Empowering Young Children

Respecting Children’s Unique Perspectives

Kids’ inner workings, desires, thoughts and ideas are just as worthy as those of adults’. They experience life in distinct and unusual ways, making them powerful teachers and philosophers. However, most children have very little control over their time, their thoughts or their behaviors. Often, because they still need care and guidance, children’s voices and opinions are discounted from meaningful deliberation and decision-making. Children are not merely unformed adults; they are human beings in their own right. And yet, children are routinely disenfranchised in their homes and in their schools. More and more, kids’ lives are structured, scheduled up and bossed around by adults all day, every day.

Suppose instead that we listened to and respected children’s perspectives and held their questions in high regard. What if we let kids decide how to spend their own time, or trusted their intuitive responses? What if we empowered children to learn and grow the way they have naturally evolved and developed, without imposing our agendas on them? What if we let them choose how to fully spend one school day a week, or one day a month? Suppose they did choose to spend that whole day at recess, or to finally experiment with the science and math materials the way they wanted to? What if their school curriculum was focused on exploring and explaining those things that kids were wildly interested in?

Challenging Social Facts

Empowering children means taking their perspectives – listening to them and checking our own biases. It also may require a rethinking of our systems of education, which are rarely set up from the child’s perspective. Granted, top-down structure can and does make everything easier for those in power; it makes learning appear linear and visible and sets up an accountability structure for teachers. The trouble is, the best learning is rarely linear or visible. We need to reassess what we’re up to when we see, for instance, well-meaning teachers disrupting kids that are in a flow state at recess (perhaps adding and subtracting rocks from a puddle), in order to transition them inside to math class, to complete, say, an addition and subtraction worksheet. Instances like this are commonplace in schools when rigid schedules and top-down directions rule the day. This has created a significant mismatch between how young children best learn and how schools typically operate.

Here is a question to illustrate this mismatch: did you study a foreign language in school? Do you speak that language fluently today? If you were lucky enough to grow up in a country that starts second language instruction in early childhood, you very well might. But if you grew up in a country that begins second language instruction in middle or high school (like most schools in the U.S.) and did not ever live in a place that speaks the lan- guage you studied, I can predict with close to 100% certainty that you do not. Decades of cognitive science and neuroscience research has shown that children’s brains are staggeringly adept at learning languages when they are young, but this learning has a critical period (defined by closing off synapses and elimin- ating myelination). By puberty, it becomes exponentially harder to learn a second language (and close to impossible to learn to speak it as a native speaker would) (Lee, Meltzoff, & Kuhl 2020). Yet, most schools in the U.S. begin teaching second languages in middle or high school, at the exact moment when it becomes impossible to learn, rendering all of that instruction useless. Why would we set up schools that way? These choices may be made out of tradition or convenience. But often they are based on social facts that haven’t been questioned in a long time, if ever. And the folks who best understand how children learn (who sit upon moun- tains of systematic, solid research such as this) almost never talk to the folks who decide on the mandated curriculum for kids. They don’t talk to each other because they don’t even know each other. It’s as if they don’t even speak the same language.

The ways that we raise and educate our children are beset with unexamined assumptions that need to be revisited and challenged. French sociologist Emile Durkheim called mechanisms that control us (which we are largely unaware of) “social facts” (Durkheim, 1938). This book asks us to question the social facts about kids and learning and school and society. We must shake up our version of what has to be in educational contexts, and to do that, we must reconsider all of the social facts about the children in our midst. But in order to challenge the social facts, first we need to notice them – this will take close attention in addition to bravery. Every time we are faced with a social fact “have-to” as in, “Kids have to start learning to read in kindergarten,” we can challenge that thinking by going to counter-examples in our own experience, throughout history or across cultures.

Another key way to challenge social facts about kids and school is to turn to the empirical research on child develop- ment and cognitive science. Decades of carefully designed and implemented studies are there to help us strengthen our resolve about how kids best learn. Peer-reviewed scientific research on children’s learning has flourished in recent decades, and although it is not without bias, cognitive and developmental science researchers lack any direct conflict of interest with early childhood educational institutions. They are helping us to under- stand the brain and mind purely for the sake of furthering know- ledge. Social science experts use processes that hopefully limit bias and approach some sort of objectivity via the peer review process. We can hold that knowledge about children in our back pockets. It can bolster us. Along with our valuable first-hand experiences and intuitions, empirical science can be a powerful source of information on what we know about children and learning. This book is a call to make choices about parenting and educating children which are in synchrony with our best understanding about the ways their minds and brains develop.