The case for the greatest possible freedom in education is a very strong one. To begin with, absence of freedom involves conflicts with adults, which frequently have a much more profound psychological effect than was realized until very recently. The child who is in any way coerced tends to respond with hatred, and if, as is usual, he is not able to give free vent to his hatred, it festers inwardly, and may sink into the unconscious with all kinds of strange consequences throughout the rest of life. … Or again, hatred of the authorities who oppress the child may become transferred into a desire to inflict equal oppression later upon the next generation. Or there may be merely a general moroseness, making pleasant social and personal relations impossible. I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: ‘The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.’ In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
Another effect of compulsion in education is that it destroys originality and intellectual interest. Desire for knowledge, at any rate for a good deal of knowledge, is natural to the young, but is generally destroyed by the fact that they are given more than they desire or can assimilate. Children who are forced to eat acquire a loathing for food, and children who are forced to learn acquire a loathing for knowledge. … A great many of these troubles are avoided by making lessons voluntary. There is no longer friction between teacher and pupil, and in a fairly large proportion of cases the pupils consider the knowledge imparted by the teacher worth having. Their initiative is not destroyed, because it is by their own choice that they learn, and they do not accumulate masses of undigested hate to lie festering in the unconscious throughout the rest of life. [Bertrand Russell, Education and the Social Order, 1932, Routledge Classics, 2009, pp. 17-18]
In all respects, reliance upon [coerced] attention … is a wasteful method, bringing bad temper and nervous wear and tear as well as imperfect result. The teacher who can get along by keeping spontaneous interest excited must be regarded as the teacher with the greatest skill. [William James, “Talks to Teachers,” 1882, William James: Writings 1878-1899, Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1992, p. 773]
There is little joy in most of the learning [students] are now compelled to do. … Without some joy in learning … basic schooling cannot initiate the young into the life of learning, let alone give them the skill and incentive to engage in it further. Only the student whose mind has been engaged in thinking for itself is an active participant in the learning process that is essential to basic schooling. [Mortimer J. Adler, The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto, 1982, Touchstone / Simon & Schuster, 1998, p. 32]
Experience has persuaded me, somewhat to my surprise, that it is possible to give adequate instruction, and to produce highly educated human beings, without imposing any obligation to be present at lessons. To do this requires a combination of circumstances which is not at present possible on a large scale. It requires among adults a genuine and spontaneous interest in intellectual pursuits. It requires small classes. It requires sympathy and tact and skill in the teacher. And it requires an environment in which it is possible to turn a child out of a class and tell him to go and play, if he wishes to be in class solely for the purpose of creating a disturbance. It will be a long time before these conditions can be realized in ordinary school, and therefore, for the present, compulsory attendance in class is likely to be necessary in the great majority of cases. [Bertrand Russell, Education and the Social Order, 1932, Routledge Classics, 2009, p. 24]
If s-chools, doing places for children, are honest, active, and interesting enough, they will not need to be compulsory; as long as they are compulsory, they don’t need to be good, and most of them will not be. [John Holt, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better, 1976, Sentient, 2004, p. 208]
The crisis in public education, like the hastening dissolution of other of our social institutions, creates anxiety and doubt, and we respond as anxious people do: we try to impose order by force, imagining that if we can obliterate the symptoms, we will have cured the disease. We speak increasingly of control, as if we feared that everything would collapse into nothing if we let loose our (illusory) hold on things. And so I have been urging one simple truth through all these pages: that the educational function does not rest upon our ability to control, or our will to instruct, but upon our human nature and the nature of experience. [George Dennison, The Lives of Children: The Story of the First Street School, 1969, Vintage / Random House, 1970, p. 246]
I readily concede that a great deal of first-rate education goes on in our government school systems; but I must insist that the first-rate production is in spite of, not because of, the coercive or governmental aspects. Untold millions of teachers and students, in many of their day-to-day relationships, are on a voluntary, not a coercive basis; to a large extent the students are selecting their teachers. But wherever coercion insinuates itself into schooling—that is, the upbringing process—be it government or private, an imbalance of know-how and wisdom will become evident. Wisdom will decrease, not increase, when the reliance is on duplication by force; wisdom cannot be grafted onto a carbon copy. [Leonard Read, Anything That’s Peaceful: The Case for the Free Market, Foundation for Economic Education, 1964, p. 203]
To … make active, competent, and initiating citizens who can produce a community culture and a noble recreation, we need a very different education than the schooling that we have been getting. …
On the whole, the education must be voluntary rather than compulsory, for no growth to freedom occurs except by intrinsic motivation. [Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education and The Community of Scholars, Vintage / Random House, 1964, pp. 61-62]
Contrasting the means to be employed [coercion] with the work to be done [character formation], we are at once struck with their utter unfitness. Instead of creating a new internal state which shall exhibit itself in better deeds, coercion can manifestly do nothing but forcibly mold externals into a coarse semblance of such a state. In the family, as in society, it can simply restrain; it cannot educate. … As someone has well said, the utmost that severity can do is make hypocrites; it can never make converts. [Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, 1851] quoted by [Sheldon Richman, Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families, Future of Freedom Foundation, 1995, p. 59]
We must stop looking for some new use of force every time we encounter something that upsets us or arouses our pity. [Nathaniel Branden, Taking Responsibility: Self-Reliance and the Accountable Life, 1996, Fireside / Simon & Schuster, 1997, pp. 214-215]
We should also think about how an act of control is exercised: Do we justify it with a reasonable explanation? … Do we pause to ask whether what we are getting the child to do (or stop doing) is really necessary? Are we thinking about how best to help the child become a responsible person (as opposed to just how to get her to obey)? …
Some who support more coercive strategies assume that children will run wild if they are not controlled. However, the children for whom this is true typically turn out to be those accustomed to being controlled—those who are not trusted, given explanations, encouraged to think for themselves, helped to develop and internalize good values, and so on. Control breeds the need for more control, which then is used to justify the use of control. [Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes, Houghton Mifflin, 1993, p. 33]
Nothing interferes more with our freely turning toward the light we choose than to be coercively turned toward someone else’s choice of lights. … The compulsion directing American “education” today accounts for the dearth of voluntary turning and leaves the false impression that freely turning toward the light has no vitality and, thus, could not be relied upon. But, is it not true that you, whoever you are, trust yourself in this respect? Then, why not trust others?
Assuming no compulsions, every person above the moronic level would freely seek those lights befitting his unique requirements. One couldn’t live unless he did so; and the will to survive is strong within all of us. [Leonard Read, The Coming Aristocracy, Foundation for Economic Education, 1969, pp. 122-124]
It is truly amazing, as pointed up by our findings, that if people are ongoingly treated as if they were either passive mechanisms or barbarians needing to be controlled, they will begin to act more and more that way. As they are controlled, for example, they are likely to act more and more as if they need to be controlled. That fact has led some commentators to conclude that society should use more controls. It has led to the call for greater discipline, for more heavy handedness. But ironically, it should call for just the opposite. This phenomenon behooves us to insist even more emphatically that it is time to stop looking for the easy answers contained in the reliance on control and instead to start employing more autonomy-supportive approaches. [Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste, Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation, Penguin, 1996, pp. 83-84]
To me the worst thing seems to be for a school principally to work with methods of fear, force, and artificial authority. Such treatment destroys the sound sentiments, the sincerity, and the self-confidence of the pupil. It produces the submissive subject. … It is comparatively simple to keep the school free from this worst of all evils. Give into the power of the teacher the fewest possible coercive measures, so that the only source of the pupil’s respect for the teacher is the human and intellectual qualities of the latter. …
What can be done that this spirit be gained in the school? … First, teachers should grow up in such schools. Second, the teacher should be given extensive liberty in the selection of the material to be taught and the methods of teaching employed by him. For it is true also of him that pleasure in the shaping of his work is killed by force and exterior pressure. [Albert Einstein, “On Education,” 1936, Ideas and Opinions, Three Rivers, 1982, pp. 61-63]
What most concerns me [are] … the things that S-chools teach simply by the fact of being S-chools, of having the power to compel children to attend, to tell them what to learn, and to grade, rank, and label them. …
The first message that S-chools, like any other compulsory institution, send to the people who attend them is a message of distrust and contempt: If we didn’t make you come here you wouldn’t learn anything, you’d just waste your time, … never do anything worthwhile, grow up to be a bum. …
Along with these messages … goes this one: … If you want to learn something of any importance, you must get it from a teacher, in a school. From this it follows that understanding is not an activity but a thing, a commodity. It is not something you do or make for yourself, but something you get. It is scarce, valuable, and expensive. [John Holt, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better, 1976, Sentient, 2004, pp. 171-172]
If we do not challenge the assumption that valuable knowledge is a commodity which under certain circumstances may be forced into the consumer, society will be increasingly dominated by sinister pseudo schools and totalitarian managers of information. Pedagogical therapists will drug their pupils more in order to teach them better, and students will drug themselves more to gain relief from the pressures of teachers and the race for certificates. [Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, Harper & Row, 1971, pp. 71-72]
[N]o kingdom can maintain itself by force alone. Force does not work the way its advocates seem to think it does. It does not, for example, reveal to the victim the strength of his adversary. On the contrary, it reveals the weakness, even the panic of his adversary … [James Baldwin, No Name in the Street, 1973]
[T]he whole issue [of compulsory attendance], as we know it in this country, testifies to a really peculiar anxiety and lack of faith on the part of adults. Would children really abandon school if they were no longer compelled to attend? Or, more properly, would the acquisition of skills and knowledge and the participation in large-scale social life with their peers suddenly lose all attractiveness? The idea of school—not perhaps in its present bureaucratized form—is one of the most powerful social inventions that we possess. It rests squarely on the deepest of necessities and draws on motives we could not disavow even if we wished to. Teaching is one of the few natural functions of adults. Vis-à-vis the young, we simply cannot escape it. Too, our legitimate demand of the young—that in one style or another they be worthy inheritors of our world—is deeply respected by the young themselves. They form their notions of selfhood, individual pride, citizenship, etc., in precisely the terms that we put forward, converting our demands into goals and even into ideas of glory. I cannot believe all this is so feeble that we need to rest the function of education upon acts of compulsion, with all the damage this entails.
If compulsion is damaging and unwise, its antithesis—a vacuum of free choice—is unreal. And in fact we cannot deal with the problem in these terms, for the real question is not, What shall we do about classes? but, What shall we do about our relationships with the young? How shall we deepen them, enliven them, make them freer, more amiable, and at the same time more serious? How shall we broaden the area of mutual experience? If these things can be done, the question of school attendance, or classroom attendance, will take a simpler and more logical form, will lie closer to the fact that classroom instruction is, after all, a method (one among many) and deserves to be criticized in terms of its efficiency. It is not the be-all and end-an of a child’s existence. [George Dennison, The Lives of Children: The Story of the First Street School, 1969, Vintage / Random House, 1970, pp. 109-111]
If education is not to go on making adolescents “mass” more and more thoroughly and destructively, the young and the schools must be given a wider range of alternatives with respect to one another. The young must not be compelled to submit to year after year of education that denatures them. The schools must not be compelled to accommodate the hordes of youngsters unqualified by earlier experience to participate in its specialized educational functions, and to permit them to disrupt those functions for which they are unqualified and in which they see no value. The young must not be worn into submission, during their most vulnerable and crucial years of growth, to the ignoble view of life that dominates the schools. They must not be constrained to relinquish the precise and significant image of themselves that can only be developed when personal experience is privately explored under conditions of trust and intimacy.
Basically, then, I disapprove of compulsory school attendance in itself. I see no valid moral reason to single out the young for this special legal encumbrance. The economic reasons are compelling enough; but they are likewise contemptible. A people have no right to cling to economic arrangements that can be made halfway workable only by imposing an infantile and unproductive status on adolescents and indoctrinating them with a need for trashy goods and shallow, meretricious relationships that they know to be degrading. There are social reasons, too; the family has lost many of its functions through adaptation to social change and now has no more place for its young than any other social institution has and no real basis for dealing with them. If the children were not in school, many parents would go mad; and the schools, for all their defects, are more orderly and safer places, with a little more care and better food, than many homes.
Nevertheless, I find it odd that children should be confined because adults are incompetent to design, or too grossly impaired emotionally to accept and operate, a society that works. It is, I would very strongly stress, the compulsory feature alone that I object to. Public education, in the sense of a system of public supported schools open without charge to any student who wishes to attend them, is not a debatable issue. …
Should the young be compelled to go to any school at all? I should prefer that they be left free; that youth be provided with a wealth of diverse opportunities for employment and self-employment, with school attendance prominent among them and left to work out their own arrangements to meet their own needs with the assurance of a reasonable level of state support—both financial and in the form of services of trained personnel available to give solicited advice. [Edgar Z. Friedenberg, Coming of Age in America: Growth and Acquiescence, Vintage / Random House, 1965, pp. 248-251]
Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside. [Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, Simon & Schuster, 1987, p. 249]
“But what will happen to the students if they don’t go to school?” “How will they learn?” …
Even while asking [such questions] teachers reveal their unconscious and contaminating attitudes. They can no longer imagine what children will do “outside” schools. They regard them as young monsters who will, if released from adult authority or help, disrupt the order of things. What is more, adults no longer are capable of imagining learning or child-adult relationships outside the schools. [Peter Marin, “The Open Truth and Fiery Vehemence of Youth,” 1969, The Cosmos Reader, edited by Edgar Z. Friedenberg et al., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971, p. 812]
The heart of the deception rests on a single, well-constructed lie: the pretense of free choice within a managed framework of “alternative” ideas. This point lies right at the heart of the effectiveness of public school. It does not lock up children in a diplomatic compound unless we can induce them to believe that they are living in an ordinary structure—and, still more important, that they live there by their own free will. There must be the illusion of free options. There must be, too, a certain area of seemingly free motions. The compound must not seem to be a compound. The quarantine must appear to be no quarantine at all, but only a convenient form of tactful disaffiliation from unpleasant matters in the outside world. The prison must not seem to be a prison if it is to do the prison job correctly. [Jonathan Kozol, The Night is Dark and I Am Far From Home, Houghton Mifflin, 1975, p. 96]
To discuss this matter clearly we must first understand the nature of freedom; and to do this we must differentiate between overt authority and anonymous authority. Overt authority is exercised directly and explicitly. The person in authority frankly tells the one who is subject to him, “You must do this. If you do not, certain sanctions will be applied against you.” Anonymous authority tends to hide that force is being used. Anonymous authority pretends that there is no authority, that all is done with the consent of the individual. While the teacher of the past said to Johnny, “You must do this. If you don’t, I’ll punish you”; today’s teacher says, “I’m sure you’ll like to do this.” Here, the sanction for disobedience is not corporal punishment, but the suffering face of the parent, or what is worse, conveying the feeling of not being “adjusted,” of not acting as the crowd acts. Overt authority used physical force; anonymous authority employs psychic manipulation. [Erich Fromm, Foreword, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, by A. S. Neill, Hart, 1960, https://archive.org/details/Summerhill-English-A.S.Neill]
[F]ear of failure is the pulse of school life. Remove the fear of failure and education in America would stop as if its heart had been cut out. [Jules Henry, Jules Henry on Education, Vintage / Random House, 1972, p. 11]
Most S-chools do not want people in them who deal with their students on a basis of natural authority—trust, affection, and genuine respect—rather than fear. A teacher who does not use fear and does not need to use it, who makes his students less afraid, and so makes them harder for others to make afraid, threatens every other teacher in the S-chool. [John Holt, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better, 1976, Sentient, 2004, pp. 205-206]
It is not that authority has disappeared, nor even that it has lost in strength, but that it has been transformed from the overt authority of force to the anonymous authority of persuasion and suggestion. In other words, in order to be adaptable, modern man is obliged to nourish the illusion that everything is done with his consent, even though such consent be extracted from him by subtle manipulation. His consent is obtained, as it were, behind his back, or behind his consciousness. The same artifices are employed in progressive education. The child is forced to swallow the pill, but the pill is given a sugar coating. Parents and teachers have confused true non-authoritarian education with education by means of persuasion and hidden coercion. Progressive education has been thus debased. It has failed to become what it was intended to be and has never developed as it was meant to. [Erich Fromm, Foreword, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, by A. S. Neill, Hart, 1960, https://archive.org/details/Summerhill-English-A.S.Neill]
One of the most common approaches to discipline in modern society involves making the provision of love, acceptance, and esteem contingent upon people’s behaving in certain ways. This withdrawal-of-love approach underlies one of the tragic aspects of life; namely that in many circumstances autonomy and relatedness are turned against each other by people in one-up positions. … [T]he social world can capitalize on people’s vulnerability to being controlled—to having their autonomy robbed—by their need to be related to others. [Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste, Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation, Penguin, 1996, p. 112]
If we want our students to trust that we care for them, then we need to display our affection without demanding that they behave or perform in certain ways in return. It’s not that we don’t want and expect certain behaviors; we do. But our concern or affection does not depend on it. [Marilyn Watson, Learning to Trust, 2003] quoted by [Alfie Kohn, Feel-Bad Education: And Other Contrarian Essays on Children and Schooling, Beacon, 2011, p. 118]
So far the children are everywhere sent to school by force, while parents are compelled to send their children to school by the severity of the law, or by cunning, or by offering them advantages, whereas the masses everywhere study of their own accord and regard education as good.
How is this? The need of education lies in every man; the people love and seek education, as they love and seek the air for breathing; the government and society burn with the desire to educate the masses, and yet, notwithstanding all the force of cunning and the persistency of governments and societies, the masses constantly manifest their dissatisfaction with the education which is offered to them, and step by step submit only to force.
As at every conflict, so also here, it was necessary to solve the question: What is more lawful, the resistance, or the action itself? Must the resistance be broken, or the action be changed?
So far, as may be seen from history, the question has been solved in favour of the state and the educating society. The resistance has been acknowledged to be unlawful, men seeing in it the principle of evil inherent in man, and so … the state has made use of force and cunning in order to annihilate the people’s resistance. [Leo Tolstoy, “On Popular Education,” 1862, Tolstoy On Education, U of Chicago P, 1967, p. 5]
The compulsory structure of the school excludes the possibility of all progress. [Leo Tolstoy, “On Popular Education,” 1862, Tolstoy On Education, U of Chicago P, 1967, p. 18]
Compulsory education is the chink in the armor of American capitalism. We are expected to value initiative and contract, but base our educational system on conformity and compulsion. [Thomas Szasz, Words to the Wise, Transaction, 2004, p. 40]
Sensitivity can never be awakened through compulsion. One may compel a child to be outwardly quiet, but one has not come face to face with that which is making him obstinate, impudent, and so on. Compulsion breeds antagonism and fear. Reward and punishment in any form only make the mind subservient and dull; and if this is what we desire, then education through compulsion is an excellent way to proceed.
But such education cannot help us to understand the child, nor can it build a right social environment in which separatism and hatred will cease to exist. In the love of the child, right education is implied. But most of us do not love our children; we are ambitious for them—which means that we are ambitious for ourselves. [Jiddu Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life, HarperCollins, 1953, pp. 31-32]
We seem to think that freedom is an ultimate end, a goal, and that in order to become free we must first submit ourselves to various forms of suppression and intimidation. We hope to achieve freedom through conformity; but are not the means as important as the end? Do not the means shape the end?
To have peace, one must employ peaceful means; for if the means are violent, how can the end be peaceful? If the end is freedom, the beginning must be free, for the end and the beginning are one. There can be self-knowledge and intelligence only when there is freedom at the very outset … [Jiddu Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life, HarperCollins, 1953, p. 59]
Imagine: We will insure freedom to “the people” by denying freedom to them in education, for if their education is entrusted to freedom they will remain uneducated and, thus, will not be able to enjoy the blessings of freedom! Illogical? How can we ever expect a people brought up on coercion to be free of demigod mentalities? Does a coercive educational system have the intellectual soil and climate where freedom and wisdom may flourish? The answers lie all about us. [Leonard Read, Anything That’s Peaceful: The Case for the Free Market, Foundation for Economic Education, 1964, pp. 205-206]
What is the goal of parenting? It’s to help a child grow up to be a decent human being, a mensch, a person with compassion, commitment, and caring. How does one go about humanizing a child? Only by using humane methods, by recognizing that the process is the method, that ends do not justify the means, and that in our attempt to be effective in getting children to behave, we do not damage them emotionally. [Haim Ginott, Between Parent and Child, 1965, Three Rivers, 2003, p. 192]
[M]any teachers believe in the “spinach theory” approach. This approach can be roughly summarized as, “Although they do not want to eat spinach now, if I force them to eat it they will come in time to appreciate my making them eat it.”
I am concerned about this type of thinking for two reasons. First, I question how many people do end up liking the “spinach” when introduced to it in this way. For every one anecdote I hear teachers relating about the students coming to like “spinach,” I hear ten students relating how much they hated their teachers for forcing it on them.
Secondly, even if more students did learn to like “spinach” being introduced to it in this way, I would still be concerned that they might learn from the teacher’s behavior that if you believe strongly about something, it is all right to “force it on someone else for his own good.” I have seen too much damage come from such thinking to want to see it perpetuated in our educational institutions. [Marshal Rosenberg, Life-Enriching Education: Nonviolent Communication Helps Schools Improve Performance, Reduce Conflict, and Enhance Relationships, Puddle Dancer, 2003, pp. 71-72]
What’s Orwellian about the status quo? Most fundamentally, the idea of compulsory enlightenment. Educators routinely defend compulsion on the ground that few students want to explore ideas and culture. They’re right about the students’ tastes but forget a deeper truth: intrinsically valuable education requires eager students. Mandatory study of ideas and culture spoils the journey. …
Regimentation may be a good way to mold external behavior, but it’s a bad way to win hearts and minds—and a terrible way to foster thoughtful commitment. …
Even top students respond to incentivized soulcraft by gaming the system, not reforming their priorities. … When schools require enlightenment, students predictably respond by feigning interest in ideas and culture, giving educators a false sense of accomplishment. …
The rise of the Internet undercuts the Machiavellian line that intellectual force-feeding ultimately blossoms into sincere appreciation. Today’s adults are the product of over a decade of mandatory exposure to abstract ideas and high culture. If educational force-feeding worked well, most educated adults would adore these nerdy realms—and eagerly tap the Internet to revisit them. To understate, they rarely do. …
[T]he Internet proves low consumption of ideas and culture stems from apathy, not poverty or inconvenience. [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, pp. 260-261, 242]
Force-feeding ideas and culture to recalcitrant youths often sparks resentment rather than appreciation. …
“What alternative is there?”
Patience. Young philistines have a lifetime to reconsider their intellectual apathy.
“That’s wishful thinking.”
When free machines provide instant access to the totality of human knowledge, humanists should count their blessings. The life of the mind is now open to all. I’m not convinced that mandatory enlightenment ever made sense, but either way, it’s obsolete. [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, p. 284]
Trying to force students to learn or threatening to punish them if they don’t learn inevitably has the opposite effect from what you want to achieve, no matter how much pressure your teaching responsibilities put upon you.
It would be better if you could regard your job (if the official theory of learning would allow you to do so) not as the instructor who organizes the learning that students are supposed to do but as the guide who makes what we would like students to learn interesting, comprehensible, and accessible. This won’t always be easy, it won’t always be done on time, and sometimes it may be impossible to do at all. This is reality, whatever approach you take to learning. But there will be much less frustration, despair, and resentment on all sides even if your efforts to involve individuals in particular activities fail than if you try to enforce learning with exercises, drills, tests, slogans, and discriminatory labels. [Frank Smith, The Book of Learning and Forgetting, Teachers College, 1998, p. 80]
Many teachers feel helpless when told not to motivate students using punishment, reward, guilt, or shame, or a sense of obligation to duty. What’s left, they ask? What is left are connections between people and a desire to contribute to one’s own self-fulfillment and the well-being of others. [Marshal Rosenberg, Life-Enriching Education: Nonviolent Communication Helps Schools Improve Performance, Reduce Conflict, and Enhance Relationships, Puddle Dancer, 2003, pp. 112-113]
This is the whole point of Neill’s Summerhill, that the discovery of one’s own subjective freedom can occur only in the freest possible learning circumstances. Moreover, freedom is the only medium in which the I-Thou relation can develop; it is the only vehicle in which genuine communion, in Buber’s word, can be effected between teacher and learner.
“Freedom is the vibrating needle, the fruitful zero. Compulsion in education means disunion, it means humiliation and rebelliousness. Communion in education … means being opened up and drawn in. Freedom in education is the possibility of communion; it cannot be dispensed with and it cannot be made use of in itself; without it nothing succeeds, but neither does anything succeed by means of it: it is the run before the jump, the tuning of the violin, the confirmation of that primal and mighty potentiality which it cannot even begin to actualize.” [Between Man and Man, p. 91] [Van Cleve Morris, Existentialism in Education: What it Means, 1966, Waveland, 1990, pp. 152-153]
Related:
– What is the nature of authority? How is it gained or lost?
– What is motivation? How can we cultivate it in ourselves and others?
– Why might young people dislike school?