I’ve disliked the idea of childhood since before I can remember (at least, if my mother is to be believed). I felt that people didn’t quite see me as a person — and I could never understand why everyone else was so okay with that.
John Holt’s book is about why this isn’t okay and what to do about it. I loved it for that—so much that I took notes on the entire book.
It's more of a vision of the world we'd like to see than an actual plan of action. Still, I think knowing exactly what we want is already very important.
It's a close, AI-assisted translation of my Russian summary. I've reviewed it, but I might have missed some wordplay or unnatural phrasing. The section headings follow Holt's chapter titles. I grouped the notes under them as seemed appropriate.
The Institution of Childhood
1. Childhood is a particular social institution, a legal regime involving a severe deprivation of most of the rights that in other cases are considered basic and inalienable.
2. Some people are comfortable with the way of life that childhood entails. Some are not. And this can change over time. Often, it is precisely this point of transition that comes with a large number of conflicts and problems. Because of this, those who were happiest in childhood can become especially unhappy when they are forbidden to leave it.
Childhood in History
3. The cultural idealisation of childhood largely serves to make everyone, or almost everyone, see it as a normal legal regime.
4. Childhood is a relatively recent invention, and it developed asymmetrically for the two sexes. Childhood for boys was invented earlier than childhood for girls.
[My addition: the tightening of the legal regime of childhood continues. Since the 1950s, children have, statistically speaking, been deprived of some of their freedom of movement.]
5. Mothers worked a lot. The modern ideal of motherhood is quite new.
[My addition: this is broadly true. A Nobel Prize in economics was recently awarded precisely for research in this area. The status of a housewife staying home with the children is a fairly short-lived phenomenon, genuinely widespread in twentieth-century America and the wealthy countries of Europe, and in Japan during the economic miracle. Essentially, it never really existed on a mass scale anywhere else.]
6. The invention of childhood is partly connected with the spatial separation of the "adult world" and "home". In the pre-industrial era, these worlds were in the same place and therefore naturally merged.
The Family and Its Purposes
7. Closed nuclear families generate some problems by their very structure. For example, competition between siblings for their parents' attention is, in effect, a consequence of being forbidden to seek attention from other older people: an adult's attention is scarce.
8. Modern childhood severely restricts the range of places children can go if something goes wrong. In practice, the options are limited to one home and the state. If something is bad at home, a child generally has nowhere to run.
The author expresses this with a line he quotes from Robert Frost:
Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in.
Just so. Children need many such homes.
Holt, chapter 4, "The Family and Its Purposes"; the line about home is his quotation of Robert Frost.
On the Loss of Authority of the Old
9. It would be a mistake to think that the older generation has lost its authority because it has been excessively soft.
10. In the author's time, a generation was growing up with a very particular perception of the future because of the threat of nuclear war. For example, he heard ten-year-olds talking about "if I grow up". He found that this was characteristic of those who regularly went through nuclear-alert drills at school.
Such children did not develop a sense that adults knew what they were doing. Consequently, they did not develop a sense that adults should be trusted to decide when they, the children, would be ready to take responsibility for running society.
The Burden of Having Children
11. The sight of children having fun annoys adults. Generally, they try to interrupt the fun. If we believe the author, people designing children's spaces in Britain recommended enclosing playgrounds and play areas with opaque fences, partly so that the sight of children having fun would not drive adults into a rage.
12. This probably happens because adults dislike spontaneity.
13. School, as the main site of control over children, expresses this hatred most strongly, suppressing spontaneity almost completely on its territory. Schools tend to be petty in setting rules.
14. Most adults want schools to be more punitive rather than freer.
One Use of Childhood
15. One important function of childhood is to give just about any adult an opportunity to acquire the right to control someone and impose their will on them.
16. With their own children, adults allow themselves a degree of rudeness in how they talk and pettiness in what they pick on that they would never allow themselves with anyone else.
On ‘Help’ and ‘Helpers’
17. The problem with the helping professions is that they attract people who want to play God.
[My comment: this is true. I wanted to, when I went into psychology.]
18. Because of this, the work of people in the helping professions often makes those receiving help more helpless.
The Competence of Children
19. Suppressing spontaneity suppresses curiosity.
20. Adults generally underestimate children's competence very severely.
21. The author gives an interesting case of a radio station run entirely by children under twelve. Anyone who turned thirteen had to leave the staff.
And it was a good radio station.
22. The author gives the case of a Japanese teacher who taught very young children to play the violin on a mass scale.
The teacher's thought was that a child of five or six has a fairly good command of a very complex structure: the Japanese language. Therefore, there is no fundamental difficulty for small children in learning complicated things. The problem is literally that children are not taught these things because people believe they are incompetent. Simply stop believing this, and you will already get progress.
23. Children's success can depend on what they—and the adults around them—believe they are capable of.
[Comment from my original notes: there is research supporting this. Children can learn more when their teachers believe they are capable of it.]
24. Children do not learn to their full potential, partly because nobody believes they can master the material, and partly because any possible use for it lies so far in the future—sometimes literally further away than the length of the child's life so far.
The Child as Love Object
25. The author tells a story about dwarfs.
Years ago, a friend of mine used to tell a very funny Embarrassing Moment story. Hearing of a sale at one of New York’s large department stores, she went there early, like many other women, to find some good bargains before they were all snapped up. As soon as the doors opened in she went, in a dense crowd of hurrying people. As she walked along, she found herself just behind two small boys whose heads came up only a little above her waist. Feeling affectionate and mischievous, she put a fingertip on the top of each boy’s head and walked along that way for a step or two. But no more than that; in an instant, two furious adult faces looked up at her and in a harsh, high, but adult voice one of them said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” They were midgets!
Over the years I have heard her tell this story several times and every time joined others in laughing at it. Only after many years, really quite recently, did I realise that behind her act and our laughter was this thought - that if those midgets really had been children, it would have been perfectly all right to walk along with her fingertips on the tops of their heads. What made the story so funny was that what seemed to be such a good idea, the sort of thing that all of us child-lovers would like to do, turned out so quickly to be such a bad idea. We laughed because we could so easily put ourselves into her shoes, imagine ourselves with hearts brimming with love, putting our fingers on the dear little children’s heads and imagine our horror at finding our mistake. But what makes it such a good idea to walk along with our fingers on the tops of strange children’s heads? What gives us the right to do it? What gives us the right to think that they like us to do it?
Holt, chapter 11, "The Child as Love Object".
Quoted in full:
The habit of using women as sex objects may explain why seeing other men with long hair used to make, or still makes, some men so irrationally angry. Such longhairs, by their deceiving appearance, may trick other men into fantasy sexual, and therefore, homosexual, relations with them.
Holt, chapter 11, "The Child as Love Object".
The seventies being the seventies...
Another passage, quoted in full:
To such talk a friend of mine once said that perhaps the older person needed to kiss the small child and so it was right to compel the child to let him do it. This is a perfect example of what I mean about an adult using a child. If the needs of a four-year-old and a sixty-year-old come into conflict, why must the child always give way? Is he entitled to no consideration simply because he is smaller and weaker?
Holt, chapter 11, "The Child as Love Object".
The seventies being the seventies, x2.
26. Children often dislike being used as love objects. This is normal. This choice should be respected.
27. The author compares the objectification of children as objects of sentimental affection with the sexual objectification of women. In both cases, those doing the objectifying tend to form an ideology presenting the situation as though this is exactly what the person being objectified wants, generally regardless of that person's actual opinion.
28. It is right to love the qualities a child actually has, qualities you would value in people of any age.
On Seeing Children as ‘Cute’
29. We love some qualities in children because we lack them ourselves, and their presence in children allows adults to feel better and assert their superiority at the child's expense. Loving these qualities is not very good.
30. Promoting the idea that growing up means losing qualities we generally consider good may be a way for adults to defend themselves psychologically. They have lost qualities they should have done everything they could to preserve.
31. By instilling a cult of growing up in children, adults force children to give up generally positive qualities of personality.
32. Most sentimental notions of lost childhood are incorrect. Children are not happier because they are children. They are happier because of, say, greater energy, which adults diligently extinguish. In this sense, adults have made the loss of qualities that make people happy part of what they mean by "growing up". Calling this a good thing is primarily a form of psychological self-defence.
33. Growing up is not always decline and defeat. Experience of life does give you some good stuff.
34. Thinking better of children than they actually are is harmful to both adults and children.
35. Sentimentality is cruel in its very nature. If you treat a child like a kitten or a puppy, without the depth of regard you consider appropriate towards a human being, the child will feel it.
36. Children's suffering and problems often seem funny or cute to us. This attitude is cruel.
37. This leads to children's wishes and feelings being understood as "unreal", which means they can safely be sacrificed to adults' "real" wishes and feelings.
38. Children do not think of one another as cute. This allows them actually to see one another as people with real problems.
39.
Are midgets cute? Not at all; we recognise that the littleness of a midget is an affliction and burden.
Holt, chapter 12, "On Seeing Children as ‘Cute’".
40. The idea of children's innocence is strange. By "innocence", people usually mean a mixture of children's ignorance, trust and openness to the world.
Ignorance is a bad quality, and children themselves try to get rid of it. It is right to value the other two qualities in adults as well. These are generally good qualities. However, adults often believe that they should be outgrown.
41. Children do not see themselves as cute. When they cannot do something, it is genuinely difficult and unpleasant for them. It is respectful not to treat children's difficulties as something cute. A test would be the question: "Would I find this cute if an adult behaved this way?"
Most likely, difficulty walking or pronouncing words in a thirty-year-old would not inspire sentimental affection.
How Children Exploit Cuteness
42. Adults are frightened by children who behave intelligently, competently or effectively. Often, adults hate such children, consider them abnormal, and frequently wish trouble on them.
43. When a Japanese researcher demonstrated a widespread capacity among children to use typewriters, he received a barrage of indignant letters accusing him of cruelty. Adults want to see children as incompetent and do not want to see evidence to the contrary.
44. The phrase "let children be children", often used by defenders of childhood, is effectively a manifesto for enforced incompetence.
45. A child is not a "potential adult".
46. Babies do not behave "childishly" in the sense often meant by the word. They are, on the whole, extremely serious and straightforward within the modest needs and abilities they have.
Children often have to learn to behave childishly and be cute in order to live up to adults' expectations.
Love May Not Cure Everything
47. One possible reason for a school bully's behaviour may be an attempt to turn the tables. Having trouble figuring out how to farm adults' affection, he tries another strategy: make the adults come begging, wondering how to "fix" him.
In a sense, this resembles a rejected lover's fantasy of the beloved understanding everything, coming to plead, and being told: "No, you had your chance, now it's too late."
48.
What we should understand is that it is possible to fail as completely at a free or alternative school like Summerhill or Lewis-Wadhams or First Street School as at the most rigid and conventional school. In a school whose main work is having everyone get good marks on exams, whoever can’t do this is a failure. But in a school whose main work is helping everyone to be happy, to love and be loved, anyone who can’t do this is just as much a failure. And the shame and pain of such failure may be even greater, because the student really shares the aims of the school, really wants to be a success at love and happiness, and knows that everyone is really trying to help him and that when he fails he has only himself to blame.
Holt, chapter 14, "Love May Not Cure Everything".
What Children Need, We All Need
49. Children want to grow up for a reason. They would like to hear from their elders that things will get better, rather than that childhood is the best time of their lives.
50. Generally, people who say they want to work with children mean that they will be provided with an audience of children who cannot leave. Often, they have no answer to the question: "What do you have to offer that would make children come to you voluntarily?"
On the Use of the Word ‘Rights’
51. When the law says I have the right to vote, this does not mean I am obliged to vote. But it does mean that the law will take action against anyone who tries to stop me voting.
Another understanding of a right, say the right to free medical care, assumes that the state is obliged to provide me with medical care.
The conventionally proclaimed rights of children, such as the right to a loving family, fit neither of these versions: there is no body that could provide them. These statements are therefore, essentially, not rights.
52. A child should have the right to decide where to live.
53. A child should have the right to work. The author believes it is much harder to make sure children are given any work at all than to protect them from exploitation.
54. A child should have the right to vote.
55. These rights are interconnected. It is difficult to secure the right to vote without the right to work, because without the ability to earn money independently, the right to vote is essentially useless.
56. Children are people too, and human rights should apply to them. The right to vote should probably come first, to create political pressure for the rest.
The Right to Vote
57. On the whole, most of the time a person knows better than anyone else what they want.
58. In the long run, society pays more for its overseers than for the mistakes they are supposed to prevent.
59. Children will have to live with the consequences of government decisions for the longest, since they have the most years ahead of them in that country.
60. There follows a lot of discussion that makes sense for America about the opportunities and influence that the right to vote gives you, and about how to get it.
61. Adults, on average, understand politics no better than children, and there is little difference in how informed a ten-year-old's vote and a thirty-year-old's vote are.
62. After two years of the press chewing over Watergate, two thirds of Americans did not recognise the name, and half could not even say that there was any scandal at all when it was described to them.
The Right to Work
63. Most children in gangs left them once they had a chance to work.
64. The ban on children working is justified by saying that children do not want to work unless forced. This, in turn, is argued from children's reluctance to help with housework of their own accord: that is, to do stuff that literally nobody wants to do without pressing necessity. Nobody does housework with a smile.
For the most part, the work children do not want to do is work nobody wants to do.
65. A child's unwillingness to work in the way and at the time the parents want is not the same thing as the child's unwillingness to work at all.
66. The phrase "child labour" gives us flashbacks to the nightmares of the nineteenth century. But it is worth understanding that the work of an adult worker in those days was also a fairly nightmarish experience. There is no reason to expect child labour in the twenty-first century to be as nightmarish as in the nineteenth, given how much better adult work has become.
The Right to Own Property
67. Any extension of civil rights to children requires institutions through which children can defend themselves against the arbitrary power of parents or other adults.
68. Implementing the right to own property must somehow resolve the conflict between the child's right to own property and the right of the homeowner, parent or landlord, to refuse to have that item in the house.
The right to own or rent real estate solves this problem.
69. The question of drawing a line between the right of ownership and the right of use is complicated. For example, something given to a child as a gift is unequivocally theirs; furniture put in their room by their parents probably is not.
However, discussing this question makes little sense until the law recognises ownership of at least the obviously personal belongings.
My comment:
Although most of Holt's claims still seem radical, in fact some of the path he proposed has been travelled.
For example, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted in 1989. It is important not only, and not so much, for its contents as for the fact that children were, in general, recognised as having some serious civil rights.
In practice, the Convention is more a statement of aspirations than a description of reality. Take Article 12, probably the most valuable article in the whole Convention: it says that the child's opinion should be taken into account in matters concerning them, in accordance with their maturity. The Committee's interpretation also makes clear that children do not have to prove their capacity in advance. In practice, it is ignored, because deciding on maturity is left to adults who have an interest in underestimating it.
Certain institutions have also begun to take shape, though again in a distorted form: these are institutions for protecting children, rather than institutions through which children can protect themselves. Agency remains with adults; this time, simply, with officials instead of parents.
On the whole, progress towards children's liberation is stalling, and the project is turning into a kind of animal welfare: "Take their interests into account without giving them the right to defend those interests."
Put simply, instead of a punishing master, children have acquired a merciful master. This is progress, but nowhere near enough.
The Right to Travel
70. Children are generally the first to try to make peace in a conflict. Digging in and being spiteful in response to this offer, demanding deeper repentance, is bad.
The Right to Choose One’s Guardian
71. Children should be given the right to choose their own guardians.
72. Parents do not necessarily like their own children best. Sometimes they like other people's children better. The same goes for children's attitudes towards parents. The right to choose a guardian would reduce this tension by letting children and adults freely choose different family arrangements.
73. It would be cool to set up children's homes that children could choose to live in.
74. Many experimental schools are, in effect, such homes, and do school stuff simply because creating children's communities and residences is forbidden unless they are schools.
75. For example, the well-known Summerhill was, in effect, a children's community. Summerhill's founder said that it had to be a school at least on the surface, because otherwise children's communities were forbidden.
76. The state should not run children's communities. Certification kills any attempts at freedom. Instead, the state could give money to people building self-governing communities.
The Right to a Guaranteed Income
77. UBI is cool.
The Right to Legal and Financial Responsibility
78. On the whole, the law is harsher towards children than towards adults.
79. The author gives the case of a girl sentenced to reform school for being ungovernable. This meant that she constantly disobeyed her parents: specifically, she talked to boys, which she had been forbidden to do. Holt proposes putting children's right to talk to anyone they like into law, and stresses that such a case could not, in principle, exist for an adult.
80. The author gives the case of a six-year-old boy removed from his birth family. His parents appealed and secured his return. The child vehemently protested against being returned to his birth family. Nobody listened to him. Four weeks later, his father beat him to death. Holt points out that children's opinions should be listened to without ranking them as "mature enough" and "not mature enough": this could prevent such cases.
81. Here are some reasons for which children can be punished: insolence, disobedience, disrespect, moving about without permission, keeping secrets, talking without permission. Slaves in America were punished for the same reasons.
82. Abuse within the family is the most common cause of violent child deaths.
83. Generally, a child has no difficulty telling people who are malicious and cruel towards them from kind people; this is especially noticeable with teachers. The idea that a cruel teacher is actually acting in the child's best interests is a strange myth from the adult world. Adults themselves generally avoid such teachers and such kindness.
84. Children really are deprived of their liberty for things like "talking to boys".
85. Children are sometimes placed in correctional institutions for offences for which adults would not even be given community service.
The Right to Control One’s Learning
86. Children should have the right to control their education.
87. Of all American institutions, school is probably the most authoritarian. School is the only institution that everyone is required to attend at some point in life, and it can use state coercion against those who refuse.
88. School probably gives one person the greatest amount of power over another of any American institution. Even in the army, a soldier has more free time not spent under the immediate supervision of someone in power.
89. School can use a very wide range of interventions, up to pumping someone full of drugs for disobedience.
The school is the closest we have yet been able to come to Huxley’s Brave New World, with its alphas and betas, deltas and epsilons - and now it even has its soma.
Holt, chapter 24, "The Right to Control One’s Learning".
[My note: here Holt criticises the practice, current in his time, of prescribing amphetamine and methylphenidate to children who were persistently inattentive at school. Methylphenidate is still used. You may know it as Ritalin.]
90. A child should have the right not to take part in all this if they do not want to.
The Right to Use Drugs
91. The right to use legal drugs, such as coffee, tobacco and alcohol, should be extended to children.
92. One argument for this is that it would reduce the sense of mystery and secrecy around these things as "rituals of the adult world", which could potentially reduce young people's interest in the subject.
The Right to Drive
93. Children should be given the right to drive a car if they can pass the driving test.
The Law, the Young and Sex
94. We should stop treating the very idea that children have a sexuality as taboo.
95. Early pregnancy is bad.
96. The question of sexual freedom for legally emancipated minors is straightforward, but it is more complicated for those who remain dependent on their parents. Either way, the legislation concerning sex in Holt's time was so harsh that there was still a lot to repeal before reaching the point where things became debatable.
97. Compensating for harsh laws with lax enforcement is bad practice. If a law is usually not enforced and everyone thinks it normal not to enforce it, the law should be repealed.
98. On the whole, the state should probably stay out of people's sex lives regardless of their age.
Steps to Take
99. One strategy for reaching the desired world is to keep trying to live as though you are already in that world.
100. You can treat children as people with rights, even if the state does not yet recognise those rights.
101. Over time, the child themselves should control an increasing share of the money you are prepared to spend on them.
102. We should support initiatives that weaken the child's total subordination to the institution of school. Ideally, it would be good to have a full alternative to school that the child could choose independently.
This would benefit schools by creating competition for children, and benefit the children themselves.
103. We should support initiatives aimed at making juvenile justice more humane.
104. We can start small: for example, lower the age of majority to eighteen wherever it is higher.
I’ve disliked the idea of childhood since before I can remember (at least, if my mother is to be believed). I felt that people didn’t quite see me as a person — and I could never understand why everyone else was so okay with that.
John Holt’s book is about why this isn’t okay and what to do about it. I loved it for that—so much that I took notes on the entire book.
It's more of a vision of the world we'd like to see than an actual plan of action. Still, I think knowing exactly what we want is already very important.
It's a close, AI-assisted translation of my Russian summary. I've reviewed it, but I might have missed some wordplay or unnatural phrasing. The section headings follow Holt's chapter titles. I grouped the notes under them as seemed appropriate.
The Institution of Childhood
1. Childhood is a particular social institution, a legal regime involving a severe deprivation of most of the rights that in other cases are considered basic and inalienable.
2. Some people are comfortable with the way of life that childhood entails. Some are not. And this can change over time. Often, it is precisely this point of transition that comes with a large number of conflicts and problems. Because of this, those who were happiest in childhood can become especially unhappy when they are forbidden to leave it.
Childhood in History
3. The cultural idealisation of childhood largely serves to make everyone, or almost everyone, see it as a normal legal regime.
4. Childhood is a relatively recent invention, and it developed asymmetrically for the two sexes. Childhood for boys was invented earlier than childhood for girls.
[My addition: the tightening of the legal regime of childhood continues. Since the 1950s, children have, statistically speaking, been deprived of some of their freedom of movement.]
5. Mothers worked a lot. The modern ideal of motherhood is quite new.
[My addition: this is broadly true. A Nobel Prize in economics was recently awarded precisely for research in this area. The status of a housewife staying home with the children is a fairly short-lived phenomenon, genuinely widespread in twentieth-century America and the wealthy countries of Europe, and in Japan during the economic miracle. Essentially, it never really existed on a mass scale anywhere else.]
Source note: the Nobel reference is to Claudia Goldin's research on women's labour-market participation. It's not specifically about motherhood, but rather about women's participation in the labour market. Still, I think my interpretation is reasonable.
6. The invention of childhood is partly connected with the spatial separation of the "adult world" and "home". In the pre-industrial era, these worlds were in the same place and therefore naturally merged.
The Family and Its Purposes
7. Closed nuclear families generate some problems by their very structure. For example, competition between siblings for their parents' attention is, in effect, a consequence of being forbidden to seek attention from other older people: an adult's attention is scarce.
8. Modern childhood severely restricts the range of places children can go if something goes wrong. In practice, the options are limited to one home and the state. If something is bad at home, a child generally has nowhere to run.
The author expresses this with a line he quotes from Robert Frost:
Holt, chapter 4, "The Family and Its Purposes"; the line about home is his quotation of Robert Frost.
On the Loss of Authority of the Old
9. It would be a mistake to think that the older generation has lost its authority because it has been excessively soft.
10. In the author's time, a generation was growing up with a very particular perception of the future because of the threat of nuclear war. For example, he heard ten-year-olds talking about "if I grow up". He found that this was characteristic of those who regularly went through nuclear-alert drills at school.
Such children did not develop a sense that adults knew what they were doing. Consequently, they did not develop a sense that adults should be trusted to decide when they, the children, would be ready to take responsibility for running society.
The Burden of Having Children
11. The sight of children having fun annoys adults. Generally, they try to interrupt the fun. If we believe the author, people designing children's spaces in Britain recommended enclosing playgrounds and play areas with opaque fences, partly so that the sight of children having fun would not drive adults into a rage.
12. This probably happens because adults dislike spontaneity.
13. School, as the main site of control over children, expresses this hatred most strongly, suppressing spontaneity almost completely on its territory. Schools tend to be petty in setting rules.
14. Most adults want schools to be more punitive rather than freer.
One Use of Childhood
15. One important function of childhood is to give just about any adult an opportunity to acquire the right to control someone and impose their will on them.
16. With their own children, adults allow themselves a degree of rudeness in how they talk and pettiness in what they pick on that they would never allow themselves with anyone else.
On ‘Help’ and ‘Helpers’
17. The problem with the helping professions is that they attract people who want to play God.
[My comment: this is true. I wanted to, when I went into psychology.]
18. Because of this, the work of people in the helping professions often makes those receiving help more helpless.
The Competence of Children
19. Suppressing spontaneity suppresses curiosity.
20. Adults generally underestimate children's competence very severely.
21. The author gives an interesting case of a radio station run entirely by children under twelve. Anyone who turned thirteen had to leave the staff.
And it was a good radio station.
22. The author gives the case of a Japanese teacher who taught very young children to play the violin on a mass scale.
The teacher's thought was that a child of five or six has a fairly good command of a very complex structure: the Japanese language. Therefore, there is no fundamental difficulty for small children in learning complicated things. The problem is literally that children are not taught these things because people believe they are incompetent. Simply stop believing this, and you will already get progress.
23. Children's success can depend on what they—and the adults around them—believe they are capable of.
[Comment from my original notes: there is research supporting this. Children can learn more when their teachers believe they are capable of it.]
24. Children do not learn to their full potential, partly because nobody believes they can master the material, and partly because any possible use for it lies so far in the future—sometimes literally further away than the length of the child's life so far.
The Child as Love Object
25. The author tells a story about dwarfs.
Holt, chapter 11, "The Child as Love Object".
Quoted in full:
Holt, chapter 11, "The Child as Love Object".
The seventies being the seventies...
Another passage, quoted in full:
Holt, chapter 11, "The Child as Love Object".
The seventies being the seventies, x2.
26. Children often dislike being used as love objects. This is normal. This choice should be respected.
27. The author compares the objectification of children as objects of sentimental affection with the sexual objectification of women. In both cases, those doing the objectifying tend to form an ideology presenting the situation as though this is exactly what the person being objectified wants, generally regardless of that person's actual opinion.
28. It is right to love the qualities a child actually has, qualities you would value in people of any age.
On Seeing Children as ‘Cute’
29. We love some qualities in children because we lack them ourselves, and their presence in children allows adults to feel better and assert their superiority at the child's expense. Loving these qualities is not very good.
30. Promoting the idea that growing up means losing qualities we generally consider good may be a way for adults to defend themselves psychologically. They have lost qualities they should have done everything they could to preserve.
31. By instilling a cult of growing up in children, adults force children to give up generally positive qualities of personality.
32. Most sentimental notions of lost childhood are incorrect. Children are not happier because they are children. They are happier because of, say, greater energy, which adults diligently extinguish. In this sense, adults have made the loss of qualities that make people happy part of what they mean by "growing up". Calling this a good thing is primarily a form of psychological self-defence.
33. Growing up is not always decline and defeat. Experience of life does give you some good stuff.
34. Thinking better of children than they actually are is harmful to both adults and children.
35. Sentimentality is cruel in its very nature. If you treat a child like a kitten or a puppy, without the depth of regard you consider appropriate towards a human being, the child will feel it.
36. Children's suffering and problems often seem funny or cute to us. This attitude is cruel.
37. This leads to children's wishes and feelings being understood as "unreal", which means they can safely be sacrificed to adults' "real" wishes and feelings.
38. Children do not think of one another as cute. This allows them actually to see one another as people with real problems.
39.
Holt, chapter 12, "On Seeing Children as ‘Cute’".
40. The idea of children's innocence is strange. By "innocence", people usually mean a mixture of children's ignorance, trust and openness to the world.
Ignorance is a bad quality, and children themselves try to get rid of it. It is right to value the other two qualities in adults as well. These are generally good qualities. However, adults often believe that they should be outgrown.
41. Children do not see themselves as cute. When they cannot do something, it is genuinely difficult and unpleasant for them. It is respectful not to treat children's difficulties as something cute. A test would be the question: "Would I find this cute if an adult behaved this way?"
Most likely, difficulty walking or pronouncing words in a thirty-year-old would not inspire sentimental affection.
How Children Exploit Cuteness
42. Adults are frightened by children who behave intelligently, competently or effectively. Often, adults hate such children, consider them abnormal, and frequently wish trouble on them.
43. When a Japanese researcher demonstrated a widespread capacity among children to use typewriters, he received a barrage of indignant letters accusing him of cruelty. Adults want to see children as incompetent and do not want to see evidence to the contrary.
44. The phrase "let children be children", often used by defenders of childhood, is effectively a manifesto for enforced incompetence.
45. A child is not a "potential adult".
46. Babies do not behave "childishly" in the sense often meant by the word. They are, on the whole, extremely serious and straightforward within the modest needs and abilities they have.
Children often have to learn to behave childishly and be cute in order to live up to adults' expectations.
Love May Not Cure Everything
47. One possible reason for a school bully's behaviour may be an attempt to turn the tables. Having trouble figuring out how to farm adults' affection, he tries another strategy: make the adults come begging, wondering how to "fix" him.
In a sense, this resembles a rejected lover's fantasy of the beloved understanding everything, coming to plead, and being told: "No, you had your chance, now it's too late."
48.
Holt, chapter 14, "Love May Not Cure Everything".
What Children Need, We All Need
49. Children want to grow up for a reason. They would like to hear from their elders that things will get better, rather than that childhood is the best time of their lives.
50. Generally, people who say they want to work with children mean that they will be provided with an audience of children who cannot leave. Often, they have no answer to the question: "What do you have to offer that would make children come to you voluntarily?"
On the Use of the Word ‘Rights’
51. When the law says I have the right to vote, this does not mean I am obliged to vote. But it does mean that the law will take action against anyone who tries to stop me voting.
Another understanding of a right, say the right to free medical care, assumes that the state is obliged to provide me with medical care.
The conventionally proclaimed rights of children, such as the right to a loving family, fit neither of these versions: there is no body that could provide them. These statements are therefore, essentially, not rights.
52. A child should have the right to decide where to live.
53. A child should have the right to work. The author believes it is much harder to make sure children are given any work at all than to protect them from exploitation.
54. A child should have the right to vote.
55. These rights are interconnected. It is difficult to secure the right to vote without the right to work, because without the ability to earn money independently, the right to vote is essentially useless.
56. Children are people too, and human rights should apply to them. The right to vote should probably come first, to create political pressure for the rest.
The Right to Vote
57. On the whole, most of the time a person knows better than anyone else what they want.
58. In the long run, society pays more for its overseers than for the mistakes they are supposed to prevent.
59. Children will have to live with the consequences of government decisions for the longest, since they have the most years ahead of them in that country.
60. There follows a lot of discussion that makes sense for America about the opportunities and influence that the right to vote gives you, and about how to get it.
61. Adults, on average, understand politics no better than children, and there is little difference in how informed a ten-year-old's vote and a thirty-year-old's vote are.
62. After two years of the press chewing over Watergate, two thirds of Americans did not recognise the name, and half could not even say that there was any scandal at all when it was described to them.
The Right to Work
63. Most children in gangs left them once they had a chance to work.
64. The ban on children working is justified by saying that children do not want to work unless forced. This, in turn, is argued from children's reluctance to help with housework of their own accord: that is, to do stuff that literally nobody wants to do without pressing necessity. Nobody does housework with a smile.
For the most part, the work children do not want to do is work nobody wants to do.
65. A child's unwillingness to work in the way and at the time the parents want is not the same thing as the child's unwillingness to work at all.
66. The phrase "child labour" gives us flashbacks to the nightmares of the nineteenth century. But it is worth understanding that the work of an adult worker in those days was also a fairly nightmarish experience. There is no reason to expect child labour in the twenty-first century to be as nightmarish as in the nineteenth, given how much better adult work has become.
The Right to Own Property
67. Any extension of civil rights to children requires institutions through which children can defend themselves against the arbitrary power of parents or other adults.
68. Implementing the right to own property must somehow resolve the conflict between the child's right to own property and the right of the homeowner, parent or landlord, to refuse to have that item in the house.
The right to own or rent real estate solves this problem.
69. The question of drawing a line between the right of ownership and the right of use is complicated. For example, something given to a child as a gift is unequivocally theirs; furniture put in their room by their parents probably is not.
However, discussing this question makes little sense until the law recognises ownership of at least the obviously personal belongings.
My comment:
Although most of Holt's claims still seem radical, in fact some of the path he proposed has been travelled.
For example, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted in 1989. It is important not only, and not so much, for its contents as for the fact that children were, in general, recognised as having some serious civil rights.
In practice, the Convention is more a statement of aspirations than a description of reality. Take Article 12, probably the most valuable article in the whole Convention: it says that the child's opinion should be taken into account in matters concerning them, in accordance with their maturity. The Committee's interpretation also makes clear that children do not have to prove their capacity in advance. In practice, it is ignored, because deciding on maturity is left to adults who have an interest in underestimating it.
Certain institutions have also begun to take shape, though again in a distorted form: these are institutions for protecting children, rather than institutions through which children can protect themselves. Agency remains with adults; this time, simply, with officials instead of parents.
Meanwhile, children's everyday freedom is rapidly shrinking. Since Holt's time, that small scrap of freedom of movement, the "right" to get to school independently, fell nearly tenfold in the English surveys: from roughly 80% of seven- and eight-year-olds in 1971 to roughly 9% in 1990.
On the whole, progress towards children's liberation is stalling, and the project is turning into a kind of animal welfare: "Take their interests into account without giving them the right to defend those interests."
Put simply, instead of a punishing master, children have acquired a merciful master. This is progress, but nowhere near enough.
The Right to Travel
70. Children are generally the first to try to make peace in a conflict. Digging in and being spiteful in response to this offer, demanding deeper repentance, is bad.
The Right to Choose One’s Guardian
71. Children should be given the right to choose their own guardians.
72. Parents do not necessarily like their own children best. Sometimes they like other people's children better. The same goes for children's attitudes towards parents. The right to choose a guardian would reduce this tension by letting children and adults freely choose different family arrangements.
73. It would be cool to set up children's homes that children could choose to live in.
74. Many experimental schools are, in effect, such homes, and do school stuff simply because creating children's communities and residences is forbidden unless they are schools.
75. For example, the well-known Summerhill was, in effect, a children's community. Summerhill's founder said that it had to be a school at least on the surface, because otherwise children's communities were forbidden.
76. The state should not run children's communities. Certification kills any attempts at freedom. Instead, the state could give money to people building self-governing communities.
The Right to a Guaranteed Income
77. UBI is cool.
The Right to Legal and Financial Responsibility
78. On the whole, the law is harsher towards children than towards adults.
79. The author gives the case of a girl sentenced to reform school for being ungovernable. This meant that she constantly disobeyed her parents: specifically, she talked to boys, which she had been forbidden to do. Holt proposes putting children's right to talk to anyone they like into law, and stresses that such a case could not, in principle, exist for an adult.
80. The author gives the case of a six-year-old boy removed from his birth family. His parents appealed and secured his return. The child vehemently protested against being returned to his birth family. Nobody listened to him. Four weeks later, his father beat him to death. Holt points out that children's opinions should be listened to without ranking them as "mature enough" and "not mature enough": this could prevent such cases.
81. Here are some reasons for which children can be punished: insolence, disobedience, disrespect, moving about without permission, keeping secrets, talking without permission. Slaves in America were punished for the same reasons.
82. Abuse within the family is the most common cause of violent child deaths.
83. Generally, a child has no difficulty telling people who are malicious and cruel towards them from kind people; this is especially noticeable with teachers. The idea that a cruel teacher is actually acting in the child's best interests is a strange myth from the adult world. Adults themselves generally avoid such teachers and such kindness.
84. Children really are deprived of their liberty for things like "talking to boys".
85. Children are sometimes placed in correctional institutions for offences for which adults would not even be given community service.
The Right to Control One’s Learning
86. Children should have the right to control their education.
87. Of all American institutions, school is probably the most authoritarian. School is the only institution that everyone is required to attend at some point in life, and it can use state coercion against those who refuse.
88. School probably gives one person the greatest amount of power over another of any American institution. Even in the army, a soldier has more free time not spent under the immediate supervision of someone in power.
89. School can use a very wide range of interventions, up to pumping someone full of drugs for disobedience.
Holt, chapter 24, "The Right to Control One’s Learning".
[My note: here Holt criticises the practice, current in his time, of prescribing amphetamine and methylphenidate to children who were persistently inattentive at school. Methylphenidate is still used. You may know it as Ritalin.]
90. A child should have the right not to take part in all this if they do not want to.
The Right to Use Drugs
91. The right to use legal drugs, such as coffee, tobacco and alcohol, should be extended to children.
92. One argument for this is that it would reduce the sense of mystery and secrecy around these things as "rituals of the adult world", which could potentially reduce young people's interest in the subject.
The Right to Drive
93. Children should be given the right to drive a car if they can pass the driving test.
The Law, the Young and Sex
94. We should stop treating the very idea that children have a sexuality as taboo.
95. Early pregnancy is bad.
96. The question of sexual freedom for legally emancipated minors is straightforward, but it is more complicated for those who remain dependent on their parents. Either way, the legislation concerning sex in Holt's time was so harsh that there was still a lot to repeal before reaching the point where things became debatable.
97. Compensating for harsh laws with lax enforcement is bad practice. If a law is usually not enforced and everyone thinks it normal not to enforce it, the law should be repealed.
98. On the whole, the state should probably stay out of people's sex lives regardless of their age.
Steps to Take
99. One strategy for reaching the desired world is to keep trying to live as though you are already in that world.
100. You can treat children as people with rights, even if the state does not yet recognise those rights.
101. Over time, the child themselves should control an increasing share of the money you are prepared to spend on them.
102. We should support initiatives that weaken the child's total subordination to the institution of school. Ideally, it would be good to have a full alternative to school that the child could choose independently.
This would benefit schools by creating competition for children, and benefit the children themselves.
103. We should support initiatives aimed at making juvenile justice more humane.
104. We can start small: for example, lower the age of majority to eighteen wherever it is higher.
105. The end.