Taking Children Seriously:
The Final Phase of The Enlightenment

Sarah Fitz-Claridge

Taking Children Seriously (TCS) is the name of an organisation I founded to promote the Libertarian educational philosophy.

How can there be such a thing as the Libertarian educational philosophy? Aren't parents in a Libertarian society free to educate their children in any way they wish?

Yes. But that doesn't make every possible choice morally right, or best for the child, or compatible with the survival of the Libertarian society. To satisfy these criteria, we must look more deeply than Libertarian political philosophy – which is basically about how a society can run without the initiation of physical force.

What justifies both Libertarian political philosophy and TCS education theory in my opinion is reason – something which, I fear, has yet to emerge in the spheres of education and childrearing.

do a very good job of bringing their children up to believe in authority and obedience to dictators, whether parents or the state. Recently, I had the misfortune to be present when someone I know was subjected to a violent attack by his parent. I was very shaken and didn't throw myself between my young friend and the angry adult, but I did manage to pluck up the courage (once I poked my head up from behind the sofa where I was hiding) to express the opinion that hitting children may not be the best way to deal with disagreements, and that it may not be entirely morally unobjectionable. Perhaps I was less diplomatic than The Parent thought appropriate, because he accused me of trying to coerce him into changing his parenting practices, and then played the “children-are-property” card: “It's none of your business how I raise my child.”

Let me give an example:

There are two kinds of country which have the US constitution. There are those which, after they have instituted the US constitution, get an open society in which all the constitutionally-protected human rights are respected (such as in the US itself), and there are those which just ignore the constitution. Merely introducing a Libertarian constitution would not ensure that liberty was actually respected.

(If you're thinking that the US isn't an example of a country in which all the constitutionally-protected human rights are actually respected, and that in fact the US constitution is often violated, that just makes my point more strongly. If America isn't a place where the rights laid down in the US Constitution are respected, what makes you think that, after it's replaced by a new Libertarian Constitution, whether written or unwritten, the resulting society will respect that constitution?)

In 1989, Nigeria instituted a constitution strikingly similar to that of the US. But has it produced a society like the US in terms of rights being respected? Not exactly. Not unless you're being very uncharitable to the US.

What's the difference? Would Nigeria become a Libertarian society if it were lucky enough to have a constitution designed for it by the good people at ISIL? No. If anything, adopting a Libertarian constitution would result in even more of a mess.

When the US constitution was adopted in America, most people in the society (or at least the people who counted) were intellectually convinced that this constitution was right; but the overwhelming majority of Nigerians would be convinced that the ISIL constitution was not for them. Much as it would be in their interests to adopt an ISIL constitution, the idea is a non-starter. And if it were somehow implemented, people simply wouldn't act that way. The Nigerians couldn't even behave in accordance with the US constitution, let alone a better one.

So having the right constitution or laws alone will not get you a Libertarian society. You need the right sort of people. You need people with the right ideas.

Now – here is a third way in which education theory and Libertarian political theory are linked:

Some Libertarians believe that children have rights, perhaps the same rights as adults. An intermediate position is that children have no rights other than to leave home and find new parents. At the other end of the spectrum are Libertarians who believe that children are, more or less, property, because the parents buy the food which makes up the molecules of their bodies. These different versions of Libertarian ideas would have different implications for how parents would be allowed to educate their children, even in a Libertarian society – even in a Libertarian-anarchist society.

For instance, at this moment there are thousands of children all over the country who want to leave home (or to leave school, or refuse consent to medical procedures and so on), and in many of those cases the parents are violently overriding their wishes, with the authority and assistance of the state as well as of most bystanders on whose assistance the parents choose to call. Now imagine that an anarchist revolution is achieved. What will happen next?

Some of the anarchists will regard all that parental violence as justified. Others will regard it as the epitome of injustice.

The two kinds of people will think it legitimate violently to assist whichever side they think is in the right.

If a civil war ensues – this isn't so farfetched: something very similar happened in regard to slaves, following an earlier revolution for liberty – it will be because although the individuals in that society agreed that violence is legitimate only in self-defence – they disagreed about which entities have a ‘self’ in the appropriate sense.

Now you may wish that everyone agreed with your particular conception of Libertarianism. But although you may well have stumbled upon the ultimate truth about what a Libertarian society should be like, you have to admit you've failed to hit upon the ultimate truth about how to propagate that idea to each other – let alone to the next generation.

What we are discussing here is a kind of knowledge. This knowledge is philosophical, it is epistemological, it is psychological. It is knowledge that is necessary for the functioning of a Libertarian society, but it can't be derived from Libertarian principles.

It's the knowledge of what sort of citizen would make a society which is nominally Libertarian actually function as such. That includes knowledge in the mind of such a citizen.

Does it include the knowledge of how to make such a citizen? Not exactly. I don't believe it's either moral or rational to bring up children to propagate a certain political view. Such a thing should be anathema to any advocate of liberty, and in my opinion, to any decent parent too.

What I am trying to illustrate with these examples – the libertarian society that dies after a generation; the nominally libertarian society imposed on people with non-libertarian ideas; the civil war about children's rights – is that a functioning Libertarian society will depend on the existence of knowledge that cannot be obtained from Libertarian principles alone.

To discover such knowledge we must look to what underlies those principles themselves.

In my opinion, their underlying justification is epistemology. Applied epistemology is otherwise known as education theory.

It is important to seek an education theory that grows from the same roots as Libertarianism, but it is a colossal mistake to try to derive educational theory from Libertarianism.

The main reason I'm a Libertarian is that I believe that human beings are fallible. That the powerful, in particular, are fallible and can't be trusted to be right. Not kings, not bureaucrats – and not parents or teachers either.

So I agree with Karl Popper that the question isn't ‘who should rule?‘ but ‘how can we limit the harm they do?‘

In education theory, the ‘who should rule?‘ debate is still alive and virtually unchallenged. Should it be parents? Teachers? School boards? The government? The UN...? (A better answer would of course be me.)

And as always when you start with that question, the answer is tyranny. The real question is: how can institutions be set up within a family in such a way that no one – including the children – is ruled.

So that differences of opinion can be resolved, not only without the initiation or threat of force (which is as far as Libertarian theory can possibly take us), but without force at all: by reason, which implies by consent.

Libertarians today differ about many things – I have already mentioned children's rights – but also whether, say, intellectual property is really property, whether abortion is murder or not, and so on. What we really want, and the whole point of a Libertarian society, and of a free society in general as I see it, is not to entrench particular answers to such questions, but to allow bad answers to be replaced by better ones. A fixed rule, such as ‘the parent is always right’ is inherently irrational and will systematically pick the wrong answer. Family institutions that enforce such a rule are irrational.

As good Libertarians and good parents, we should want our children to be able to correct our errors. And by “able”, we should mean not just legally able (that is to say, they won't be thrown in prison or punished by their parents if they try) but psychologically able to, which means that they won't feel fear or guilt or the weight of parental disapproval if they try.

What we need – what TCS provides – is a completely different rhythm of family life; as different as an open society is from a paternalistic dictatorship.

To understand Libertarianism you have to understand that living in liberty isn't just a pleasant experience, like eating raspberries. Liberty isn't just a good, it's a condition for goods to be created.

Similarly, tyranny – the initiation of force – isn't just an unpleasant experience, like having a large teganaria giganiticus charging at your bare feet from across the room (if you hate spiders, that is!)

As soon as you do think of it in that subjective way, you miss the point, and lay yourself open to wicked arguments about tradeoffs – “So, Mr Irresponsible Libertarian, how many children are you willing to see die of heroin poisoning or in gun accidents, just to give you the nice warm feeling of living in liberty?”

It isn't that ‘some people hate spiders, some people hate taxes’. Those are not the same kind of thing. The Libertarians' hatred of taxation is structurally different. John Gray, who wrote that deplorably defeatist book Liberalisms, disagrees, but he's wrong.

There is something more than personal preferences underlying the liberalisms, in particular Libertarianism, and it does make sense, and it's reason.

The reason for the Libertarian hatred of taxation is that the institution of taxation is, in an extended sense, irrational. Not necessarily in the narrow sense that the word “rational” has historically been used, but in the most general sense: There are patterns of thinking that can work (that is, create the knowledge needed to solve the problems and meet the preferences of the person doing the thinking), and patterns that can't work (except by unlikely coincidence). For instance, logical deduction can work when trying to solve a mathematical problem, but, as generations of exam-takers have found, prayer cannot. Scientific reasoning can work when trying to understand the physical world, but logical deduction in the absence of experimentation cannot, and nor can prayer.

Rationalism is the theory that the patterns of thinking that can work are the rational ones – where the exact criterion for a process being ‘rational’ depends on which species of rationalism one adopts. The one appropriate to TCS is the same as the one that I believe is appropriate to the liberalisms in general and to Libertarianism in particular: it is what is known as ‘critical rationalism’, but with the proviso that we include unconscious and inexplicit knowledge and thought uniformly in our scheme of things. (Thus a rational process need not rely on verbal reasoning.) As fallibilists, we don't expect there to be a closed definition of ‘rational’: the exact criteria are always under critical review.

To be ‘rational’ in the fallibilist, critical-rationalist sense, a process has to be truth-seeking, evolutionary, open to new ideas and to criticism of old ones, avoid entrenchment of particular ideas, judge ideas according to content rather than source ... and so on.

In science, these criteria lead to Popper's conclusion that theories about measurable phenomena must be experimentally testable if progress is to be possible. In political theory, they lead to Libertarianism. In psychology and education theory, they lead to TCS.

The places where reason has gained substantial ground over the last few hundred years, are specifically, in the areas of human rights, and in the economy, and in science. If we call this the Enlightenment in the public sphere, TCS is about extending the Enlightenment into the private sphere, and specifically into the sphere of child rearing.

We ask, applying the same philosophical principles as underlie the Enlightenment generally, what sort of institutions within the family promote the growth of knowledge in the same sense that the external laws of a Libertarian society promote the growth of knowledge in the society as a whole, and the rules of the scientific community promote the growth of scientific knowledge.

You can define a Libertarian society as one in which political issues are decided by reason rather than force or blind obedience to tradition.

In a non-Libertarian society, if I earn a hundred pounds, the criterion of choosing how that should be spent isn't unanimous agreement between all the parties, it's voting, and ultimately the use of police power to take the money from me against my will. Whereas in a Libertarian society, every possible use of the money I earn has to have my consent. So in society at large, the alternative to consent is force.

But in human relationships the absence of consent doesn't necessarily amount to force. It's a wider class of behaviours, which includes force: there are many patterns of interaction between people in close relationships that don't resolve issues by reason at all, yet don't involve force either.

When a parent gives Little Billy a telling off, she may use no physical force and no overt threat of force, but it is still not reason. Despite this being a ‘mere’ exercise of the parent's freedom of speech, little Billy does not consent to it. Even while he is having the flow of ideas initiated in his mind by the telling-off, he simultaneously wishes he were not.

When a parent gives Sally a choice between, on the one hand, taking out the rubbish and having dinner, and on the other hand, not getting any dinner, she is acting in such a way to put Sally into the psychological state of enacting one theory while one or more conflicting theories remain active in her mind. She is causing Sally to act literally against her will. Sally doesn't want to take out the rubbish but fear of not getting any dinner effectively forces her to do so.

Even making disappointed faces at your children to shame them into complying works in the same way, psychologically, instead of causing a genuine, FREE change of mind.

Some Libertarians I know force their children to eat everything on their plate – presumably not on the basis that there are starving children in Africa – no doubt they have some other pseudo-justification for this viciously immoral and harmful practice, but the psychological effect upon the child is the same either way.

It may not be state tyranny, but if you are being controlled by someone else, it feels bad whether it is the state or your parent. And in both cases, life would be better for all if reason were applied instead of force.

Reason also requires seeking truth, because if you are not seeking truth, you are unlikely to find it. It is because rational processes seek a common and objective truth that they tend to reach agreement, and it is this tendency that powers the continual discovery of ‘common preferences’ that replaces the command structure of conventional education and parenting.

Seeking the truth requires remaining open to criticism and change, because otherwise you will fail to drop false theories even when better ones are to hand. Failing to drop refuted theories is incompatible with reason. But that is exactly what a child is required to do, when he is coerced into learning something against his will. He prefers one activity; perforce he engages in another. This is irrational. And because it is irrational, it fails to create knowledge. Rote learning isn't knowledge in the true sense, merely the semblance of knowledge, just as inflated money is the semblance of wealth.

Judging ideas by their source rather than their content is incompatible with reason – so ‘mother knows best’, and ‘because I say so’ are the archetypes of irrational child-rearing just as much as using the parent's physical strength to settle a dispute would be.

So what TCS asks is of a piece with what Libertarianism asks in regard to politics and economics, namely: what ‘rules of engagement’ in interpersonal relationships have the property that rival ideas will be judged by reason (and can therefore approach the truth)? This is what leads us to TCS educational theory, whose most striking feature, especially to the newcomer, is the idea that it is desirable and possible to bring up children without doing things to them against their will.

Just as an economic transaction takes place only with the unanimous consent of all parties, so TCS family life seeks the unanimous consent of the family members – including the children.

The TCS project is the construction of institutions within the family which do for the growth of knowledge there what the public institutions of capitalism, common law and so on do for the growth of wealth, science and other knowledge that involves the cooperation of strangers. So TCS is the final, most difficult, but also the most valuable, stage of the Enlightenment.

The future of liberty is TCS.

Criticism welcome! If you would like to comment, email me at sarahfitz-claridge.com.

Transcript of a speech I gave at Frihetsfronten's Summer Seminar near Stockholm, Sweden, August 18th, 2001, Tips for Tyrants Published by the Libertarian Alliance.

Some comments on John Gray's Liberalisms.

Adventures in Quebec City: Diary of a Reluctant Counter Demonstrator Published in Freedom Network News April-June 2001.

Adult Wrongs Don't Make Youth Rights: Given at the American University, Washington, DC, in April, 2002.

An editorial I wrote in the wake of the Bill Clinton impeachment trial: Lying About Lying Published in Taking Children Seriously.

Against Sharing Equally Published in Taking Children Seriously.

Index of articles, papers and speech transcripts by Sarah Fitz-Claridge

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Sarah Fitz-Claridge, formerly Sarah Lawrence; Sarah Fitz-Claridge, formerly Sarah Lawrence

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