3 Listen to an early childhood educator and observe children

I want to say that the main message of this lecture is can we shut away the idea that children are puppets? They’re not. They are people. As the great Italian educationalist said, ‘They have one hundred languages, a hundred thoughts, a hundred ways of listening, marvelling, loving, singing and understanding,’ and he added, ‘School and culture steal 99 of these and tell the child to listen and not speak, to understand without joy. But, despite this,’ he added, ‘young children are strong and powerful.’ So why do we treat these remarkable people as if they’re puppets who must be forced to go to school and forced to learn? I would like to argue that we’ve got to rethink compulsory schooling. After all, most young people would go to school willingly. They work very hard and creatively. In one school, we gave cameras to the children and said will you take pictures of the things that you most value in your school and the way you think your rights are most respected, and one of the subjects they created were pictures to express their affection for their teachers. Adults, we assume, work and learn better voluntarily; not when they’re forced to. Are children and young people so very different? So, in conclusion, I hope you will agree that in some ways adulthood and childhood overlap; that many of the differences result much more from the way we misperceive, mistreat children than from children’s actual incapacities; that a rigid double standard of respect and rights for adults and compulsion and control for children is not principled or productive. And so, how can children be responsible agents within enforced helpless dependence; and an eight-year-old succinctly told me, summing up how rights in school tend to be either trivialised or made very remote and distant, “It’s so boring when they keep telling you that making the world a better place means picking up litter and not killing whales.” Where does children’s rights come in there? This is called an inaugural lecture and I suppose the idea came from a youngish professor inaugurating or instituting a program of work over the next 20 years or so. Well, I haven’t got that long time ahead of me, so instead I hope that the Institute will inaugurate a program for the next 100 years. I hope it will be led by Marion Richardson faith in sincere free relationships; and the nineteenth-century working people’s views that learners go first and the master would follow, as is already practiced in many earlier centres and schools and colleges around the world. I hope the programme will explore the problems and the creative solutions and the many advantages of non-compulsory schooling. It would cut layers of management. That would release resources for much better student–teacher ratios and relationships. Then, learners and teachers could be far more co-creators of education. This would be based on valuing the intrinsic rewards of learning, rather than having to have forcing or bribing people, but it would involve rethinking the meaning and relevance of childhood, children’s competencies and rights, and it would change society’s attitudes towards children. Schools can’t do it on their own as little islands in society, and the programme will be informed by the UN convention principle that respecting the inherent worth and dignity and the inalienable rights of all members of the human family promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedoms, and lays foundations for justice and peace in the world that we so desperately need. Thank you.