“The words ‘expect’ and ‘expectation’ are on the whole badly misunderstood and misused by most people who write about children. Most people use them as synonyms for ‘demand’ or ‘insist’ or ‘compel.’ When they say we should have higher expectations of children, they mean that we should demand that they do certain things and threaten to punish them if they do not. When I speak of expecting a lot of children, I only mean that we should not in our minds put an upper limit on what they may be able to do. I don’t mean that we should assume that they can, and therefore should, do certain things or be disappointed and worried if they do not – everyone has his own path and timetable into life.”

The 2 week hiatus that I had on discussing this book has actually been due to the aggressive manner in which I tackled the first 9 chapters. I originally read those chapters and picked the excerpts all in one weekend. It worked well in the sense that after the first couple chapters, I was really relying on what the excerpt itself said to me. Within a week I had read most of the book. Tonight, I picked it up again and re-read this chapter and selected the above excerpt to represent it.

I have discussed expectations with with a number of other parents. I also mentioned it in the Master Plan of Education. I grew up in a home where the expectations were low but the demands were high. An example of this was that one of my older brothers failed an early grade in school before I was born. From that point on we were all expected to fail in school. It was insisted that we do well, but the sense was there that we wouldn’t do well. Partly due to shyness and insecurity, I was someone who had no problem reading silently in grade one, yet stumbled badly when reading out loud. When the second last report card of the year came home the parental response led me to believe that I was going to fail which exacerbated the problem. They did almost fail me even though I was one of the best readers in the class. When it came time to read aloud, I was a nervous wreck.

If someone says they expect the weather to be good tomorrow, they are saying that they believe and have reason to believe that the weather will be good. They do not think that if they hadn’t said it that the weather would turn out different. But when someone says to a child, I expect you to do this and this and this, they are rarely saying that they believe and have reason to believe that the child will do it. In most instances, they are giving instructions to the child to compel it to carry out the tasks. By doing this what they are communicating is that we want you to do this but we expect that you wouldn’t unless we insisted that you do.

I have to say that I honestly believe that the majority of the social problems that exist in our society are due to the fact that the vast majority of the adults in our society were treated this way as children. When you plan children;s education down to the last detail, the expectation that cannot be eliminated from that situation is either that the children would not or could not learn those things on their own. If they could and would learn it on their own then you would not need to plan it for them. So, the folks who suggest that we ought to expect more of children are correct in saying so. However, if their recommended solution to the problem is retooling or extending the existing methodology in some fashion, they are misusing the word ‘expect’ as John Holt has suggested.

“It is important that we try to understand how the idea of help has been so largely corrupted and turned into a destructive exploitation, how the human act of helping is turned more and more into a commodity, an industry, and a monopoly.” (P. 79)

In a sense, this cuts pretty deep. One time I ran into a student outside of the college and he asked me a question that no one else has asked me about homeschooling. He asked, “Why would you want to homeschool?” He caught me so off guard I didn’t know quite what to say. We have had so many people ask us if we were qualified that the question of why someone with the qualifications and worked as part of the extended system would, came out of left field. Later I explained to him that I hadn’t expected it and that I saw the obvious logic in why he had asked.

Whether or not he intended it this way, what I felt the question asked was, why would someone be working in the extended system if he didn’t believe in it. What he probably didn’t know is that, the system aside, my main goal in teaching is to show my students that they can learn on their own.

“The person whose main lifework is helping others needs and must have others who need his help. The helper feeds and thrives on helplessness, creates the helplessness he needs.” (P. 79)

This reminds me of our social safety net. I know of third generation welfare recipients. In theory, social assistance might be a good idea. In reality, for many people, it becomes a crutch. One of the problems with it is that it doesn’t provide them with enough money to get off of it. As this quote relates to education the way the classroom setting is carried out creates a helplessness in the students. There is no point in doing anything on your own if you don’t know what you are going to be told to do next.

“It should not surprise up that the Russian police state now puts in ‘mental hospitals’ those who strongly and publicly object to its way of doing things and there subjects them to ‘treatment’ until they think or act as they are supposed to. Or that the miniature police states of our schools are more and more using strong drugs such as Ritalin on those children who do not, or will not, fit smoothly into its regime.” (P. 84)

How many of us know someone whose children were put on Ritalin and once they were taken out of school no longer needed it? Andrea wrote at length about Ritalin here.

“The only way we can fully protect someone against his own mistakes and the uncertainties of the world is to make him a slave. He is then defenseless before our whims and weaknesses.” (P. 86)

This immediately brought to mind those who fight/lobby for ‘children’s rights’. The thing is, they are not fighting for the child to have rights, but for the state or some other agency other than the parent to make decisions for the child. I believe that one of the most detrimental aspects of the current public school model is that it leaves almost no planning up to the child. In the long run, it may be this that has produced a society dependent on experts.

“And so the family home, which we often hear described as the place where we are free to be and dare to be nicer and kinder than we can be anywhere else, turn out much of the time to be the place where at least with our children harsher, more cruel, more contemptuous and insulting, than we would anywhere else.” (P. 77)

I considered posting this single quote on the tail end of chapter 7. But I wondered whether they were addressing the same issue. I have to be honest and say that I have a couple brothers who fit this description while I was growing up. The other thing that I thought about was the abuse that sometimes goes on inside of families whether it is spousal or child abuse. Somewhere in the last six months or so, I read an article where the person mentioned that fact that school causes most to compartmentalize their lives. Many adults endure pressures and stresses in the course of work and their ‘social activities’ that the only place they have where they are not under those is their home. While I’m not defending it, their anger and resentment toward those situations, gets taken out in the one place they feel they should be allowed to. It bothers me alot when I hear that it gets taken out on people who had no hand in producing it.

“For many years now, in all kinds of places and circumstances, I have noticed that most adults around children do not act as people do when they are with people they like, but very much the opposite. They are anxious, irritable, impatient, looking for fault and usually find it.” (P. 66)

My experience while growing up was that this was one of 2 groups of adults. I wouldn’t commit to the thought that most of the adults I knew were this way. The other group really enjoyed being around children. I still think the point that many adults feel this way about children is worth considering.

“There are many good reasons for this resentment and dislike. Until recently, children were less trouble to bring up.” (P. 66)

I think a more significant reason is that many people are not used to children being around them. If they work, they likely work in a place where there are no children. When they were a child, they spent most of their time away from adults other than those appointed to oversee them. I suspect the age segregation that occurs in schools, such that for the 3 or 4 years the average student is high school, older students are rarely around younger children.

“Furthermore, when formerly a child became more help and less trouble as he grew older, today he becomes less help and more trouble. Everything he needs, uses, or wants costs more as he gets older…” (P. 70)

Since this was written, marketing campaigns for many products have been adjusted to appeal to this consumer group. Although I don’t have the statistics to back it up, I would not be surprised to find that our consumption based economy is dependent on this consumer group.

UPDATE from Andrea: I did a quick search and found the following:

“Marketing to kids” in Milling & Baking News weekly, Oct. 4, 1994, p. 1, 20-26. Notes role of children in influencing $100 billion in food sales, 17% to 20% growth yearly in this influence, effects of changing roles of women combined with greater responsibility of children for their own food consumption decisions. Notes beginnings of brand loyalty among children as early as age 2, introduction of at least 650 food and grocery products for children over past five years. Cites growth of strategic alliances between child-oriented foods and media events or products such as movies, television programs, sportswear, and use of special child-oriented packaging and promotions. Notes influence of Food Guide Pyramid graphic in schools. (link)

“…it seems to me very unlikely that most of the human beings who have ever lived, doing work they needed to do to get their food, clothing and shelter and to maintain the structures of their community life, thought of this work as being a ‘struggle for survival.’ Is a person ‘struggling’ when he raises food which he will eat, or make clothing, or builds or fixes his dwelling? The notion is absurd.” (P. 62-63)

I’ve seen the phrase ‘struggle for survival’ used a few times. But what he points out here had never occurred to me. We can look back at life a couple centuries ago and come to the conclusion that they did struggle to survive compared to our life. I’m sure that at the time, people didn’t think of it that way. Do many people today talk about their own life as a struggle for survival?

In whatever age, life was what it was. There were periods of history where getting past the age of 45 was to have long life. Consider the people who live in remote areas of Nepal. It is the only life they have ever known.

“The trouble with modern man seems to me that he has made himself dependent on institutions that he can neither know nor control.. More and more he is not able, or even permitted, to act to meet his own basic needs. He can’t keep himself from getting ‘obese’ … without a committee of experts telling him how to do it.” (P. 63)

The way I’ve been doing these articles is that I pick out the quotes on the first read and then go back later, get the quotes and write based on the quotes alone. In this chapter, I’m not really sure that what I think of when reading the quotes is necessarily the main point of the chapter. I realized that in our society for most people the struggle is not over basic necessities but over things beyond our control. When I consider things like stress, I’ve found that it really grows out of situations where I have too little control.

As a family we avoid dependence on institutions where possible. An example is that we have never bought anything on the 6 months no interest no payments plan.

“A generation that does not believe it can make a future that it will like, or trust or love any future it can imagine, has nothing to pass onto and hence nothing to say to the young. It might seem a paradox that our society, which perhaps more than any that ever existed is obsessed with the need to control events, nature, people, everything, should feel more than any other that things are out of control.” (P. 57-58)

On the first statement, I think many homeschoolers are living out their opposition to this. Whether or not it is universal, what I’ve seen is that most people in my generation thought that it could be done, but they were not in the position to do anything about it. Many years ago someone told me, ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and you don’t get any closer to your destination until you take it.’ Instead of focusing on the future, we set out to make a present that we liked and sometimes accepted one which allowed us to go to sleep at night. When you approach it that way, it doesn’t matter how close you are to the thousand miles. As long as you are taking steps, you will be getting closer.
            

“We worship change and progress, the belief that the new must always be better than the old. We believe that we can change and improve on anything. And yet, we do not really believe that in any large sense we can change things to make them come out the way we like.
… We have created a false dream and called it Progress. … If newer and newer and more and more do not seem any longer to add up to the Good Life, we conclude there cannot be such a thing as a good life…”
(P. 58-59)

This reminded me of a buzz phrase I’ve heard often in the last five years or so. Someone will say, ‘We are going to move forward with this.’ As often as not, it is said in regard to something which was not an improvement over the current situation. This usage implies progress
whether or not the undertaking is actually going to improve anything. Again, I’ve found that homeschooling is not progress in the sense that most people use the term. But, C.S. Lewis said in one of his books that if you discover you are going the wrong way, turning around and going back is the only way you will make progress. Because homeschooling is turning around and going back 100 years in a step, it is true progress.

“Whatever is strong and healthy in families, whatever meets real human needs, enhances and enriches life, cannot and will not be threatened by what I propose here. Any institution that really works is immune to attack, however severe. Reality has its own strength. … Happily married couples who after many years get great strength and joy from each other’s company simply smile and go on with their life when they hear that marriage is nothing but a device for the exploitation of women, or whatever it may be. Their experience tells them better.” (P.
46)

In this, I think Holt is talking in terms of ideas or philosophies. Obviously, a family can be torn asunder by war, famine, etc. The main idea he presents in this chapter is that in our society to a
significant degree the family is broken. And the way our society tries to fix it typically does not work. The things in individual families that do work would continue to work even if the current social controls were eliminated.

The illustration he is leaning on is a marriage which works. Andrea and I may have looked at our marriage license a couple times in the last 10 years. It is not the license which keeps us married but the fact that overall, our marriage works. We rarely say to each other that such and such is your responsibility in the marriage. And the following quote does a nice job of summing up how this chapter applies to children.

“This notion that a child cannot grow up healthy unless he is at every moment under the eye of some adult who has nothing to do but watch over him is very modern.” (P. 49)

This I know to be true from personal experience. Beginning as young as 9, I often spent Saturday afternoons away from my family, in the woodland around home. In the summer I would also have chores to do which would last most of the day so I would only see my parents at mid morning/afternoon breaks and meals. Ironically, this book was written when I was about that age. Books written generations ago often involved children being on their own.

“We constantly ask ourselves, in anxiety and pain, ‘What is
best for the children, what is right for the children, what should we
do for the children?’ The question is an effect as well as a cause of
modern childhood. Until the institution was invented, it would hardly
have occurred to anyone to ask the question or, if they had, to suppose
that what was good for children was any different from what was good
for everyone else.” (P. 39)

Given the society we live on, it would be difficult for a caring parent
to not consider these questions. However, I expect most home educators
have already come up with different answers for these questions than
most parents in our society do. The question that I had never really
given much thought to is, why would the answers for children be
different for them from the answers for adults. I believe that the only
fundamental difference between children and adults in this area is that
the child has less experience to work from. And from that perspective,
focusing on ‘book learning’ is going to be more of a hindrance to them
than a help.

“Throughout most of the life of man, much of his work has
been hard, arduous, even exhausting, and often dangerous. But much of
it required strength, skill, and judgement; much of it was work he was
proud to do, and to do well; and hardly any of it seemed pointless. …
But with increasing specialization, industrialization, and
centralization, work became more remote and more meaningless and
hateful. … More and more adults did not want children to do the work
they did and, indeed, often did not want to do it themselves.” (P. 40)

This is the subject from this book which I understand best. I grew up
doing the ‘hard’ work. Although I made the choice for different
reasons, choosing programming as a career enabled me to produce work
which I could be proud of. Even though the industry has tried to turn
programming into a mechanical process due to pressure from the
bureaucracies it serves, there are still places where you can be both
creative and elegant in your programming. Open Source has survived
decades for that very reason. Contributors can build what they want,
how they want.

“Much of the meaning of man’s world was destroyed, at least
for most men, when his philosophers invented causality. For this
invention put the meaning of the present reality into the past, a past
which itself became increasingly unknowable and meaningless as human
life changed ever more rapidly. The principle of causality tells us
that everything that happens is a result of, and therefore caused by
and determined by, something that happened before.” (P. 42)

At first, I wondered why the changing topic throughout the chapter. In
hindsight, I saw that everything he spoke of related to a child
understanding the world he lived in.

One term in college, I had an eccentric communications teacher. On our
final exam she gave us the choice of writing an essay on 1 of 3
Murphy’s Laws. The one I chose was, ‘If any man examine his problem long enough, he will see himself as part of the problem.’
My essay explained that so long as there was something he could do
about the problem that he wasn’t doing, that made him part of the problem.
Alternatively, if there really was nothing he could do about the
situation, then it ceased to be a problem because he could not solve
it. He would have to accept it as a fact of life and move on.

Causality allows people to be up to their neck in problems without them
giving a moment’s thought to how they contributed to creating the
situation. Abusive spouses/parents blame the stress at work, alcohol,
drugs, financial stress or the abused themselves. Their behaviour does
not change because they have identified an external cause and turned
the examination of the problem away from themselves.

“A child asks, why is the fire burning? Because someone lit
it with a match. … The child wanted to know the point of what he
could see around him, but could get no answer. For if everything is a
result of something in the past, nothing has any point.” (P. 42-43)

Every small child I have had the opportunity to watch is intensely
interested in determining the purpose of things. Often they come up
with their own purpose and may use it for a while to do a number of
things. Eventually though, if it is something they don’t see bigger
people using, they usually ask what it is and what it is for. From an
educational perspective, I believe that this is the biggest pitfall of
traditional schooling. When I went to school, eventually we had all
decided that what we were learning had no point except as a means of
getting to something else.

“People used to see the meaning of life in terms of purpose. … (Things happened) so that something else could happen.” (P. 43)

There are two things that come to mind. First, the hard work necessary
in earlier generations pushed children to learn to plan, to create
purposes and to carry them out. To a significant degree, having modern
tools and conveniences eliminate this inherent lesson. Second,
schooling methods which rely on curriculum significantly reduce the
opportunities for the child to plan and create purposes because that
has already been done for them. And that is what I believe is the primary flaw in the current public education model.

“We might think of human life as a sort of curve… for every human
being that curve is a single curve, a wholeness.” (P. 25)

This is something that most home educators come to realize somewhere in
their career. But it is easy to understand how parents who send their
children off to school for 12 or more years do not see it.

 “We do not, like some insects, suddenly turn from one kind of creature
into another that is very different.” (P. 25)

For those who endure ‘traditional’ school, it must seem that we do. It
certainly did for me. Not that I felt that much different, but that I
had finally escaped the cocoon. If only this were said at every prom
and graduation ceremony. It wouldn’t hurt to have it said at weddings
either. Even though I had unconsciously dropped giving much credence to
the ‘important dates’ with which our society segments life, the above
statement had never really occurred to me.

“Here the fact of childhood ends and the institution of
childhood begins. Childhood as we now know it has divided that curve of
life, that wholeness, into two parts – one called Childhood, and the
other called Adulthood, or Maturity. It has made a Great Divide in
human life, and made us think that the people on opposite sides of this
divide, the Children and the Adults, are very different.” (P. 25)

A little over two years ago, I wrote a paper called “Unschooling for
Adults” for an adult ed course I was taking. In addition to my
experience teaching at a college level, I had brought years of
homeschooling experience to the class. The basic argument that I made
in the paper was that, even though educational experts distinguished
and separated discussion of childhood and adult education that I had
not found their needs to be a lot different.

If you are so inclined to take a course or two in the discipline of
adult education, what you will find is that virtually nothing that is
recommended for adult learners is implemented in the typical child
learning environment. Due to length restrictions, most of “Unschooling
for Adults” described the basics of a productive learning environment
for adults. The final few paragraphs explained what unschooling was and
how it fit the learning environment for adults.

“(This book) is about the institution of modern childhood,
the attitudes, customs, and laws that define and locate children in
modern life and determine to a large degree what their lives are like
and how we, their elders, treat them.” (P. 17)

I have arrived at the point that whenever I encounter the word
institution, I mentally shudder. Since I am already at odds with a
number of ways in which our society typically treats children. It looks
like I am going to like this book.

“For a long time it never occurred to me to question this institution.” (P. 17)

(Sigh) Me too. It is better late than never. Through questioning this
and other institutions, much of the world, as I formerly knew it,
unraveled.

“…if we are going to make a society and world in which
people will be not only able to live but also glad to live, and in
which the act of living will of itself make them more wise,
responsible, and competent, then, there are some things that we must
learn to do very differently.”

This conclusion is something that I tend to believe many home educating
parents have discovered on their own. In some ways, that conclusion is
virtually inevitable to any home educator who does do things
differently. That does not rule out the ability to go on denying it.

“The point is not to worry about what is possible but to do what we can.” (P. 22)    

The thing I often find discouraging in many of the work environments
I’ve been in is that any current problems tend to be fuel for a vision
for the future. Often current problems are ignored or endured in favour
of some grandiose plan which will take forever to implement.

I am not embarrassed to say that I am generally at odds with those
solutions. I am a very results oriented guy. I get things done. If
something is broken, my main concern is with finding out what is wrong
with it and what I need to do to get it fixed. There is time for
meetings and adjusting visions & plans after that is done.

For years, I blamed this on the marketing driven economy. But now I
wonder if I shouldn’t be blaming the marketing driven economy on the
principle of causality.