What Is Humanizing Education? The Human Rights of Children – Part 5

By Demetrius Haddock, GDN Contributing Writer

Designed after the Civil War in the echo of enslavement and alongside legal segregation, our public school model is linked to both of these dehumanizing systems. That is not a problem solely for Black children; it is a problem for all children since the human rights of children were not part of the design.

In this final part of the Humanizing Education series, I will share a lie, a secret, and a dare.

The lie (or partial truth) 

Let’s begin with the lie. Well, it is not so much a lie as a partial truth: All men are created equal. It is more accurate to say that all people are created equal as dependent and vulnerable children. We all must pass through childhood before becoming adults, with no exceptions, starting life unable to freely move on their own—many just barely able to hold up their heads, if that. We also start life unable to speak or understand others. Crying is the first form of communication. That is how dependent and vulnerable they are.

Then, we slowly over the course of the first year develop the ability to crawl and pull ourselves up into a standing position. We expand to cooing, babbling, and finally saying their “first word.” By the second year, we will walk, jump and run with a lot of stumbling and falling and we start forming simple words and phrases like “all done.”

Extremely dependent and vulnerable, children thus need “special safeguards and care” to mature physically and mentally to their full potential. Since children naturally learn all the time, they do not need much teaching in terms of instruction. Most children’s brains do not develop the capacity to reason until about age seven or eight, so from a child’s perspective, much of our logic and reasoning as adults is nonsense anyway. Of course, nonsense works against genuine learning and curiosity.

What would happen if we “taught” children to walk and talk? What impact would “walking classes” have on children? How about “talking classes?” It would be mostly nonsense and children must be protected from nonsense.

What is the point of learning nonsense? An even worse consideration would be ranking and grading children as they “learn” nonsense. Would two-month-olds stand a chance against two-year-olds or even one-year-olds? Trust, autonomy, and initiative are infinitely more important than the size of the vocabulary of a six-year-old. The content is not the most important thing; the child’s development is. There is no way that women and men can be created equal until children are.

The secret (or little-known truth) 

Children naturally develop autonomy and initiative but that is rooted in trust. They do not need rewards when allowed to pursue their natural interests and curiosity. Bribes and coercion are necessary when teaching nonsense or trivia. In his book Insult to Intelligence, Dr. Frank Smith wrote, “Children work very hard in their purposeful endeavors in the world when they have ends they want to accomplish themselves. It is meaningless teaching, not learning, that demands irrelevant incentives.”

Teaching with programmatic instruction does not improve learning; it does the opposite. Learning is rooted in meaning-making and no one can make meaning “for” another. They can however foster a learning disability when children are not allowed to be the primary voice in their own learning.

Although we claim to protect children from violence, coercing them with rewards and punishments while disabling their autonomy and initiative is mental violence against their healthy development. Our rigid compulsory programs ignore their natural interests, and we then grade and rank them with no care for their lack of interest. Even replacing standardized testing with progress monitoring or standards-based grading is still more of the same mental violence based on the same manufactured crisis of student mediocrity. We would still be “singling out” our children to carry the burden for businesses’ failures. Why hold our children to account?

Adopted on November 20, 1989, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) not only states that each child has “the right to protection from all forms of physical or mental violence,” but also “the right to express views freely in all matters affecting [them], and the right to be heard.” What could be more important than a child’s freedom to voice his or her own interests and be listened to?

The CRC lays out “the right to education” for children and several protections that ensure “the best interests of the child” and the development of “the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential.” According to CRC, education must respect the child’s parents, his or her own cultural identity, the natural environment, and the preparation of the child for responsible life in a free society. Equally important, children have “the right to rest and leisure [and] to engage in play.”

Here is the secret: Despite the Clinton Administration’s signature in 1994, the United States, over three decades after the 1989 CRC adoption, is still the only UN member nation that has not ratified the convention. The time has come for the United States to join the rest of the world. Humanizing education is nearly impossible to provide without an affirmative statement on the human rights of children.

The dare (or truth for a healthy future)

Children learn best in healthy, enriching environments that attend to the whole child’s growth and well-being. Curiosity and wonder are vitally important and deeply rooted in each child’s joy, humor, and playfulness. What begins as playful imitation will likely turn to focused exploration and examination as a child discovers a sense of purpose and service to the larger community.

In the class of self-evident truths, children are human beings with human rights at birth. We can easily add to that the notion that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution extends to each of us birthright citizenship. Therefore, citizenship also begins at birth, not at our eighteenth birthday. So, as dependent and vulnerable children, we are all citizens with all of the privileges, immunities, due process, and equal protections of such.

Here is the dare: Treat children as full citizens from birth with special protections and care given to ensure that they can fully exercise all of their freedoms and rights as they mature to understand and preserve those rights for themselves. Let’s redesign the schools we have inherited. As the saying goes, “I dare you.”

Children are not machinery to be tested or animals to be conditioned or manipulated to serve the whims and desires of others. Their lives belong to them and the discovery of purpose is the most meaningful endeavor in life. Schools that center around this discovery are humanizing.

All the various activities in schools should support, not supersede, the child’s healthy growth, development, and sense of purpose. A mechanical, life-draining classroom will not prepare children for the challenges of the current century. Wake up! Our children need our protection.