Who is to say what the student should learn? [Some argue] that it is the student himself who should say. His current interests should be the source of an effective educational policy. Certainly they will reflect his idiosyncrasies, and that is good, but how much can he know about the world in which he will eventually play a part? The things he is “naturally” curious about are of current and often temporary interest. …
It must be admitted that the teacher is not always in a better position. Again and again education has gone out of date as teachers have continued to teach subjects which were no longer relevant at any time in the student’s life. Teachers often teach simply what they know … [or] what they can teach easily. Their current interests, like those of students, may not be a reliable guide.
Nevertheless, in recognizing the mistakes that have been made in the past in specifying what students are to learn, we do not absolve ourselves from the responsibility of setting educational policy. We should say, we should be willing to say, what we believe students will need to know, taking the individual student into account wherever possible, but otherwise making our best prediction with respect to students in general. Value judgments of this sort are not as hard to make as is often argued. … [W]e are merely choosing a set of specifications which, so far as we can tell, will at some time in the future prove valuable to the student and his culture. Who is any more likely to be right? [B. F. Skinner, “The Free and Happy Student”, Phi Delta Kappan, 55(1), 1973, pp. 13-16, https://education-consumers.org/free-happy-student-article/]
Many of the [progressive school] reforms were all to the good. But as everybody knows, the new conception of the child was utopian; it often went so far as to expect that he or she should decide what to study, supposedly in response to inner “needs.” That was pure preposterism. It equated a desirable goal, the self-directing adult, with the child mind and will as yet undeveloped. This, again, was to skip the rudiments and jump to the full-blown achievement. [Jacques Barzun, Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, Chicago UP, 1991, p. 86]
The idea that inexperienced young people can judge in advance what will later turn out to be relevant over the next half-century or more of their life is part of a more general and romantic social vision. This vision underlies such things as denigration of authority derived from experience or specialized training. [Thomas Sowell,
Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas, Free Press, 1993, p. 92]
Permitting students an influence upon the formulation of academic policy would be tantamount to giving those with less knowledge and, therefore, less ability to advance the truth the same power as those who possess a greater knowledge and ability to do so. It would put men who have proved their excellence on a par with those who still must, and perhaps never will, prove it. Such a policy would topple the very tenets of education. [Gottfried Dietze, “Reason of University,” Education in a Free Society, edited by Anne Husted Burleigh, Liberty Fund, 1973, p. 114]
[I]nterest and adjustment have taken the place of discipline and cultivation as the watchwords of educational policy. The whole aim of education changes, for adjustment leads to the cult of success, the “ideal” of getting ahead by beating your neighbor. The emphasis on the interests of the student makes him a buyer instead of a patient, and the teacher becomes a salesman rather than a doctor prescribing the cure for ignorance and incompetence. It is the student who is the master under the elective system, which … makes the young, i.e., the relatively ignorant and incompetent, choose their own road to learning according to the fickle interests of their immaturity. [Mortimer J. Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, p. 77]
As we have a tendency to underrate the intelligence of the young, we have a tendency to overrate their experience and the significance of the expression of interests and needs on the part of those who are inexperienced. Educators ought to know better than their pupils what an education is. If educators do not, they have wasted their lives. The art of teaching consists in large part of interesting people in things that ought to interest them, but do not. The task of educators is to discover what an education is and then to invent the methods of interesting their students in it. [Robert M. Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952, p. 49, https://archive.org/details/greatconversatio030336mbp/mode/2up]
Freedom from discipline, freedom to do nothing more than pursue the interests that the accident of birth or station has supplied may result in locking up the growing mind in its own whims and difficulties. [Robert M. Hutchins, Education for Freedom, 1943, Louisiana State UP, 1947, p. 89, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.501404]
[There is a] difference, upon which I wish to insist, between exciting or indulging an interest and realizing it through its direction. …
If you simply indulge this interest by letting the child go on indefinitely, there is no growth that is more than accidental. But let the child first express his impulse, and then through criticism, question, and suggestion bring him to consciousness of what he has done, and what he needs to do, and the result is quite different. [John Dewey, The School and Society, 1900, Chicago UP, 2nd ed. 1915, p. 41, https://archive.org/details/schoolsociety00dewerich]
[T]he teacher, as the member of the group having the riper and fuller experience and the greater insight into the possibilities of continuous development found in any suggested project, has not only the right but the duty to suggest lines of activity … [John Dewey, “Progressive Education and the Science of Education,” 1928,
John Dewey on Education: Selected Writings, edited by Reginald D. Archambault, 1964, Chicago UP, 1974, p. 179]
[Student] evaluations often contain very useful information on those things which students are qualified to evaluate—the conscientiousness, clarity, and accessibility of professors, for example. The crucial problem, however, is that students are not qualified to evaluate what matters most, the quality of their education.
They can spot blatantly shoddy stuff, some of which can be found in even the most prestigious institutions. But to evaluate the real quality of a course which the student found challenging, interesting, and even inspiring, would require the student to know how that course compares to similar courses elsewhere, how much of what is vital to the subject was included or left out, and how much of a foundation the course provides for later and deeper work and thought in the same or related fields. These are the unknowns which are almost certain to remain unknown for years after the student’s evaluation has been turned in. …
Because students cannot evaluate what is crucial, someone else with more training and experience must do that evaluating. [Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas, Free Press, 1993, pp. 216-217]
What the most promising students imagine depends upon how they are sprung loose from their verbal and numerical dexterity routines, on the one hand, and from their demoralizing entertainments, on the other. Under the present egalitarian experience swindle, even the most promising student is likely to be confused about what he wants. Therefore, we are obliged not to give him what he wants; we can only give him what we think he should have. [Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers: Of Culture and Its Second Death, Chicago UP, 1985, pp. 97-98]
Looking back over the educational objectives that professional educators determined would be helpful to me through the years, I would say they didn’t predict very well. I do not see my life as having been significantly enriched by the majority of subjects that were offered. In retrospect, I can see many areas of learning I would have preferred to pursue that I believe would have served me better than those chosen for me. [Marshal Rosenberg, Life-Enriching Education: Nonviolent Communication Helps Schools Improve Performance, Reduce Conflict, and Enhance Relationships, Puddle Dancer, 2003, pp. 68-69]
The belief that children and even teenagers are incapable of rational decision-making and self-direction is a self-fulfilling prophecy. By confining children to school and other adult-directed school-like settings, and by filling their time with forced busywork, which serves no productive purpose, we deprive them of the time and opportunities they need to practice self-direction and responsibility. And so, children themselves, as well as their parents and teachers, come to think that children are incompetent. [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]
Another issue is whether we could permit knowledge to be organized in and by the individual, or whether it is to be organized for the individual. Here teachers and educators line up with parents and national leaders to insist that the pupil must be guided. He must be inducted into knowledge we have organized for him. He cannot be trusted to organize knowledge in functional terms for himself. As Herbert Hoover says of high school students, “You simply cannot expect kids of those ages to determine the sort of education they need unless they have some guidance.” (Time, 2 Dec 1957) This seems so obvious to most people that even to question it is to seem somewhat unbalanced. Even a chancellor of a university questions whether freedom is really necessary in education, saying that perhaps we have overestimated its value. He says the Russians have advanced mightily in science without it, and implies that we should learn from them. [Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy, Houghton Mifflin, 1961, pp. 293-294]
I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering and thwarting and too much governing he may be hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.
But I hear the outcry which replies to this suggestion:—Would you verily throw up the reins of public and private discipline; would you leave the young child to the mad career of his own passions and whimsies, and call this anarchy a respect for the child’s nature? I answer,—Respect the child, respect him to the end, but also respect yourself. Be the companion of his thought, the friend of his friendship, the lover of his virtue—but no kinsman of his sin. Let him find you so true to yourself that you are the irreconcilable hater of his vice and the imperturbable slighter of his trifling. [Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Education,” The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 10, 1909, pp. 141-142, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/emerson-the-works-of-ralph-waldo-emerson-vol-10-lectures-and-biographical-sketches]
A number of writers and teachers who resist giving children the chance to make decisions have justified their opposition by erecting an enormous straw man called “absolute freedom” and counterposing it to the status quo. …
Not only is this a classic false dichotomy, but virtually every influential proponent of choice for students—as well as the programs that have put the idea into effect—proceeds from the assumption that there are indeed limits on the capacity and right of children to decide. The scary specter of laissez-faire liberty that shows up in the rhetoric of traditionalists is not easy to locate in the real world. Nearly every essay on education by John Dewey, the father of progressive schooling, stresses the importance of adult guidance and derides the idea of “leaving a child to his own unguided fancies.” [Alfie Kohn, “Choices for Children: Why and How to Let Students Decide,” Phi Delta Kappan, Sept 1993, https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/choices-children/]
I once participated in a psychotherapy class with Carl Rogers and learned a powerful lesson about the value of student involvement in setting learning objectives in the first ten minutes of the course.
Rogers began the class in a way that was unfamiliar to me. Instead of coming in and directing the learning process, he simply sat and waited for us to express what we wanted from the course. One of my classmates expressed dissatisfaction with Roger’s non-directive teaching saying that he paid tuition to learn what Rogers had to offer and wanted to know why Rogers wasn’t presenting information to us about psychotherapy. Rogers sincerely listened to the student’s dissatisfaction and responded, “I believe that persons, regardless of how knowledgeable or creative they may be in a particular field, probably have no more than one or two ideas which are uniquely theirs. I could present to you the one or two concepts about psychotherapy for which I am given credit within five minutes. Then what would we do for the rest of the semester?”
Roger’s statement apparently stimulated irritation within the student, who responded, “Yes, I agree that no one knows everything about a subject. But you know better than we do what has been done in the field and know better what is worth learning.”
Again Rogers listened intently to what the student said and then responded, “It might be so that I have a better grasp of what has been done in the field of psychotherapy than you do. And maybe I have a better grasp of what is usually taught in this area. However, I am reluctant to decide by myself what is important for you to learn because I believe that the most important aspect in learning is to choose what is worth learning. If I alone make that choice, every day I would be reserving the most important part of learning for myself.”
That lesson has stayed with me over the years and it helps me remember the value of bringing students in as partners in determining what is worth learning. [Marshal Rosenberg, Life-Enriching Education: Nonviolent Communication Helps Schools Improve Performance, Reduce Conflict, and Enhance Relationships, Puddle Dancer, 2003, pp. 81-82]
To involve students as partners in setting objectives is not as radical as it might seem at first. Whether or not the right of students to be partners in determining their objectives is recognized, the students still have the choice. It has been my experience that more will choose to pursue the objectives offered by teachers and administrators when these objectives are presented as recommended options (assuming, of course, that the objectives have life-enriching possibilities) than when they are presented as something that must be done. …
I had an interaction with the principal of a high school in a large city in the United States who was extremely upset when I introduced the possibility of students being partners in decision-making about their learning. He protested that there were simply some choices that students weren’t allowed to make. I asked for an example.
He said, “In this state it is the law that students attend school until they are 16 years old. Therefore, they have no choice as to whether or not they attend school.”
I found this rather humorous. Why was I at his school in the first place? The board of education had hired me to work with the schools in their city that had a thirty percent or greater unexplained absent rate each day. They hoped that I might provide the staff of these schools with ideas for how to make education more appealing to the students. Though the principal claimed that the students could not choose whether or not to attend school, at least thirty percent of the students were aware they had that choice. [Marshal Rosenberg, Life-Enriching Education: Nonviolent Communication Helps Schools Improve Performance, Reduce Conflict, and Enhance Relationships, Puddle Dancer, 2003, p. 70]
I do not see student ignorance as just cause for the teacher unilaterally establishing objectives. If teachers believe strongly in a certain objective, I would like to see them responsible for educating students regarding its importance to the point that the students are willing to actively commit themselves to it. [Marshal Rosenberg,
Life-Enriching Education: Nonviolent Communication Helps Schools Improve Performance, Reduce Conflict, and Enhance Relationships, Puddle Dancer, 2003, p. 71]
[Our education] involves of course a serious misconception: instead of joining with one’s equals in assuming the effort of persuasion and running the risk of failure, there is dictatorial intervention, based upon the absolute superiority of the adult … [Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, 1961, Penguin, 1977, pp. 176-177]
The most desirable mode of education therefore, in all instances where it shall be found sufficiently practicable, is that which is careful that all the acquisitions of the pupil shall be preceded and accompanied by desire. The best motive to learn, is a perception of the value of the thing learned. [William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature, 1797, Garland, 1971, p. 78, https://archive.org/details/enquirerreflecti00godw/page/n3/mode/2up]
I’ve always been bothered by the advice “make it relevant to the students,” for two reasons. First, it often feels to me that it doesn’t apply. Is the Epic of Gilgamesh relevant to students in a way they can understand right now? Is trigonometry? Making these topics relevant to students’ lives will be a strain, and students will probably think it’s phony. Second, if I can’t convince students that some material is relevant, does that mean I shouldn’t teach it? If I’m continually trying to build bridges between students’ daily lives and their school subjects, the students may get the message that school is always about them, whereas I think there is value, interest, and beauty in learning about things that don’t have much to do with me. I’m not saying it never makes sense to talk about things students are interested in. What I’m suggesting is that student interests should not be the main driving force of lesson planning. Rather, they might be used as initial points of contact that help students understand the main ideas you want them to consider, rather than as the reason or motivation for them to consider these ideas. [Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don’t Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom, John Wiley & Sons, 2009, p. 65]
Cultivating the full range of students’ talents calls for a broader curriculum and a flexible range of teaching styles. This is not to suggest that students should study only the subjects they like or have a natural interest in. One of the roles of education is to broaden and stretch the interests of the students, into areas for which they may not have a natural affinity: it is equally important that they feel their own natural abilities are properly engaged and valued. [Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: The Power of Being Creative, Capstone, 2011, p. 250]
Education, says Fichte, must inevitably work in such a way that “you will later recognise the reasons for what I am doing now”. Children cannot be expected to understand why they are compelled to go to school … If you cannot understand your own interests as a rational being, I cannot be expected to consult you, or abide by your wishes, in the course of making you rational. [Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 1958, Four Essays On Liberty, Oxford UP, 1969, pp. 118-172, https://cactus.utahtech.edu/green/B_Readings/I_Berlin%20Two%20Concpets%20of%20Liberty.pdf]
[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]
People do not always learn from experience, but without it they do not learn at all. And experience alone is not enough; they must have not just experience but the ability to affect experience. If they think their choices and decisions make a difference to them, in their own lives, they will have every reason to try to choose and decide more wisely. But if what they think makes no difference, why bother to think? It is not just power, but impotence, that corrupts people. It gives them the mind and soul of slaves. It makes them indifferent, lazy, cynical, irresponsible, and, above all, stupid.
This has nothing to do with the sentimental belief that the average person or the mass of people have some mysterious Wisdom or would never make any mistakes. They would make plenty. People are generally ignorant and fallible. But on the whole, most of the time, every human being knows better than anyone else what he needs and wants, what gives him pleasure and joy or causes suffering and pain. Given real choices, people will choose for themselves better than others will choose for them. What is much more important, every human being is likely to know better than anyone else when he has made a mistake, when a choice he has made is working badly. Given a chance to correct that mistake, he is more likely to do so than someone else. [John Holt, Escape From Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children, 1974, HoltGWS, 2013, pp. 99-100]
Responsibility is fostered by allowing children a voice and, wherever indicated, a choice in matters that affect them. A deliberate distinction is made here between a voice and a choice. There are matters that fall entirely within the child’s realm of responsibility. In such matters the child should have a choice. There are matters affecting the child’s welfare that are exclusively within our realm of responsibility. In such matters the child may have a voice, but not a choice. We make the choice, while helping the child accept the inevitable. What is needed is a clear distinction between these two realms of responsibility. …
Children should be deliberately presented with many situations in which they make choices. The parents select the situations; the children make the choices. [Haim Ginott, Between Parent and Child, 1965, Three Rivers, 2003, pp. 89-90]
One of the central features of being autonomy supportive is providing choice, which entails sharing the authority or power of your one-up position. … The most effective, autonomy-supportive managers and teachers allow their workers or students (whether individually or as a group) to play a role in decision making. …
Naturally, students must learn to read, but why not let the group decide what to read? And why not let them talk about how to make the decision—by majority, by consensus, or by committee? The process of decision making is itself an important matter to learn about. …
Even people who believe in the power of personal choice may still wonder whether offering choice is always best. The answer is undoubtedly no, and there are a few considerations that have been found to be useful in determining when it is most appropriate to include people in making decisions. One is whether the decision would be too stressful and conflict-promoting if others participated. …
Another consideration is whether the particular decision is an appropriate one for people to decide, given their level of maturation. … It is important for all youngsters to be given choices, but there are some issues that they are not ready to grapple with. …
Simply stated, even though offering choices and allowing students, children, and employees to participate in decision making is motivationally (perhaps even morally) desirable, there are various circumstances where it may be impractical or disadvantageous. [Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste, Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation, Penguin, 1996, pp. 144-147]
Some parents who are familiar with research on brain development say, “How could I possibly trust my kid to be responsible for his education? His brain isn’t mature yet.” This is true at some level—his sense of judgment is still developing. But that’s just it: he needs room to develop. Kids need responsibility more than they deserve it. For most adolescents, and even for younger kids, waiting until they are mature enough to get all their homework done and to turn it in on time before giving up the enforcer role means you’ve waited too long. As we mentioned, the parts of the prefrontal cortex that regulate emotions don’t mature until you reach your early thirties, but we’d be hard pressed to find a parent who would want to wait that long to let their “kids” make their own decisions.
The brain develops according to how it’s used. By giving your child the opportunity to make decisions for herself while still young, you will help her brain build the circuits that are necessary for resilience in the face of stress. A small experience of control over her circumstances, such as choosing her own clothing or decorating her own room, will activate her prefrontal cortex and condition it to respond effectively. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives, Viking, 2018, pp. 36-37]
[T]he idea that we must wait until children are mature enough to handle responsibilities may set up a vicious circle: after all, it is experience with decisions that helps children become capable of handling them. [Alfie Kohn, “Choices for Children: Why and How to Let Students Decide,” Phi Delta Kappan, Sept 1993, https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/choices-children/]
Most students are not my equal in experience or knowledge of literature and writing. But in some aspects of each them may be my superior. I will never know until I let them bring forth themselves full of their own experiences and ideas and feelings, as they are forced to let me bring forth myself. [Ken Macrorie, Uptaught, Hayden Book Company, 1970, p. 68]
Autonomy implies the ability and determination to regulate one’s life by rules which one has accepted for oneself—presumably because the reasons for them are both apparent and convincing. …
The development of autonomy is a slow and laborious business. Young people have to learn gradually to stand on their own feet and direct their own lives. They are not likely to do this if they are not encouraged to take responsibility and make choices about important matters within their limited experience; still less are they likely to do it if they are pitchforked into an anarchic situation in which they are told that they have to decide everything for themselves. Rationality requires a middle course between authoritarianism and permissiveness. Above all what is required is a rational attitude to and exercise of authority on the part of parents and teachers. [R. S. Peters, Ethics and Education, George Allen & Unwin, 1966, pp. 197-198]