[T]eachers sometimes find that their willingness to let students make decisions is met with an apparent reluctance on the part of the students. This is really not so surprising, given that most of them have been conditioned to accept a posture of passivity at school and sometimes at home. After a few years of being instructed to do what you’re told, it is disconcerting to be invited—much less expected—to take responsibility for the way things are.
This resistance takes three primary forms. The first is simply refusing: “That’s your job to decide,” students may protest. The second is testing: offering outrageous suggestions or responses to see if the teacher is really serious about the invitation to participate. The third is parroting: repeating what adults have said or guessing what this adult probably wants to hear. …
It can be tempting to conclude that students are either unable to handle the responsibility of making decisions or unworthy of having it. But our challenge is to persevere. As Selma Wassermann has written, “I have heard teachers give it up after a single attempt, saying, ‘Children cannot behave responsibly,’ then remove all further opportunity for students to practice and grow in their responsible behavior. I have also heard teachers say, ‘Children cannot think for themselves,’ and proceed thereafter to do children’s thinking for them. But these same teachers would never say, ‘These children cannot read by themselves,’ and thereafter remove any opportunity for them to learn to read.” [Alfie Kohn, “Choices for Children: Why and How to Let Students Decide,” Phi Delta Kappan, Sept 1993, https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/choices-children/]
It is not uncommon for students who have already gone through many years of [school] to feel uncomfortable when given the opportunity to help establish their own learning objectives. “Listen,” one of them will say, “I don’t want all this negotiation with you. Tell me what I need to learn.”
So when I am teaching and hear such a comment, I first offer that student empathy for his discomfort. Then I suggest that he try to enjoy a new and radical approach that I am going to try. I say to the class, “I’d like to see a show of hands. How many of you are here because you know what the subject is and you really want to learn it?” That will be Group A. “And how many of you are here because you’re afraid of what’s going to happen to you if you’re not here?” That will be Group B.
Now, I’d say in almost all of the schools that I’ve been working in, about 3/4 of the students fall into Group B. After the show of hands, I suggest that we not proceed with class until everybody is in Group A, but that no one join Group A out of a sense of fear or obligation. The conversations that then emerge between the two groups not only concern the values of the course materials, but also the students’ and my personal values. [Marshal Rosenberg, Life-Enriching Education: Nonviolent Communication Helps Schools Improve Performance, Reduce Conflict, and Enhance Relationships, Puddle Dancer, 2003, p. 82]
Often when [giving] talks or consultations about autonomy support, people tell us that their children, their students, or their employees don’t want to have choice—that they want to be told what to do. When we hear such comments, they do ring true, at least to come extent, but we realize that if they are true it is because people have been pushed to that point by being overly controlled in the past. Remember that if you control people enough, they may begin to act as if they want to be controlled. As a self-protective strategy, they become focused outward—looking for clues about what the people in one-up positions expect of them, looking for what will keep them out of trouble. I have seen this, for example, in countless students who have come to ask what topic to use for their term papers. I typically respond with something like, “What interests you?” only to get the reply, “I don’t know; what do you think I should write about?” …
It seems that, to some degree at least, people adapt to being controlled and act as if they don’t want the very thing that is integral to their nature—namely, the opportunity to be autonomous. They probably fear that they will be evaluated—perhaps even punished—if they make the wrong choice. [Edward Deci with Richard Flaste, Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation, Penguin, 1996, pp. 147-148]
If progressive education is so terrific, why is it still the exception rather than the rule? … For starters … progressive education is not only less familiar but also much harder to do, and especially to do it well. It asks a lot more of the students and at first can seem a burden to those who have figured out how to play the game in traditional classrooms—often succeeding by conventional standards without doing much thinking. It’s also much more demanding of teachers, who have to know their subject inside and out … [and] know a lot about pedagogy because no amount of content knowledge (say, expertise in science or English) can tell you how to facilitate learning. …
Progressive educators also have to be comfortable with uncertainty, not only to abandon a predictable march toward the “right answer” but to let students play an active role in the quest for meaning that replaces it. That means a willingness to give up some control and let students take some ownership, which requires guts as well as talent. [Alfie Kohn, Feel-Bad Education: And Other Contrarian Essays on Children and Schooling, Beacon, 2011, pp. 22-28]
[P]rogressive education has an uphill journey because of the larger culture we live in. It’s an approach that is in some respects inherently subversive, and people in power do not always enjoy being subverted. …
There is pressure to raise standardized test scores, something that progressive education manages to do only sometimes and by accident—not only because that isn’t its purpose but also because such tests measure what matters least. …
And then … there are parents who have never been invited to reconsider their assumptions about education. As a result, they may be impressed by the wrong things, measured by signs of traditionalism—letter grades, spelling quizzes, heavy textbooks, a teacher in firm control of the classroom—and unnerved by their absence. [Alfie Kohn, Feel-Bad Education: And Other Contrarian Essays on Children and Schooling, Beacon, 2011, pp. 28-29]
An implicit and sometimes explicit message of our forced schooling system is this: “If you do what you are told to do in school, everything will work out well for you.” Children who buy into that message stop taking responsibility for their own education. They assume, falsely, that someone else has figured out what they need to do and know to become successful adults. … This attitude … , set up in childhood, may then persist for a lifetime. [Peter Gray, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, Basic Books, 2013, p. 70]
[Students] may prefer to avoid unnecessary intellectual challenges such as those entailed by a more active, probing form of learning. …
It’s not just about how much effort is required. Students may become accustomed to classrooms in which they aren’t expected (or even permitted) to have much of a say about what happens. …
After all, from their first days in school they have been carefully instructed in what Philip Jackson famously called the “hidden curriculum”: how to do what you’re told and stay out of trouble. …
Passivity, however, is not the only outcome of that training. We may also witness a diminution of interest in the life of the mind. Even those who are successful at playing the game of school and managing to stifle the urge to ask impertinent questions may find what they’ve been doing deeply unappealing on some level. If they haven’t been exposed to a more active, more critical model of learning, they may well walk away from all intellectual pursuits. [Alfie Kohn, Feel-Bad Education: And Other Contrarian Essays on Children and Schooling, Beacon, 2011, pp. 39-41]
In the name of education, we have increasingly deprived children of the time and freedom they need to educate themselves through their own means. [Peter Gray, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, Basic Books, 2013, pp. 19-20]
When life isn’t work, it is play. That’s not hard to understand. People are tired, stressed, drained: They want to kick back a little. That something done in the rare off-hours should be strenuous seems rather unfair. Frost talked about making his vocation and his avocation one, and about his work being play for mortal stakes: For that sort of thing, assuming it was ever possible, there is no longer time. [Mark Edmundson, Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education, Bloomsbury USA, 2013, pp. 173-174]
[I]n the majority of cases, the memory of our slavery [in school] becomes associated with the studies we pursued, and it is not till after repeated struggles, that those things can be rendered the objects of our choice, which were for so long a time the themes of compulsion. [William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature, Garland, 1971, p. 83, https://archive.org/details/enquirerreflecti00godw/page/n3/mode/2up]
One had to cram all this stuff into one’s mind, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year. [Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, edited by Paul A. Schilpp, 1949, MJF Books, 1970, p. 17, https://archive.org/details/albert-einstein-philosopher-scientist]
[Students’] enrollment in Summerhill represents a traumatic and sudden “decompression” in the scholastic environment. All the pressures associated with “going to school” are abruptly lifted, and their customary response is precisely what one might expect—they play hookey, refuse to attend any classes or do any work; they indulge to the full their child impulses to play and play all day long. Neill lets them.
Sooner or later, though, they voluntarily take up their studies again. This interval Neill appropriately calls “recovery time”; it sometimes goes on for months. “The recovery time is proportionate to the hatred their last school gave them. …” [Van Cleve Morris, Existentialism in Education: What it Means, 1966, Waveland, 1990, pp. 148-149]
Discipline, dogmatically imposed, and punishment create fear; and fear creates hostility. This hostility may not be conscious and overt, but it nevertheless paralyzes endeavor and authenticity of feeling. [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]
[I]n an atmosphere where all discipline is thought evil, it will not occur to young people that voluntary submission of this sort is an essential of almost every kind of success. Difficult success as an ideal should be present to the mind of the young if they are not to become wayward or futile. [Bertrand Russell, Education and the Social Order, 1932, Routledge Classics, 2009, p. 23]
I would like to give a brief portion of a recorded interview with a young woman, a graduate student, who had come for counseling help. … During the interview one of the feelings she discovered was her great desire to be dependent, just to let someone else take over the direction of her life. She was very critical of those who had not given her enough guidance. She talked about one after another of her professors, feeling bitterly that none of them had taught her anything with deep meaning. Gradually she began to realize that part of the difficulty was the fact that she had taken no initiative in participating in these classes. …
I think you will find that this excerpt gives you some indication of what it means in experience to accept the locus of evaluation as being within oneself. Here then is the quotation from one of the later interviews with this young woman as she has begun to realize that perhaps she is partly responsible for the deficiencies in her own education. …
Client: I mean, it seems to be really apparent to me that I can’t depend on someone else to give me an education. (Very softly) I’ll really have to get it myself.
Therapist: It really begins to come home—there’s only one person that can educate you—a realization that perhaps nobody else can give you an education.
C: M-hm. (Long pause—while she sits thinking) I have all the symptoms of fright. (Laughs softly)
T: Fright? That this is a scary thing, is that what you mean?
C: M-hm. (Very long pause—obviously struggling with feelings in herself). …
I hope that this illustration gives some sense of the strength which is experienced in being a unique person, responsible for oneself, and also the uneasiness that accompanies this assumption of responsibility. To recognize that “I am the one who chooses” and “I am the one who determines the value of an experience for me” is both an invigorating and a frightening realization. [Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy, Houghton Mifflin, 1961, pp. 120-122]
[T]o know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own. Modern man is ready to take great risks when he tries to achieve the aims which are supposed to be “his”; but he is deeply afraid of taking the risk and the responsibility of giving himself his own aims. [Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom, 1941, Henry Holt & Co., 1994, pp. 251-252]
Neither pride nor self-esteem can be supported by the pursuit of secondhand values that do not reflect who we really are.
But does anything take more courage—is anything more challenging and sometimes frightening—than to live by our own mind, judgment, and values? Is not self-esteem a summons to the hero within us? [Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Bantam, 1994, pp. 41-42]
The requirement to be self-evaluating and self-correcting demands an internal standard … it requires a theory or a philosophy of what makes something valuable … Our loyalty is transformed from adherence to a value to the process of originating or inventing what is valuable, a determination that heretofore has been made by the psychosocial surround. …
Educators seeking “self-direction” from their adult students are not merely asking them to take on new skills, modify their learning style, or increase their self-confidence. They are asking many of them to change the whole way they understand themselves, their world, and the relation between the two. They are asking many of them to put at risk the loyalties and devotions that have made up the very foundation of their lives. We acquire “personal authority,” after all, only by relativizing—that is, only by fundamentally altering—our relationship to public authority. This is a long, often painful voyage, and one that, for much of the time, may feel more like mutiny than a merely exhilarating (and less self-conflicted) expedition to discover new lands. [Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, Harvard UP, 1994, pp. 169, 275]