John Holt – 10. The Competence of Children

“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.