More thoughts on education and children

In the last couple of years, I’ve read two books that I’d put in the “parenting” genre, which in some ways is a little strange given that I have no children or short-term plans to have any. But both of these books have been valuable to me in changing how I think, so I’d like to review both of them here.

But before I do, I’d like to caveat the usefulness of this review: some books are useful primarily for the information they contain, and these books are the ones for which a summary or review is most helpful. You may not need to know the book’s subject at a tremendous level of detail; a review can offer a lower-resolution view of the same thing. But books of information are a recent invention: for most of their history, books have been considered primarily useful for the experience of reading the book, and books of this sort are very much still in existence. For books of this sort, the “information” in the book isn’t adequately modeled as an abstract information entity amenable to various encodings, transformations, etc. without changes to the underlying value. Both of the books I’m reviewing here are books of this sort; you will gain a good deal from reading them even if you already know more or less what they have to say.

Listen, by Patty Wipfler

Patty Wipfler founded Hand in Hand Parenting, an organization designed to promote and support certain attitudes and techniques in parenting (and discourage others). In Listen, she enumerates 5 parenting techniques with goofy names, and sketches a fairly radical parenting philosophy. The essence of the philosophy is that childrens’ emotional breakdowns are a good thing, and virtually all other misbehavior is a way for children to signal their parents that they need a safe environment to break down. Here’s an anecdote, selected for representativeness, from Wipfler’s book, which contains more than 100 such stories:

One of the children who had graduated from the infant-toddler center I directed couldn’t go to sleep by herself. She needed either her mom or her dad to lie down with her, and it often took her a long time to finally fall asleep. The lack of sleep and long bedtime routine was affecting the parents’ relationship with one another, so they decided to help her face her fears. They asked my advice about how to help wean her from their presence after some snuggles at bedtime. I suggested that they tell their daughter they’d help her until she felt safe in her bed alone, and then initiate small steps of separation to let her feel fears while they listened and supported her.

They talked with their three-year-old about this project, expecting it to take many nights. And Rebecca began to cry that night, worried about how she would feel when her mommy and daddy left the room. They listened to her, reassured her that they would be nearby, and told her she would be safe in her bed. They snuggled with her for about ten minutes, and then made the move to sit up. She began to cry, so they sat on the bed, listening to her cry and letting her reach for them. She would reach and cry, hold on and cry, and when her crying subsided, they would peel her clutching arms away slightly to help her feel the prospect of separation again. Slowly, over a period of two hours in her room, they moved inch by inch away from her. She cried, sweated, and trembled, but they kept reassuring Rebecca that all was well. They said that they would watch over her from a distance, keeping her safe. By the time she fell asleep, they were listening to her from across the room, near her doorjamb, but they had not left the room. They’d kept eye contact with her the whole time.

They were both relieved and worried when she finally slept. She had cried so long! Would she be less trusting of them in the morning? What if they had made a terrible mistake? But Rebecca awoke feeling energetic, warmly connected, and eager to go to preschool. Her parents didn’t see the sad, distant child that they had imagined the night before. Rebecca said goodbye easily at preschool, and seemed happy to be there. At the end of the day, her teacher told her mom, “She’s been shy since she arrived here, always hovering around the edge of play. But today, she jumped right in, laughed, entered games that included several children, and had a great time. We’ve never seen her like this before!”

Her parents were amazed and relieved. The work Rebecca had done the night before had not only made a huge difference in her day, but that night, she went to sleep contentedly after a snuggle and a story.

One of the big points of this story is that Rebecca needed to cry about something. We don’t know what she needed to cry about, and don’t need to know. Rebecca likely doesn’t know herself. She doesn’t know how she’s feeling. All Rebecca and her parents can know is that she needs to cry. The essence of Listen, as I understand it, is giving your children the warmth and connection they need to work through their issues by crying, having tantrums, etc., with your engaged support. This also sometimes means giving your child the excuse they need to break down. Rebecca’s parents intentionally set up a situation where she would cry, and when she stopped crying they adjusted their behavior to give her another opportunity for discomfort. Rebecca benefited from the opportunity to fully work through her emotions, not only in the resolution of the immediate challenge of going to sleep by herself, but also in apparently unrelated areas of her life.

Wipfler offers five or so tools to help you work through parenting problems.

Playlistening is one of the two play-based ways to interact with children, and it’s done informally as a way to release tension. This can help kids stay on track after being instructed and managed all day - or even serve as a way of adjusting behavior in a more playful way, without typical instruction and management. You let the kids direct the play, and try to make them laugh as much as possible (without tickling them), but typically playlistening is done to adjust behavior.

Staylistening is what you do when a child is crying, having a tantrum, etc. You simply sit with the child, potentially give them a gentle touch (if it makes them cry harder, this is good - don’t touch them if it stops them from crying), and occasionally remind them of the thing they were crying about (“we’re out of orange juice”). You can also say reassuring things as long as they’re completely true and aren’t trying to solve a problem (“you can have orange juice another day”).

Special Time is unique as the only technique you broadcast and identify to your child. It’s a time when you agree to do anything your child wants. It should be scheduled ahead of time (usually) and should always be timed. Even 10 minutes is perfectly good. This is a time for your child to establish a connection with you and invite you into his/her world.

Setting Limits is more or less what it sounds like, although it’s defined somewhat more broadly than you might imagine (“we’re going to Aunt Patty’s now”). Interestingly, setting limits is often coupled with gentle physical coercion. The idea here is not to obtain immediate compliance, but to give your off-track child the pretext they need to get well and truly upset. This, obviously, does not mean that you should set unreasonable limits on purpose.

Listening Partnerships are a thing you do with another adult, not your child. They’re important because everything in Hand in Hand has to come from a place of genuine love and interest. Sometimes you’re too stressed out or triggered by your child’s behavior to Staylisten. In this case, you shouldn’t fake it! You should gently tell your child that you can’t listen to them right now. Listening partnerships are essentially a therapy technique to help you execute the rest of the Hand in Hand approach correctly.

I want to emphasize again, because all of the names here are so goofy, that the whole picture of this is worth taking seriously. It is the job of children to cry and throw fits. It is the job of adults to give them the pretext and safety in which to do so. Absolutely missing from this is any sense that adults are here to impart wisdom, discipline, or any other virtue onto children. In fact, Wipfler even discourages having your child name the emotion they’re having. Your child is already doing nonconceptual/somatic energy work and doesn’t need you to impose paradigms they’ll later have to hope to unlearn.

My best argument for using the techniques in Listen (though it’s not in the book), is something like: everyone has a bunch of people in their head. Most of these people are mental models of their friends and family, and some of the first and most influential people that get to live in your head are your mental models of your parents. If, as a parent, you use this as an opportunity to install a mental model that is boundlessly compassionate towards and permissive of your child’s emotions, you will be giving them a tremendous gift.

How Children Learn, by John Holt

John Holt is famous for sparking the unschooling movement, all the way back in the 1960s. The two books that made him and his philosophy famous were this one and its predecessor, How Children Fail, which were written by Holt after a six-year stint teaching elementary school. Over the course of several more books on education, Holt became increasingly convinced that the educational system could not be reformed, and that homeschooling was the only realistic option. How Children Learn is an interesting book partially because it outlines a philosophy seems very palatable until it eventually leads to unschooling - which is so contentious that many of my otherwise very open-minded friends refuse to consider it.

I think John Holt would like Listen, but How Children Learn one-ups it by increasing the parable density to something quite close to 100%. The brilliance of the book is that it doesn’t shove its ideas in your face, it just tells you some charming stories about kids and lets you draw your own conclusion. For example, on math:

…But the matter of freedom, to choose how to do this, or to choose not to do it, is all important. Long before the “New Math” had ever been heard of, before the great boom in curriculum reform was under way, Bill Hull was trying to get his fifth-grade classes to do some real, original, problem-directed thinking. One piece of equipment he used was a balance beam, a piece of wood balanced at its midpoint, with places along the arms to put weights. The children were supposed to figure out the principle of the beam, so that, whatever weight we put on one side, they could balance it with weights on the other. In How Children Fail I described some of the work that very bright fifth-graders did with this beam. One girl, that I can remember, seemed to know how to do at least the simple balancing problems—two weights on one side balancing one on the other. Hardly anyone else in the class could consistently work out even simple problems; most of them never got beyond the guessing stage. And this in spite of the fact that we—or so we thought—had done everything possible to set up a situation that would make discovery more easy. We worked with the children in small groups; we gave each child an easy problem; we encouraged the other children in the group to say whether they thought this solution to the problem was correct, and if not, why not. We thought we had set up in our class a laboratory in miniature, and that the children would accordingly act like scientists. But we hadn’t, and they didn’t, for just this reason, that it was our problem they were working on, not theirs.

Two years later, when I was teaching my own fifth grade, I borrowed some extra balance beams from Bill, to see whether my students could make anything of them. I put these beams, and some weights to hang on them, on a table at one end of my classroom. Then I had a piece of undeserved good luck. Before I had a chance to do any talking or explaining or instructing about these beams, some children came in early one morning and saw them. “What’s that stuff?” they said. I said, “Oh, some junk I got from Bill Hull.” They said, “What’s it for?” I said, “Nothing special; mess around with it if you want to.” Three or four of them went down to the end table and began to fool around. As other children arrived they went down to watch. By half an hour later, almost all the kids who had been working with the beams knew how to work them—including some who were not good students. I gave one of them one of the problems that had in earlier years given very able students so much trouble. She solved it easily and showed that she knew what she was doing. I said, “You have any trouble figuring that out?” She said, “Oh no, it was cinchy.”

Not long after, Bill Hull and some other friends of mine were developing a very ingenious and powerful set of mathematical and logical materials (now produced by the McGraw-Hill Book Company in New York City) called Attribute Blocks or A-blocks. These are a set of wooden blocks, of various colors, sizes, and shapes, with which children can play a wide variety of classifying games, and with which they do a great many things that experts on such matters have said they would be unable to do.

They developed these materials by having small groups of young children, mostly five-year-olds, come into their office-lab-classroom and work with them, that is, play various games, do puzzles, solve problems. (Some of the games now incorporated into the unit were invented by the children.) They found a very interesting thing about the way children reacted to these materials. If, when a child came in for the first time, they tried to get him “to work” right away, to play some of their games and solve some of their puzzles, they got nowhere. The child would try to do what he was asked to do, but without joy or insight. But if at first they let the child alone for a while, let him play with the materials in his own way, they got very different results. At first, the children would work the pieces of wood into a fantasy. Some pieces would be mommies and daddies, some children; or they would be houses and cars; or big animals and little animals. Then the children would make various kinds of patterns, buildings, and constructions out of the pieces of wood. When, through such play and fantasy, the children had taken these materials into their minds, mentally swallowed and digested them, so to speak, they were then ready and willing to play very complicated games, that in the more organized and businesslike situation had left other children completely baffled. This proved to be so consistently true that the experimenters made it a rule always to let children have a period of completely free play with the materials, before asking them to do directed work with them.

Holt sort of leads with a claim here, about freedom being “all-important,” but the rest of the section is just a couple of anecdotes about children learning in different classroom environments. To me, at least, it’s both charming and convincing - but taken to its logical conclusion, this concept would turn modern schooling on its head. What do you do with the children who aren’t interested in the balance beams? How do you turn the beams into a standardized test? The only option would seem to be a highly individualized curriculum, with teachers acting more as mentors than sources of divine authority, and students given free reign to direct their own education (while still being very gently guided, to some extent, along useful paths of inquiry). Virtually all standardized testing would be useless in this world, because the children would be expected to pursue their own various interests.

Here’s another passage from How Children Learn:

By this time, I knew better than to try to give these materials the hard sell; children learn very early to be wary of too much adult enthusiasm. So, instead of saying, “Oh, Lisa, I’ve brought the most exciting things for you to look at, wait till you see them, we’re going to have such fun with them…,” I merely left the charts in my room, where I knew she’d see them when she went in to explore. Sure enough, a few days later, she asked me, “What are those big signs in your room?” I said, “You mean those things with the colored letters all over them?” Yes. I said that they were things I had to use at school with children who were learning to read. She said, “Can I use them?” I said, “Why, sure, I suppose, if you want to.” She said, “I mean, right now.” So we took the charts into the living room, spread a few of them on the rug, and began to work.

Ordinarily a teacher using these charts points to certain words and asks children what they are. But I had learned by this time that even little children can get very frightened, cautious, and defensive when put into a spot where they have to give an answer which may be wrong. What I did was to give Lisa a pointer, and invite her to ask me what any word said, or, if she felt that she knew what it said, to say it herself. In other words, I was trying to put her out of danger and in control of the game. For a while, we played this way; she asked me words, I told them to her, sometimes she knew a word and would say it herself. But within a very short while, only a few minutes, she began to change the rules of the game, to play it in a different way, her way. The older children in the family had a good friend named Henry Harrison, whom Lisa knew, and she began to amuse herself by pointing to various three and four letter words on the chart and saying, “Henry Harrison!” I tried gently to steer the game back to where it had been, but no use. It was clear that she was not only tired of the game, but beginning actively to dislike it. Sure enough, in another minute or so she said she wanted to stop, we put the charts away, and for the rest of the visit she did not ask to see them again.

This was a mystery. Why, when I had been so careful not to put her on the spot, did she so quickly turn away from these materials, that she herself had demanded to use? This happened again, with some quite different materials, on a later visit. Only after some time and much thought, did I begin to suspect what the trouble had been. No matter how hard I tried to keep the game unthreatening, to avoid putting her in a spot where she might be wrong, I could not hide the fact that this was a game about which I knew everything and she nothing, and this alone was more threatening and humiliating than she was willing or able to bear…

What I should have done is let Lisa use those charts however she wanted, give her time to fantasize and play with them (if she wanted), let her show me what use, if any, she wanted to make of them, let her ask me questions about them, if she wanted to do that. But even if I and she had done all those things, I doubt very much that she would have used the charts to teach herself to read, as Gattegno, their author, intended. When, a short time later, she did begin this work, what she used was real books.

What I pick up on here isn’t a philosophy of how to teach children, but a philosophy of how to treat children. Lisa learned to read by initiating the learning herself - she wasn’t taught. Attempts to teach her, even very gentle ones, actively repulsed her from learning to read by putting her in a position of feeling stupid and powerless. As Holt observes, Lisa’s issue is, if anything, that she cares too much about reading ability - so much so that she can’t stand being reminded that it’s something she isn’t yet good at.

Holt has a number of other cute stories, especially around children learning to swim. Even if you’re unconvinced about unschooling for one reason or another, I wholeheartedly recommend it as an opportunity to appreciate and empathize with young people.

Thoughts

Unschooling and Coercion

It’s tempting for me to describe unschooling as non-coercive learning (which is a very common way to describe it and often how the movement describes itself), but in reality I’m not sure that non-coercion is the entire story. In fact, I think there are some things (math being an excellent example) which we should expect to require years of effort before they become natural and useful, but which are ultimately too valuable to pass over. With enough skill, it is certainly possible to non-coercively guide children to learn an appropriate amount of math (which I’ll define as math up to calculus and linear algebra) under their own motivation; I have seen it happen. But, even as someone who mostly hangs out with engineers, I know perhaps three people who do math for fun (maybe closer to ten if you count relatively small amounts of math done incidentally for personal projects). I think the heuristic of being non-coercive can get you a long way, but it also leaves too much value on the table to be the whole story.

This is supported by the fact that in the ACX survey, unschooled participants had worse math SAT scores than traditionally schooled participants. In some sense this is completely expected: of course people raised in an environment that completely de-emphasizes standardized test performance will perform worse on standardized tests. Unfortunately, unschooling does terribly in the survey in general (unschoolers have some of the lowest life satisfaction, social satisfaction, and satisfaction with their schooling, even after controlling for religiosity). Furthermore, homeschoolers who aren’t unschooled do much better on SAT math, and are among the most satisfied with their educations, suggesting that it is specifically the features unique to unschooling which make it inferior. Again, maybe the homeschoolers have a little more standardized test experience, but it still doesn’t look good. Maybe the worse test scores are offset by intangibles like being more self-motivated and being a lifelong learner, but the respondants themselves don’t seem to feel the tradeoff was worthwhile.

The idea that non-coercion is an especially bad approach for things like math is also partially supported by the ACX survey: while unschoolers had significantly lower math SAT scores (688, vs an average of 737 over the other groups, which is a 0.46 standard deviation difference), they actually tied with private schoolers for having the highest verbal SAT scores. I think the best explanation for this is that if you give young children with limited ability to make good long-term decisions too much autonomy, they’ll naturally create self-reinforcing cycles of “I’m not a math person, so I won’t do very much math.”

An alternative explanation of the observations in How Children Learn, fueled by a synthesis of these books, might be that children can’t learn well when they’re not in emotional regulation. This suggests that children might have greater tolerance for coerced learning activities (like math) if you give them plenty of opportunities to feel smart, capable, and in charge - before, during, and after the work they’re not as enthusiastic about. With this condition met, Wipfler would probably tell us that children will only need a bit of prompting to painlessly incorporate math into their daily curriculum. In this view, committed unschoolers make an interesting mistake: they try too hard to be moral, when they should be devoting their efforts to staying considerate and connected. Children actually don’t want to be non-coerced, they want to feel capable and loved and in control of their lives.

Personal Development

Listen is an excellent book for people who, like me, didn’t learn healthy relationships with their emotions when they were young. As you put yourself in the place of parents embracing the emotions of their children, you can start to pattern similar modes of interaction with your own emotions, in a very nonthreatening way. Practicing this attitude as you notice emotions arise throughout your day is, in my experience, a great complement to IFS (Internal Family Systems) and noting type practices. How Children Learn is also very useful, especially to people who have a lot of thoughts like “I’m not an x person”, “I’m not smart”, or “I just don’t like learning things.” It’s okay to have whatever preferences that you have, but a lot of those preferences around learning might be based in trauma or learned helplessness which arises predictably and systematically in the course of modern education. Speaking from personal experience, even just being aware of this can help to loosen it.

Reasonableness

Wipfler claims that when one child hits another, we should devote loving attention to the aggressor (after, obviously, making sure there are no serious injuries). We might instinctively feel that we should punish the aggressor and focus our time on making sure the victim is OK; this seems much more fair. But Wipfler points out that the aggressive child is the one who can most benefit from our help in that moment. And so, we are asked to put our feelings of fairness aside and apply our effort where it can be most useful.

This is illustrative of a more general point: you cannot insist that children be reasonable by your definition of the word. Children are big balls of emotions over which they exercise next to zero control. They don’t have any techniques for managing their emotions (healthy or not, such techniques are adaptive) and the power of their experiences is frightening and isolating. I’d take this far enough to say that children don’t have control over their actions to the same extent that adults do. So while it may seem completely unreasonable to you that your child would steal a toy, or hit another child, or throw a full-fledged fit in the middle of the supermarket because they’re out of his favorite brand of spaghetti, there is another view in which you are the person being unreasonable by expecting a tangle of fear and frustration and unprocessed trauma to consistently play by your rules.

Note on Emotional Development

It may seem that I’ve claimed at different points in this review that children are both more and less emotionally developed than adults, so I wanted to briefly address this. You can imagine around three ways to respond to a strong “negative” emotion: resistance, cope, and flow. Babies and young children mostly let their emotions flow, and start resisting their emotions more as they become older. Resisting emotions is difficult and exhausing, so we eventually learn coping mechanisms to bypass, cut off, or ignore our emotions. However, coping techniques are not the endpoint of emotional development. Coping techniques are useful for getting through the day, but they aren’t so much ways to deal with emotions as ways to avoid them. The best strategy to deal with emotions will probably combine all three strategies, letting emotions flow where possible and using coping mechanisms and potentially resistance as crutches when necessary. I imagine that, having developed correct view, you can let your emotions flow all the time with no need for coping mechanisms. In this way, highly emotionally developed people strongly resemble children. However, the resistance and cope techniques provide safety and opportunities to develop these healthier attitudes towards/relationships with your emotions.

Responsibility

An interesting lens on these works could be that they are encouraging you to relinquish responsibility for certain aspects of your child’s life. Wipfler claims that children are experts at processing their emotions (or at least that they are processing their emotions in the best possible way given their relative lack of life experience), and that their natural good-naturedness is sufficient to make them cooperative when they’re in an emotionally regulated state. In other words, you don’t need to take responsibility for making your child feel better, or for resolving their behavioral issues; you just need to give them the opportunity to address their own problems. Similarly, Holt claims that children are passionate and effective learners when they are given reason to believe that something is actually worth learning. Maybe a good way to think about it is something like: you don’t teach children, you just create conditions for them to learn (and similar for processing their own emotions). Having created the conditions, you don’t need to manage the process or sweat the outcome.

General Note

Most of the things I’ve discussed about children can probably apply in some way to relationships with other adults.