I think it's too easy to advocate freedom for children in education.
There is an irreducible sense in which grown-ups have power over children:
grown-ups have access to worlds that children do not have access to. If
we believe many of the theories of learning that are advocated here, what
children learn is not propositional knowledge that gets stored in their
noggins, but rather skills that permit them to occupy certain structural
locations in society, construct and enact certain identities, participate
in certain activities, "see" the entities found within the complex of
functional relevancies that arise as those activities unfold, and so
on. We have many ways of talking about these things: "tacit knowledge",
"form of life", "apprenticeship", "legitimate peripheral participation",
habitus", and so on. The relationship between grownups and children is
symmetrical in one sense: each occupy their own world, to which the other
has limited access. But they are asymmetrical in other senses: grown-ups
have passed through (some version of) the children's world; the children
are headed into the grown-ups' world but not vice versa; the grown-ups'
world has a broader geographic and social scope; and so on. It follows
that the relationship of grown-ups (such as teachers) to children (such
as students) is not simply a matter of grown-ups hoarding a certain kind
of knowledge-capital which they withhold from children. The relationship
is much less reducible than that.
Now, faced with a proposal that children be given freedom, not be coerved,
etc, most non-academics will probably say something like, "If you just
let them do whatever they want then they'll run wild and never learn
anything, any more than *you* would have studied diligently in college,
much less in grade school, if nobody was holding grades over your head and
frowning at you when your attention wandered". We academics seem to know
better than this, somehow, in that we are free to posit a world in which
knowledge carries its own motivations, or is presented in a sufficiently
motivating way. But I want to point at one element of truth in the non-
academic's complaint, which is that the very nature of knowledge implies
that children *cannot* direct their own learning. That is, they are not
in a position to even *imagine* what it is they do not know, much less
evaluate its importance, or the relative importance of different things
that they might learn. If the stuff-to-be-learned really were a supply
of propositional facts-in-the-noggin then we could sit down ahead of time
and discuss which ones were going to get learned. But the fact is that
it is only possible to identify the stuff-to-be-learned in a vague and
approximate way. Children not yet inducted into the grown-ups' world are
not simply lacking for facts in the way that they might lack for money,
and they cannot choose what to learn in the way that they might choose
what to buy. No: they are literally *lost* in the grown-ups' world,
literally and necessarily *clueless* in that world. In some sense they
are not even "in" that world at all yet. How could they possibly choose
what to learn, and when and why and how, without this kind of epistemic
access to the endpoint of the learning process?
It does not follow, of course, that children's opinions are without value,
or that no room exists for negotiation about the structure and manner and
interactional styles and logistics and values and goals of the educational
process. Nor does it follow that children are entirely powerless, or that
they ought to be. It *does* follow, though, that grown-ups -- or at least,
in some sense that deserves further specification, the grown-ups' *world*
-- must structure children's learning to some significant extent. Attempts
to deny this fact -- epidemic among liberal American teachers imbued with
certain kinds of constructivist educational philosophies -- lead to all
sorts of weird hidden agendas and mixed messages, in which children are
reduced to guessing what they're supposed to do, learning to pick up on
indirect cues from the grown-ups, forever paranoid that they aren't doing
it right, when the official ideology is that they are running the show,
constructing knowledge themselves, expressing their spontaneous natural
selves, and all sorts of other good things, all having originated in
opposition to the soul-deadening drills of yore. (Valerie Walkerdine
has described this in Foucauldian terms as (I believe) "discovering the
natural child".) Much better, in my opinion, to be explicit about what
children can and cannot do, what children can and cannot know, and what
is valuable about the grown-ups' knowledge and values and activities
and cultures that deserves to be passed along, or at least offered for
appropriation in a structured context in which the structures are themselves
up for negotiation. If this is paternalistic then that's because children
need fathers. My view may be extreme, but perhaps it will stimulate
discussion about the space in-between.
Phil Agre