I Trust Children With Freedom

I trust children with freedom from the moment they are born.

Yes, I must keep a sharp eye on a toddler around traffic because they've not yet developed the judgement to be cautious around moving cars. Until they do, it's my responsibility to protect them from their own inexperience and serve as an extension of their executive function.

Yes, contemporary life requires us to, at least sometimes, be in certain places at certain times. Toddlers have not yet developed the ability to consider the future in concrete terms. Until they do, it's my responsibility to serve as their scheduling secretary.

And yes, toddlers are not always aware of the conventions of courtesy, those words and behaviors that remove some of the pain and doubt from our social interactions. Until they do, it's my responsibility to help them develop a theory of mind by showing them how their behaviors impact others, and to role model courtesy in my interactions with them.

But that doesn't mean I don't trust them with freedom. 

As an educator, I undertake my responsibilities by ensure that the places in which we gather are safe enough so that they may exercise their freedom without undue risk. I am responsible for creating predictable routines so that they may exercise their freedom with a degree of confidence about what the future holds. And I am responsible for role modeling the courtesy, the human dignity, that is due all free human beings, themselves included.

There are those who would say that what I'm calling "responsibilities" are just a new way to talking about bars in a cage, and they certainly can be used in that way. They often are. The reason that I feel I must assert that I trust children with freedom is that too many adults conflate their responsibilities toward children with being their superiors in all things. It's one thing to prevent a toddler from running into traffic "for their own good" and quite another to insist that they attend to this particular dull lesson, to walk in straight lines, or to sit obediently at a desk for hours on end "for their own good."

I trust children with their own curiosity, with their own questions, and with their own pursuit of answers because the freedom to think for oneself is the freedom that makes the other freedoms -- freedoms of speech or assembly or the right to vote, for instance -- mean anything at all. Maybe the reason so many believe that children can't handle freedom and autonomy is that we are judging their capabilities within a system (standard schooling) where freedom and autonomy aren't welcome: where children are not trusted with freedom.

Freedom is meaningless without responsibility. I am responsible for keeping children alive and relatively unharmed because without life there is only the freedom of the grave. For the same reason, I must prevent them from harming others and role model the alternatives. And I am responsible for allowing them to see that their own freedom is only possible when we take responsibility for how we treat others, because without it we are alone and that way lies insanity.

Freedom and responsibility go hand-in-hand. It's tempting to say that they lie on a spectrum and that the goal is to find balance. But the truth is that one simply does not exist without the other. They are indivisible. Freedom without responsibility is psychopathy. Responsibility without freedom is slavery. 

I trust children with freedom because they are my fellow human beings. And what I've found is that when children are trusted with freedom can also be trusted with responsibility, because they are one and the same.

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!