Children - The Last Prejudice
By: Martin Thaulow
Tags: Human Rights, Parenting, Discrimination, Education, Education Reform

I consider compulsory education to be a settled ethical question (see here, here and here), and an obvious violation of the human right to freedom. What I’m interested in now is what a commitment to freedom looks like for parents.

I have a four-year-old daughter, and a few weeks ago she had a tantrum. We were visiting family, and I came into the living room to find her crying, prostrate on the floor for no apparent reason. Three people were trying to play a board game above the noise, which kinda stressed me out. Knowing that she was unwell and hadn’t slept enough that night, I softly asked what was wrong. She responded with a furious scream. Oh well. I told her we had to go to our bedroom, so we didn’t disturb the others. Another scream. I said I could carry her or she could walk herself. Another scream. Stressed out, I picked her up and carried the thrashing little body to our room, where she started hyperventilating, biting and throwing things around. In the end, I saw no other option than to physically restrain her until she calmed down, and I never got around to asking her why she’d been crying. Guess I won’t be Father of the Year.

Other parents will smile knowingly at this story and assure me this is just the reality of life with small children. Kids don’t know or care what’s OK and what isn’t, and their reactions are way out of proportion with the actual causes, so it’s my job as a parent to use force from time to time. The alternative is to let the little devils ruin everyone’s time whenever they feel like it, which may turn out to be quite often. But note that if my crying daughter were an adult, even an unreasonable and inconsiderate one, she’d be surrounded by concerned adults before I even entered the room. The furious response to my question would have been proof that something truly horrible had happened, and me carrying her from the room to avoid disturbing a board game would seem very cold-hearted.

This differential treatment is not entirely unreasonable given that she reacted similarly just an hour earlier when I refused to let her play “Royal Puppy Costume Party" on my phone. But operating with a separate moral benchmark for children is a slippery slope, with the risk of ignoring real hurt and even trauma. Carrying my daughter from the room in that situation was as immoral as it would have been if she had been an adult, and yet I expect to do similar things in the future. This is not me performing some paternal struggle-session; I just want to point out how common hypocrisy actually is.

One of the most widespread problems in everyday moral deliberation is the failure to separate theory and practice. Our culture implicitly assumes that hypocrisy is a rare exception to the norm, and this delusion seriously hampers moral discourse. It is apparently clever or productive to point out that someone, somewhere, has failed to act in accordance with their stated ethics, even though we know very well that our actual decision making takes the form of a narrow, real-time, means/ends arithmetic that is evaluated only in hindsight, if at all. And it’s in hindsight that the real damage happens, as people assume that since they acted in a certain way it must have been in accordance with their ethics, prompting an all-to-familiar exercise in post hoc justification. And through it all, we know that the hypocrite has the wrong actions, not necessarily the wrong stated beliefs. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an early champion of children’s rights, famously abandoned his children. Luckily, he did not flinch from his own hypocrisy (which he must have been aware of) when putting pen to paper — and nor will I.

So, what should I have done with my daughter? The boring answer is that I don’t — can’t — know. Maybe there existed a string of words that, when uttered just so, would have convinced her to come with me to our room, or caused her to stop screaming, or brought about some other resolution of the situation. This is what makes ethics so hard in practice, and so fascinating: Out of a billion possible actions, I only got to choose one, and then I’m left wondering if there might have been some better way to go about it. The answer is always “yes”. Given enough time I could compose a list of a hundred candidates for dealing with my crying daughter. The lesson of the story is that my lack of time, energy and imagination is a bigger problem than my daughter’s lack of restraint. Furthermore, time and energy will be in short supply from time to time, making it quite likely that I’ll resort to coercive means again. So I’m careful about condemning both myself and others for dealing with life’s curveballs in less than perfect ways. Most of us try our best. But at the same time, I insist on a moral responsibility to entertain the possibility that we could and should have acted better (a responsibility that we may, in turn, fail to meet). It’s about seeking improvement, not perfection.

Accepting hypocrisy is part of fallibilism in the broad sense — the view that mistakes are unavoidable. Without this framework, the injunction to take children seriously sounds like a harsh and personal condemnation to many parents, and it will continue to meet derision. In my experience, freedom for children meets the most haughty opposition from teachers and parents, which some might take as proof that the idea is ludicrous. After all, who is better placed to judge ideas about children than those who spend their days dealing with them? But that’s like declaring the fox a chicken-expert. Most people who deal with children on a daily basis tend to be elbows deep in the coercion business, mandated by law or binding contracts to ensure that kids don’t get to decide for themselves. I’m not saying this to dunk on parents and teachers (I happen to be both), but it’s a reminder that authority does not come from experience.

A disclaimer: I’m not arguing for some cult of endless introspection and self-flagellation. I’m not even arguing that parents should work to change the way they act (because if the theories we operate on are not good enough, that will backfire, hard). I’m just trying to push a simple proposition: that children are people, just like you and me, and that they should have the right to pursue their interests in life — even if the interest in question seems stupid. This position is hard to maintain without fallibilism though. If it is true that we know that some skills will be absolutely essential in the year 2040, then it would make sense to “ensure” that children possess them. Fallibilists know that we can’t know or ensure any such thing. We can’t know the future. Our children will do what is fun, and if there is no employer in need of the skills they acquire (unlikely as that actually is), they may create their own jobs. This is a far more realistic stance than the staggering underappreciation of both human variance and economic opportunity represented by our education system.

But should children be able to vote? Well, I am not advocating that children should be granted the full range of rights and duties of adults. I obviously don’t want my daughter to have the legal right to vote, free movement, or to give sexual consent. Nor should she have to defend her country. Children can’t be equal citizens. But they should be equal humans, meaning that their intelligence and moral status should be respected. In many ways, a kid should be thought of as an adult immigrant from a strange country, who is not yet a citizen, but whose strange ways should be assumed to be rational in light of his knowledge and predilections. I believe decent people would seek to give such immigrants freedom to explore the physical and social world on their own terms, and hope that they would consider 10 years of surveillance and mandatory instruction a violation of the most fundamental human rights.

It’s interesting how adults can be astounded by what children can do, again and again, without ever questioning their assumptions about what children can and can’t do. The only reason to be incredulous that a child is able to play high-level chess, or beautiful jazz music, is the assumption that they’re stupid. We should have the opposite assumption and be shocked by how little most children learn — especially in school. And that may be the most important reason for making damn sure we’re not fooling ourselves about this: If it makes you sad to think about the squandered opportunities of women throughout history, the mere chance that we may be doing the same to all humans at the most attentive and creative phase of their life ought to give you sleepless nights.

Further reading: The Taking Children Seriously web page has some wonderful food for thought on this issue. I’m not as familiar with the philosophy as I perhaps should be, but TCS is a very lonely voice for compassion on an issue that is largely ignored. That alone is a good reason to investigate the matter further — if you haven’t already.