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Writer's pictureChristen Parker-Yarnal

Forced learning: a self-fulfilling prophecy

Perhaps you’ve heard or believe yourself that “Children must be forced to learn.” We’ve had many parents come tour our school - where learning is not forced -  that say some version of, “oh, if you just let her/him choose, they’ll never read, do math, learn anything.” Or “they’ll need adult encouragement to do anything besides sit around or play video games.”

Self-directed learning

It’s heartbreaking to hear these things said about vibrant young human beings. Humans are naturally curious, creative, social creatures who are learning all the time. It’s how we’ve survived this long as an otherwise physically weak and defenseless species.


So how is it that at this moment in human history our young are suddenly not intrinsically motivated and learning by choice? How is it we suddenly need to force our youth to do anything more than lay around and entertain themselves?


We could totally blame technology or helicopter parenting, but we think we must challenge the practices of schooling today that have reinforced the underlying belief that comes out in statements like, “my child has to be forced to learn anything.”


Have you ever been forced to do something that you might have otherwise enjoyed had it not been forced? An obligatory party or maybe “mandatory fun” at a work team-building event? Chocolate cake if fairly widely regarded as something delicious that people would want to eat, but if it were forced upon us many of us would become suspicious about why force would be necessary, and we might be wary or even refuse.


Healthy eating, exercise - these are joys when chosen and oppressive chores when we feel they’re forced upon us.


Why would our children be any different about learning to read, write, calculate, or critically think? These are are parts of human life that are intrinsically useful and rewarding and 100% learnable without any kind of force or cohersion.

Math skills
Self-directed learning

If you don’t believe this is true it may simply mean you’re also so used to the forcing of children that it’s hard to imagine anything different. We all know and feel comfortable with what we’re used to and it’s always hard to imagine beyond our own experiences.


Yet you absolutely have so many experiences of learning without force. We would bet most of your most cherished or powerful learning experiences came without force. They came by choice. You got excited about something and did a deep dive into learning about it - by choice. You needed to learn something for physical, social, or professional survival and you feel so proud of yourself for seeking and working hard - by choice. You think fondly of times when you invented something on your own or you and some friends went down a creative rabbit hole and had a great time exploring and thriving together.


We see our young children learn their first languages quite naturally, without classes and forcing. They learn to crawl then walk and often bike without much in the way of force. Would we ever say that our baby would just lay there and never crawl unless we set up a program of rigorous study with homework and grades? No! They’re amazing naturals at wanting to explore the world around them.


This really does not need to stop at crawling, walking, and talking! We’ve somehow all been told that it comes to a screeching halt at age 5 and then they must be enrolled in a school where the adult curriculum and agenda take over in full force - with full force.


Because they have suddenly been treated as incapable of directing their own learning, this is exactly what starts to happen!


Going from natural self-direction and creative exploration to a rigidly structured day in which their interests are largely irrelevant to the day’s activities for some is partly exciting at first - it’s a new activity proposed by adults and supported by their parents. But then their human nature starts to bristle - as it should!


“They were so excited to start kindergarten but now they don’t want to go to school.” Is it any wonder? The reading that could be a joy is often broken into largely meaningless parts that don’t hold joy or story, they hold expectations of performance. Children naturally like to count things, but now it’s not about ordering the natural world but rather pleasing an adult who tells them how important these numbers on a paper are - even though they don’t look particularly interesting or meaningful to the children themselves.


And so what are our children really learning as they sit through well-meaning reading and math instruction? They’re learning they must be forced to learn.


Is this really the lesson we want them to absorb and take with them into early and later adulthood? Because that’s what their learning - make no mistake.


The youth that come to our Sudbury school of choices (not force) who have spent more than a few years in schools of forced learning actually do often have a hard time self-motivating. Is it any wonder? They’ve learned from experience that it does no good to have your own agenda - it’s the agenda of the teacher that matters, so many of them drop those now unless interests and stop struggling to learn by choice.

They’ve learned to wait for instruction. They’ve learned that what will be praised and rewarded is usually something they’re not naturally interested in - or not yet naturally adept at. We sadly say that those young people become averse to anything that smells like learning, while also only being able to identify learning as something that comes from outside themselves.


It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. They were told they needed to be forced and so now they believe it.


They often have to unlearn this message for a while - often in relation to the length of time they


This is why we say that the younger a person can start at a Sudbury school the better. The longer they have to practice identifying, valuing, and following their interests and their inner voices the better they get at it! The longer we can protect them from the harmful message that they must be forced to learn, the more naturally they will learn by choice.

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