There is [an] attitude which stands out in those who are successful in facilitating learning. … I think of it as prizing the learner, prizing his feelings, his opinions, his person. It is a caring for the learner, but a non-possessive caring. It is an acceptance of this other individual as a separate person, having worth in his own right. It is a basic trust—a belief that this other person is somehow fundamentally trustworthy. …
It would be most unlikely that one could … commit himself to being a facilitator of learning, unless he has come to have a profound trust in the human organism and its potentialities. If I distrust the human being then I must cram him with information of my own choosing, lest he go his own mistaken way. But if I trust the capacity of the human individual for developing his own potentiality, then I can provide him with many opportunities and permit him to choose his own way and his own direction in his learning. [Carl Rogers, Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become, Charles E. Merrill, 1969, pp. 109, 114]
The richness of experience that was available [at First Street School] was the result of … the kind of freedom we offered. But let me replace the word “freedom” with more specific terms: 1) we trusted that some true organic bond existed between the wishes of the children and their actual needs, and 2) we acceded to their wishes (though certainly not to all of them), and thus encouraged their childish desiring to take on the qualities of decision-making. …
We could not have devised a more constructive way of scheduling Maxine than the way she devised for herself simply by expressing her wishes. But these wishes would not have been acted upon if we teachers had not already been convinced that the preferences of children lie close to their actual needs. [George Dennison, The Lives of Children: The Story of the First Street School, 1969, Vintage Books / Random House, 1970, pp. 21-22, 19]
Trust [the child] in a certain degree with himself. Suffer him in some instances to select his own course of reading. There is danger that there should be something too studied and monotonous in the selection we should make for him. Suffer him to wander in the wilds of literature. There is a principal in the human mind by which a man seems to know his own time, and it will sometimes be much better that he should engage in the perusal of books at the period of his own choice, than at the time that you may recollect to put them in his hands. Man is a creature that loves to act from himself; and actions performed in this way, have infinitely more of sound health and vigour in them, than the actions to which he is prompted by a will foreign to his own. [William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature, 1797, Garland, 1971, p. 144, https://archive.org/details/enquirerreflecti00godw/page/n3/mode/2up]
[T]he child’s potentialities to love, to be happy, to use his reason, and more specific potentialities like artistic gifts … are the seeds which grow and become manifest if the proper conditions for their development are given, and they can be stifled if these are absent.
One of the most important of these conditions is that the significant person in a child’s life have faith in these potentialities. The presence of this faith makes the difference between education and manipulation. Education is identical with helping the child realize his potentialities. The opposite of education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith in the growth of potentialities, and on the conviction that a child will be right only if the adults put into him what is desirable and suppress what seems to be undesirable. [Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, 1956, Perennial Library, 1989, pp. 112-113]
The teacher [in me] had been conditioned from the time I entered kindergarten: School was for learning. Time must be filled up with measurably meaningful activity. Work must be demanding and have an edge that proves it’s serious. The goals of learning must be set out clearly and measurably. Part of me has not been able to escape the feeling that if I can’t control learning and know what my students are doing, then learning isn’t taking place and I’m not doing my job.
The educator in me knows that the teacher is often misguided when it comes to understanding how learning takes place. Trusting students, letting things move toward goals in diverse and frequently digressive ways, following enthusiasms, and responding to events and experiences are not diversions or wastes of time. Rather, they are the essence of substantive learning. [Herbert Kohl, The Herb Kohl Reader: Awakening the Heart of Teaching, New Press, 2009, p. 96]
The antidote to fear is trust, and we all have a desire to find something to trust in an uncertain world. Fear and trust are powerful forces, and while they are not opposites, exactly, trust is the best tool for driving out fear. There will always be plenty to be afraid of, especially when you are doing something new. Trusting others doesn’t mean that they won’t make mistakes. It means that if they do (or if you do), you trust they will act to help solve it. Fear can be created quickly; trust can’t. Leaders must demonstrate their trustworthiness, over time, through their actions—and the best way to do that is by responding well to failure. [Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, Random House, 2013, pp. 124-125]
Rather than trying to prevent all errors, we should assume, as is almost always the case, that our people’s intentions are good and that they want to solve problems. Give them responsibility, let the mistakes happen, and let people fix them. If there is fear, there is a reason—our job is to find the reason and to remedy it. Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover. [Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, Random House, 2013, p. 128]
[T]he credo of progressive education was stated by that other Enlightenment man, long before Dewey. In a letter to Du Pont de Nemours, Jefferson said: “We both consider the people as our children, and love them with parental affection. But you love them as infants whom you are afraid to trust without nurses; and I as adults whom I freely leave to self-government.” [Ernest Becker, The Structure of Evil: An Essay on the Unification of the Science of Man, Free Press, 1968, pp. 282-284]
If our children have the benefit of a loving relationship with us, a bar set high enough to give them something to reach for, and a sense of being understood and valued for themselves, then we’ve done the best we can to ensure that grades, schools, and eventually work will fall into place. … [I]n spite of knowing all this and more, most of us still find it hard to pull back, to have faith in our children and in the evolution of their lives. What we see as concern they rightfully experience as a vote of no confidence. [Madeline Levine, Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success, HarperCollins, 2012, pp. 34-35]
The barrier of mistrust helps explain the frustrating generational divide. It’s a war over meaning. Mistrust makes young people subtly read between the lines of each comment their elders make, trying to interpret the hidden implications of our words, to determine if we are disrespecting them or not. Young people focus more on the unsaid part than the said part. For instance, when a teenager’s mother asks, “Did you brush your teeth?” the child interprets it as, “I think you’re so incompetent that you won’t even remember something so simple as brushing your teeth”—even though the mother never said the second part. Given that interpretation, anger makes sense. It’s humiliating to be told you’re incompetent—even if the mother said no such thing. …
There persists a disconnect between what higher-power adults intend to communicate when we speak and what young people hear us say. On the adults’ side, we think we’re doing everything for them while they don’t appreciate it. On their side, they think we’re disrespecting them and looking down on them. [David Yeager, 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People, Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2024, p. 88]
Many mothers have written us … telling (often sadly) about their own little children furiously rejecting their well-meant and loving efforts to help or teach them. Children resist, almost always angrily, all such unasked-for teaching because they hear in it the (perhaps unconscious) message, “You’re not smart enough to see that this is important to learn, and even if you were, you’re not smart enough to learn it.” Naturally it makes them hurt and angry. “Let me do it by myself!” they shout. That’s just what we should do. If they need help, they will ask for it—at least, as long as we give it when it is asked for. If, in our eagerness to teach and help them, we send them enough of these messages of doubt and distrust, we may soon destroy most of all of their confidence in their ability to learn for themselves, and convince them that they really are too lazy, incurious, and stupid to learn. We will have made our fears come true. [John Holt, How Children Learn, 1964, Da Capo Press, 1982, p. 68]
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. As long as the Schools have these powers this part of the curriculum cannot be changed, and all who work in such S-chools help to teach this curriculum whether they want to or not, and even when they think they are teaching the very opposite.
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, spend the whole day playing basketball or watching TV or making trouble, you’d hang out on the streets, never do anything worthwhile, grow up to be a bum.
Along with this goes the message: Even if you could be trusted to want to find out about the world, you are too stupid to do it. Not only do we have to decide what you need to learn, but then we have to show you, one tiny step at a time, how to learn it. You could never figure it out for yourself, or even have enough sense to ask good questions about it. The world is too complicated, mysterious, and difficult for you. We can’t let you explore it. We must make sense of it for you. You can only learn about it from us. [John Holt, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better, 1976, Sentient, 2004, pp. 171-172]
Far from helping students to develop into mature, self-reliant, self-motivated individuals, schools seem to do everything they can to keep youngsters in a state of chronic, almost infantile, dependency. The pervasive atmosphere of distrust, together with the rules covering the most minute aspects of existence, teach students every day that they are not people of worth, and certainly not individuals capable of regulating their own behavior. [Charles Silberman, Crisis in the Classroom, 1970] quoted by [Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes, Houghton Mifflin, 1993, p. 164]
[T]he children who always forget things in school may not forget so much because their memories are bad as because they never dare trust their memories. Even when they are right, they still feel wrong. They are never willing enough to bet on their hunch that something is so, to turn it into a conviction that it really is so. [John Holt, How Children Learn, 1964, Da Capo Press, 1982, pp. 145]
[A]t the extreme, many people never overcome the easy merger with a source of protection and power, and this gives rise to a genuine pathology of perception. The person mistrusts himself, his judgment and decisions; he fears initiating action, standing alone; he has a sense of always being less than those around him, of needing the strong hand of the trusted leader on his shoulder to point him at what to do, to steady him, to give his life the mandate that it needs. And this is logical: if you remain fixated to the source of support and protection, you never do find out what it means to stand on your own and judge reality for yourself. You accept the opinions of those who offer you easy support, whether it be the mother or other authorities who “represent” her: big brother, the elders, the tribe or the nation. [Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man, Free Press, 1971, p. 161]
In one way or another our methods produce in the young a condition of pain that seems very close to a mass neurosis: a lack of faith in oneself, a vacuum of spirit into which authority or institutions can move, a dependency they feed on. Students are encouraged to relinquish their own wills, their freedom of volition; … almost everything in their education is designed to discourage them from activity, from the wedding of idea and act. [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. 814]
[I]n an attempt to gain or hold love, approval, esteem, the individual relinquishes the locus of evaluation which was his in infancy, and places it in others. He learns to have a basic distrust for his own experiencing as a guide to his behavior. He learns from others a large number of conceived values, and adopts them as his own, even though they may be widely discrepant from what he is experiencing. …
I believe that this picture of the individual, with values mostly introjected, held as fixed concepts, rarely examined or tested, is the picture of most of us. [Carl Rogers, Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become, Charles E. Merrill, 1969, pp. 245-247]
[A] change which occurs as the result of successful psychotherapy is that the patient comes to feel increasing confidence in his own judgment. … [Carl] Rogers also notes that the client who improves ‘increasingly trusts and values the process which is himself’. It is very characteristic of depressed and dependent people that they attribute more value to the judgment of others than to their own; which is why, during the course of therapy, the therapist must always take the attitude of helping the patient to find his own answers rather than guiding him or giving him direct advice. Part of growing up is to realize that one’s own thoughts and feelings may be trustworthy guides for oneself, even if others do not necessarily find them so, for them. [Anthony Storr, The Art of Psychotherapy, Methuen, 1980, p. 153]
The more we retreat from the responsibility of independence, the more daunting the prospect of such responsibility appears. We feel more and more unequal to the challenge. How can we rely on a mind we have learned not to trust?
Or again, the more we surrender to the fear of disapproval, the more we lose face in our eyes, the more desperate we become for someone’s approval. Within us there is a void that should have been occupied by self-esteem. When we attempt to fill it with the approval of others instead, the void grows deeper and the hunger for acceptance and approval grows stronger. [Nathaniel Branden, Taking Responsibility: Self-Reliance and the Accountable Life, 1996, Fireside / Simon & Schuster, 1997, p. 67]
Self-esteem, fully realized, is the experience that we are appropriate to life and to the requirements of life. More specifically, self-esteem is: 1. confidence in our ability to think, confidence in our ability to cope with the basic challenges of life; and 2. confidence in our right to be successful and happy, the feeling of being worthy, deserving, entitled to assert our needs and wants, achieve our values, and enjoy the fruits of our efforts. …
To trust one’s mind and to know that one is worthy of happiness is the essence of self-esteem. [Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Bantam Books, 1994, p. 4]
The great object of Education should be commensurate with the object of life. It should be a moral one; to teach self-trust; to inspire the youthful man with an interest in himself; with a curiosity touching his own nature; to acquaint him with the resources of his mind, and to teach him that there is all his strength … [Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Education,” The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 10, 1909, pp. 133-134, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/emerson-the-works-of-ralph-waldo-emerson-vol-10-lectures-and-biographical-sketches]
When we permitted students the freedom of choice and gave them easy access to the community, we found that ideas acquired weight and value to the extent that students were allowed to try them out in action. It was in practical and social situations that their own strength increased, and the merging of the two—strengthened self and tested knowledge—moved them more quickly toward manhood than anything else I have seen.
One might make a formula of it: to the extent that students had freedom of volition and access to experience, knowledge became important. But volition and access were of absolute value; … without them, nothing worked. So we had to trust the students to make their own choices, no matter what we thought of them. We learned to take their risks with them—and to survive. In that sense we became equals, and that equality may in the end be more educational for students than anything else. That, in fact, may be the most important thing we learned. [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. 817]
Related:
– How do adult expectations influence young people?
– How capable are young people of directing their education? Who should decide what they learn?