He will take risks, sail uncharted seas, explore when the landscape is dim, the landmarks few, the light poor. To give only one example, he will read books he does not understand in the hope that after a while enough understanding will emerge to make it worth while to go on. In this spirit some of my fifth-graders tried to read Moby Dick. But the dull child will go ahead only when he thinks he knows exactly where he stands and exactly what is ahead of him. If he does not feel he knows exactly what an experience will be like, and if it will not be exactly like other experiences he already knows, he wants no part in it. For while the bright child feels the universe is, on the whole, a sensible, reasonable, and trustworthy place, the dull child feels that it is senseless, unpredictable and treacherous. He feels that he can never tell what may happen, particularly in a new situation, except that it will probably be bad."

This site maintains these characteristics, of brightness and dullness, bravery and trepidation, continue on into adulthood and determine the kind of life that person will lead. Further, this site maintains that the dull and fearful adults, are a constant drain on society that the bright and brave, are forced to shoulder as their burden.

Fear equals not learning and dullness

Learning to Fear and Fearing to Learn. Most children, in the first four or five years of life, are very open to experience and seem to show an intelligence that is not evident in later life. Something very curious seems to happen to them when they go to school. The supporters of traditional schooling would no doubt try to say that this is just a coincidence and that children just naturally loose their enthusiasm for life and intellectual sparkle at that age. However, as John Holt points out in his book "How Children Fail", this is immediately noticeable in the schools themselves, long before it begins to affect their behavior outside school.

"When I started, I thought that some people were just born smarter than others and not much could be done about it. This seems to be the official line of most of the psychologists. It isn't hard to believe if all your contacts with students are in the classroom or the psychological testing room. But if you live at a small school, seeing students in class, in the dorms in their private lives, at their recreations, sports, and manual work, you can't escape the conclusion that some people are much smarter part of the time than they are at other times. Why? Why should a boy or girl, who under some circumstances is witty, observant, imaginative, analytical, in a word intelligent, come into a classroom and as if by magic, turn into a complete dolt. The worst student we had - the worst I have ever encountered - was, in his life outside the classroom, as mature, intelligent, and interesting a student as anyone in the school. What went wrong?"

The brain of a child is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment the child gets up in the morning and does not stop until she gets to school. Apologies to Robert Frost.

"How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it." Alexandre Dumas

What happens then to these children who start off in life wanting to understand and truly solve problems. Why do they become dullards and dolts? The answer is fear. All kinds of fear contribute to this withering of the spirit. First and foremost is the fear that the world or reality just does not make sense is totally unpredictable and perhaps even malevolent. Children with this fear like primitive peoples cling to traditions, ritual, and try to shun anything new. This inability to build a consistent map of reality is a distortion of our primary need, the need to find universal invariants. This fear also causes distortion at every level of Maslow's hierarchy. There is fear of physical deprivation, fear for their safety and security, fear of loss of love, friendship and acceptance. and fear of loss of esteem. These can be identified as part of more easily understandable fears such as fear of failure, criticism, being wrong, being thought stupid and being humiliated. The need to escape from this fear becomes overwhelming in these children and they develop strategies for escaping from this fear. This kind of behavior is called flight or escape behavior by the behaviorists and the kind of learning it involves precludes any meaningful learning.

Anti-learning strategies. Many of these anti-learning strategies are clearly described by John Holt in his book "How Children Fail".

1. Run for it. Many children seem to develop rather disturbing symptoms after as little as a year at school. The most usual is a kind of panic when confronted with a question to which they have to find an answer. In his book "How Children Fail" John Holt has this to say about it.

   "On the diagnostic spelling test, she spelled 'tariff' as tearerfit. Today I thought I would try her again on it. This time she wrote tearfit. What does she do in such cases? Her reading aloud gives a clue. She closes her eyes and makes a dash for it, like someone running past a grave yard on a dark night. No looking back afterwards, either. Reminds me of a fragment of the Ancient Mariner - perhaps the world's best short ghost story:

   Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.

   Is this the way some of these children make their way through life?"

   It is, in fact, likely, that this terror subsides in later life, as few adults are faced with questions to which they have to find instant answers. Also those that in adulthood, who do have to find the answers to questions, are normally those that have luckily somehow avoided this path, and far from fearing these questions look forward to them and enjoy them, in anticipation of maybe finding answers. Consider however, how these fears well up in the rest of us, when we do have to find the answer to a problem.

2. Fence Sitting. Game theorists have a name for the strategy which maximizes your chances of winning and minimizes your losses if you should lose. They call it Minimax. As John Holt points out in "How Children Fail" children are experts at this. Mumbling an answer for instance will not only allow a teacher to hear a correct answer when in fact there wasn't one, but also will not enable the teacher to be sure it was incorrect. 

   

   John Holt gives several humorous examples of Minimax in "How Children Fail" of which the following is one:

   "They can always find ways to hedge, and cover their bets. Not long ago, in room period, we were working with a balance beam. A wooden arm or beam is marked off at regular intervals and balanced on a pivot at its midpoint. The beam can locked in a balanced position with a peg. We put a weight at a chosen point on one side of the beam, then give the student another weight, perhaps the same, perhaps heavier, perhaps lighter, which he is to place on the other side of the beam so that, when the beam is unlocked, it will stay in the balanced position. When a student has placed the weight, the other members of the group say, in turn, whether they think the beam will balance or not.

   One day it was Emily's turn to place the weight. After much thought she placed it wrongly. One by one, the members of the group said they thought it would not balance. As each one spoke, she had less and less confidence in her choice. Finally, when they had all spoken and she had to unlock the beam, she looked around and said brightly, 'I don't think it's going to balance either, personally.' Written words can not convey the tone of her voice: she had completely dissociated herself from that foolish person (whoever it was) who had placed the weight on such a ridiculous spot."

3. Deliberate failure. Deliberate failure or deliberately coming up with the wrong answer, would seem at first glance to be, a very poor way of avoiding fear, yet it is an often chosen strategy of children. For if children do not try they can tell themselves that the haven't really failed.

   
   

   Failure implies setting a goal and if you do not try there is no goal. Also deliberate failure has the added bonus of lowering the expectations of teachers, parents etc. Thus they are singled out for answers less and not expected to rise to some impossible expectation. In "How children Fail" John Holt puts it like this:

   "What surprised me most of all, when she finished this good performance was to see her looking not pleased or satisfied, but anxious. I thought, 'Becoming a better speller presents risks for this child. What on earth can they be?' And then I saw why for some children the strategy of weakness, of incompetence, of impotence, may be a good one. For, after all, if they (meaning we) know that you can't do anything, they won't expect you to do anything, and they won't blame you or punish you for not being able to do what you have been told to do. I could almost hear the girl saying plaintively to herself, 'I suppose he's going to expect me to spell right all the time now, and he'll probably give me heck when I don't."

   

   "One thing I have discovered is that there is a peculiar kind of relief, a lessening of tension, when you make a mistake. For when you make one, you no longer have to worry about whether you are going to make one. Walking a tight rope you worry about falling off, once fallen off, you don't have to worry. Children to whom making mistakes is acutely painful, are therefore under great tension when doing something correctly. Worrying about the mistakes they might make is as bad - no worse - than worrying about the mistakes they have made. Thus when you tell a child that he has done a problem wrong, you often hear a sigh of relief. He says, 'I knew it would be wrong.' He would rather be wrong, and know it, than not know whether he was wrong or not."

            
   

4. Answer producing. Who has the answers? Why the teachers do. It is therefore not unusual for children to stop looking for the answer in the problem and instead try all manner of tactics to extract the answer from the teacher. This is the kind of mind reading mentioned in the book "Blink". This involves careful attention to body language, facial expression and voice intonation of the teacher to perceive clues to the answer. It involves prompting by the children to cause a teacher to say and do things that give clues to the answer. It involves tricking the teacher into telling or indicating the answer. Or it may simply be waiting till the teacher gives up and tells the answer. In "How Children Fail" John Holt puts it like this:

   "There was a good deal of the tried-and-true strategy of guess-and-look, in which you start to say a word, all the while scrutinizing the teacher's face to see whether you are on the right track or not. With most teachers no further strategies are needed. This one was more poker-faced than most, so guess and look wasn't working very well. Still, the percentage of hits was remarkably high, especially since it was clear to me from the way the children were talking and acting that they hadn't a notion of what Nouns, Adjectives and Verbs were. Finally one child said 'Miss --, you shouldn't point to the answer each time.' The teacher was surprised, and asked what she meant. The child said 'Well you don't exactly point, but you kind of stand next to the answer.' This was no clearer, since the teacher had been standing still. But after a while, as the class went on, I thought I saw what the girl meant. Since the teacher wrote the word down in its proper column, she was in a way, getting herself ready to write, pointing herself at the place where she would soon be writing. From the angle of her body to the blackboard the children picked up a subtle clue to the correct answer."

   "A minute or two later Jane appeared at the door and said indignantly, 'Are you sure that it isn't those two words at the top of the page?' Having said no such thing, I was taken aback and said with some surprise, 'When did I say that?' She immediately turned to Abby, who was waiting outside the door, and said 'Write it down!' She had all the clues she needed."

   "Question after question met only with silence. She said nothing, did nothing, just sat and looked at me through those glasses, and waited. Each time I had to think of a question easier and more pointed than the last, until I finally found one so easy that she would feel safe in answering it. So we inched our way along until suddenly, looking at her as I waited for an answer to a question, I saw with a start that she was not at all puzzled by what I had asked her. In fact, she was not even thinking about it. She was coolly appraising me, weighing my patience, waiting for the next, sure-to-be-easier question. I thought 'I've been had.' The girl had learned how to make all her previous teachers do the same thing. If I wouldn't tell her the answers, very well, she would just let me question her right up to them."

5. Mumbo jumbo parroting. By far the most usual form of escaping fear is to parrot back exactly what the teacher did or said. Repeat the formula, write or speak the magic words, and hey presto correct answer. No actual understanding is involved. The child simply memorizes the words or steps and repeats them exactly as given. I am reminded of the fantastic speech by the retarded father Sam in the movie "I am Sam". For a while he seems to be giving a speech about being a father that no retarded person could. Then suddenly he is talking about a boy instead of a girl. Finally another retarded person, his friend, gives away the fact that he is quoting the speech by Dustin Hoffman in the movie "Kramer verses Kramer". In "How Children Fail" John Holt puts it like this:

   "By now I have many times seen children crank out right answers to problems without the faintest idea of what they were doing. They are blind recipe-followers. Some can even parrot back my explanations, but again without knowing what they mean."

   "What happens in school is that children take in these word strings and store them, undigested, so they can spit them back out on demand. But these words do not change anything, fit with anything, relate to anything. They are as empty of meaning as parrot-speech is to the parrot."

   "And when he remembers 7x8, he cannot use it. Given a rectangle of 7cm. x 8cm. and asked how many 1 sq. cm. pieces he would need to cover it, he will over and over again cover the rectangle with square pieces and laboriously count them up, never seeing any connection between his answer and the multiplication tables he has memorized."

   "John Holt: If you were going 50 miles per hour, how far would you go in 24 minutes?
   Walter (quickly): 36 miles.
   John Holt: How did you get that?
   Walter: Subtracted 24 from 60.
   He still hadn't got it: I tried again.
   John Holt: If you were going 50 miles per hour, how far would you get in in 30 minutes?
   Walter: 25 miles. 30 minutes is half an hour, and half of 50 is 25.
   It sounded as if he knew what he was doing at last... Most teachers would have assumed as I would have once... that he knew what he was doing... Yet in each case he showed that he had not really understood what he was doing, and it is not at all certain that he understands yet."

   "The other day I was working with a sixteen-year-old boy who was having trouble with first-year physics. I asked him to do one of the problems in his book. Immediately he began to write on his paper, 'Given': then, under it, 'To Find': and under that, 'Use'. He began to fill in those spaces with a hash of letters and figures. I said, 'Whoa, hold on, at least think about it before you start writing down a mess of stuff.' He said, 'But our teacher tells us we have to do all our problems this way. So there we are. No doubt his teacher would say that he wants his students to think about problems, and that he prescribed this form so that they would think. But what he has not seen, and probably never will see, is that his means to an end of clearer thinking has become an end in itself, just part of the ritual mumbo-jumbo you have to go through on your answer hunt."

6. By hook or by crook. John Holt talks about children being problem centered or answer centered. Finding the answer in the problem tends to take time and children are most often given no time to understand. If they are faced with the problem of arriving at an answer to a question they do not understand. The only sensible way to do this is to cheat. 

   
   

   Like criminals, who often go to extraordinary lengths to steal money, children can go to extraordinary lengths to cheat. Such is the case that one cannot help feeling that if they put the same effort into understanding they would learn so well they would never need to cheat. In "How Children Fail" John Holt puts it like this:

   "For children the central business of school is not learning, whatever this vague word means, it is getting these daily tasks done, or at least out of the way, with a minimum of effort and unpleasantness. Each task is an end in itself."

   
   

   "The children don't care how they dispose of it. If they can get it out of the way by doing it, they will do it; if experience has taught them that this does not work very well, they will turn to other means, illegitimate means that wholly defeat whatever purpose the task-giver may have had in mind."

   

   "My friends and I, breezing through the ancient history Boards, knew very well that a trick was being played on someone, we were not quite sure on whom. Our success on the Boards was due, not to our knowledge of ancient history, which was scanty, but to our teacher's skill as a predictor which was great."




His teacher basically predicted which questions would be asked on the exam and thus what to concentrate on when revising.

7. Humor. Perhaps the oldest trick in the book is for children to deflect the fear of loss of esteem involved in failing or being wrong, while gaining esteem and even acceptance by his classmates by being humorous, especially if at the expense of a teacher. I still remember clearly from my own days at school an incident that moved me from nobody to somebody the whole class held in high esteem and fully accepted as one of their own.

      

   It must have been an English class and I think we had a substitute teacher. Anyway the teacher was asking us about masculine and feminine. The teacher would give us a masculine word and we would have to give the feminine or vice versa. The word she gave me was monk. I guess she was looking for the word nun. But a word just bubbled up from my unconscious and I said it before I had time to think. The word was monkey. This, though not very clever, was thought by the class to be hilariously funny.

             

   Suddenly they were laughing and screaming so much that the poor teacher completely lost control of the class. I received many pats on the back for this bit of levity and felt an acceptance and esteem from the class that I had never had before. I don't think I ever did anything like this again though, because I felt really badly for the teacher.

    

 Control, Coercion & Medication

Coercion usually requires punishment. These days punishment as John Holt pointed out this can mean withholding the acceptance and approval, making children feel some that some vague, implacable, retribution awaits them in the future, or the teacher can tap with a word, a gesture, a look, the great reservoir of fear, shame and guilt that today's children carry around inside them. However, in recent years when this kind of coercion fails, teachers and schools have been recommending behavior modification through the use of drugs. Fear is still the driving force, not child fear, but parental fear. Parents are made to feel their children are not normal, not fitting in, not advancing correctly. All of this, they are led to believe, might be solved by the application of a pill. 

What worries me, and perhaps a lot of people about this, is that doctors and psychologists, the people who have to make decisions about whether a child is hyperactive, or who have concentration problems, or learning problems are being pressured by parents, teachers and school authorities. This kind of decision making taken out of the hands of the experts can lead to self crippling practices for society. 

In his book "How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci" Michael Gelb makes the following statement. While I hope this statement is not true, I rather suspect it might be true. He said:

"Think back to your school days. We all remember what curiosity did to the cat. But what happened to the kids who asked too many questions? A common refrain from overworked, beleaguered teachers was, 'We don't have time for all these questions; we've got to get through the curriculum.' Now persistent question askers are diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder or 'hyperactivity' and treated with Ritalin or other drugs. If young Leonardo were alive today and attending grade school, he would probably be on medication."

There seems to be something quite bizarre and hideous about the idea of controlling children's behavior with drugs. Indeed it may be that in this regard the situation for children has gotten worse instead of better. Apart from the obvious disregard for children's choice and freewill there is the inevitable danger of such an idea being misused by the worst kind of people.

John Holt in his book "Freedom and Beyond" gives one such example.

"Not long ago, a man I have known slightly for some years came up to me in great agitation and asked for advice. Without waiting for an answer, he began his story. A woman a good friend of his, was having a terrible problem with her child at school. The child was getting good enough marks, but he was behaving so badly that he disrupted the entire class. The teacher had already called the mother several times. A suggestion had been made that they take the child to see a psychologist, and perhaps even give him some drugs." 

"Over and over again the man said how frantic the mother was, how the school kept telling her that something had to be done about this child, whose behavior was causing such terrible problems. With visions of a thirteen - or fourteen-year-old boy on a rampage, hitting out in all directions, I said, 'How old is the child?' My friend looked taken aback by this question. After thinking a moment, he asked his wife, 'How old is N--?' His wife said, 'He is six.'"

"Six! I thought to myself, what in the world can a six-year-old do in the classroom that can throw all these adults into such a panic. I tried to get in some further questions. 'What is the child doing,' I asked 'that is causing such a disturbance?' Persisting through all his talk, I eventually got an answer. What this six-year-old was doing to cause such an uproar was only this - he likes to get up from his seat from time to time and go talk to his friends. He refuses to stay seated. At first I could hardly believe my ears. Was it really no more than that? Apparently that was all. Otherwise, as my friend described him, the child was lively, sociable, attractive, and has many friends."

"At one point my friend said to me, 'We think the child may be hyperactive.' I assured him on the basis of what he had told me, that he was almost certainly not 'hyperactive', and that in any case, such a diagnosis could only be made by a few highly specialized people on the basis of elaborate tests, which the child had not been given..."

"When I could get in a word or two, I tried to convince my friend that the only problem was that this lively, energetic and personable kid had had the bad luck, like many other kids, to get a first-grade-teacher who like many other teachers believed that six-year-olds ought to spend a very large part of their waking hours sitting down, motionless, and quiet... (A month later, I learned that he was being given drugs, which have 'solved' the 'problem'.)"

Crack Down. Despite this new way of controlling children there are still many people who still believe the old fashioned way was best.

How often do you hear voiced by people considered to be kind-hearted, the following: "Kids today have it too easy at school. In my day they would have got a taste of the old cane. That would have straightened them out." "Parents today let their children run wild. What they need is a good smacking (a taste of the stick)." "My parents belted me and it never did me any harm." "What these kids need to make them learn is the strap." "My teachers flogged me every day and look how I turned out. Well disciplined I can tell you." Of course the strap, the stick and the cane are long gone from most educational institutions in the west, but the feeling that there was something inherently good about them lingers on and is often alluded to by people, even the parents of children at school, with regret. John Holt in his book "Teach Your Own" gives a rather frightening account of a ride in a taxi cab where he foolishly mentioned that he wrote about teaching and parents teaching their own children. He then goes onto give some fragments of what the taxi driver had said, which are reprinted below.

"Early in his talk he said."

"Seems to me the students are directing the teachers these days instead of the other way round. ...When I was a kid if I'd ever talked back to a teacher, I would have got a face full of knuckles. (Laughed.) Then I would have had to hope to God he didn't tell my father about it."

"Print cannot convey the approval, even the pleasure with which he said this... Later in our conversation the driver spoke admiringly of Catholic schools saying,"

"I know a guy who had a couple of high school kids who were kind of wild. He sent them to Saint --- School. There, if a kid talked back to one of the priests, he'd deck him right then and there, no questions asked. (He laughed approvingly.)"

                   

Learning as punishment. John Holt in his book "How Children Fail" gives another example of the lingering strange beliefs by parents about the punishment of their children.

"Her father said he understood more clearly what we were trying to do with Cuisenaire rods; but her mother said defiantly and angrily, that she couldn't understand all these new ideas, and was going to continue working with her daughter as she had been, by giving her a page of problems to do each day, with the threat that for each problem done wrong she would be given several more problems to do. This reaction astonishes and rather appalls me. Why should this mother be so eager to have arithmetic applied to her child as a kind of punishment? She reminds me of the many parents I have known who at one time or another have urged me to crack down on their children. Do such people see school as a kind of institutionalized punishment, something unpleasant we can do to children whether or not they have done something to deserve it? What is it that such people resent so about children?"

Coercion, Fear, Equals Incompetence. Autonomous, Self-direction, Equals Competence. There has to be another path for learning not involving fear, and there is. Unfortunately for those who wish to control children it involves giving control back to the children. Teachers and parents, however, do not need to be afraid that children will therefore immediately start playing up or doing nothing. Adults will always influence children by both example and advice. Such things can never change. What can change, is a child's autonomy, independence and responsibility, as he is able to mature, make decisions, take control of his life and thus become competent.