Sarah Fitz-Claridge - Taking Children Seriously

**Sarah Fitz-Claridge** (0:00)
What children should be learning is what they want, is what interests them, is how to solve problems.
They don't learn that by being institutionalized for 12 years and bossed about by an authoritarian teacher who doesn't know very much. They just, it's an insane idea.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:24)
Hey, folks, and welcome to the Lunar Society Podcast. Today, I had the great pleasure of talking with Sarah Fitz-Claridge. Sarah is a writer, coach, and speaker with a fallibilist worldview. She started a journal that became Taking Children Seriously in the early 1990s after being surprised by the heated audience reactions that she was getting when talking about children. She has spoken all over the world about her educational philosophy, and you can find transcripts of some of her talks on her website at fitzclaridge.com. And the link to that will also be in the description.
So we had a very interesting conversation. I'm broadly sympathetic with Sarah's role view, though I do have my differences. So I had a lot of fun playing Devil's Advocate. But whether you agree with her or not, Sarah is an incredibly original and first principles thinker about how our society treats children. So without further ado, here's Sarah Fitz-Claridge.
So Sarah, can you explain what Taking Children Seriously is?

**Sarah Fitz-Claridge** (1:26)
Yes, Taking Children Seriously is an educational philosophy that takes seriously the idea that human beings are fallible, and that includes parents. So instead of interacting with our children coercively, we are trying to create consent with them. We're trying to find solutions to problems that don't involve coercion, because coercion decides issues under an irrational institution. It embodies the theory that might makes right, which is false. So we don't do that. It's actually a new view of children in that the standard view of children is a bit like the view of women before they were emancipated or say black people when they were slaves in America. It's not that they're not people.
They are people. This is the standard view, but they're not quite able to control their own lives. They need a benevolent, patriarchal parent, husband, slave master to just make sure that nothing goes wrong for them.
And of course, it's not that parents are trying to be dictators over their children. It's just that is the view that really the whole world has about children, that they are not quite the same as the rest of us. They're not quite rational and creative. And so we need to manage and control them to make sure that they turn out to be citizens who can be responsible for themselves.
So I think instead that children are creative and rational and that they're creative and rational from birth. You know, we're born with human minds, not just animal minds, but we have this human mind as well. And it just doesn't make sense to think in terms of rationality and creativity being turned on at some later stage. And so it's there from the beginning. How does a child learn language, a baby learn language, if they're not creative and rational?
So seriously, you could say is non-coercive educational theory. It's about raising children in a way that doesn't involve coercion.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (4:18)
Yeah, just for the audience, my position currently is somewhere between yours and the conventional view. So hopefully you can nudge me closer to your view.
So now one obvious counterargument is that when it came to women or other races, we viewed them as a different kind of thing. But children are literally a different kind of thing, right? They're biologically different from adults. Doesn't this mean that they're entitled to different rights, perhaps fewer rights?

**Sarah Fitz-Claridge** (4:51)
That is the same circular argument that was used in the past about women and black people. Well, their skin is black, so obviously they're not the same as the rest of us. Well, they're women, so obviously there's an actual difference there. They're not men. They're not white men. It's the same circular argument. It doesn't make any sense.
Sorry.
I think that there will come a time in the future when people will look back at how we view children now, and they will be as horrified by that as how it seems to us when we look back at the arguments that people made in the past about black people and women.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (5:36)
Yeah, no, I actually do agree with that, especially given how the schooling system works.
But now here's just to continue that argument between different races. These are superficial differences, right? And between different genders, they're not entirely superficial, but they're minimal when compared to the difference between a two-year-old and an 18-year-old. Like there seems to be such a difference in the kind of person we're talking about. It's entirely likely that a chimp is smarter than a two-year-old, right? Now, why is a chimp not entitled to the same rights against coercion?