That's a pretty good summmation of how I eventually wound up feeling about child-directed learning, MegMeg.
If the theory were sound as a hypothesis, then children shouldn't NEED parents to do any kind of intervention by force-- ever. Particularly not for things like basic physiological needs. That is clearly untrue. Children WON'T "naturally" gravitate to the proper medical care, nutrition, and sleep. Not many of them. Some of them fight parentally-imposed limits on those activities rather, er-- vigorously-- even. Nor do we expect toddlers to have the life experience to live with the natural consequences of all of their desires, either. So why it is that children should be expected to do so with their formal educational choices is a mystery to me as a parent. I come at this as the parent to a child with a life-altering medical condition that requires daily management. She is lucky in some ways that (unlike Type 1 diabetes) her condition offers pretty much immediate corrective feedback... though unlucky in that errors, even minor ones, can have seriously severe consequences-- potentially fatal ones, even. I know that raising a child with T1D is fraught with struggles to impose skills on children who may truly not be very willing to embrace them-- and their lives and longevity and health decades in the future rest on a clear cause-and-effect pathway that involves compliance. So while education clearly is more multifaceted and complex in terms of if-then outcomes, it's VERY clear that children lack the life-experience and metacognition to make such choices for themselves in the long term.
I didn't let my daughter mouth found objects as a baby. Nor did I attempt to "reason" with her about this activity. It was not developmentally appropriate for me to do so. I tend to suspect the same thing about much of the faith in child-directed learning. It's lovely when it works out, but I'm not sure that it's even a very good theory.
As one moves up Maslow's hierarchy, it's not at all clear to me why THOSE things should be more self-evident to children, if the lower level items (rest, clothing, shelter, health) aren't.
Kids really aren't set up well to understand the consequences of their decisions. It seems mean-spirited of me to not impose my understanding of them at least occasionally, when my judgment is clearly superior to my child's.
The thing about unschooling as a philosophy is that it denies that particular notion-- that my judgment IS superior to my five year old's, I mean. It truly espouses the notion that her beliefs are just as valid as mine-- about her education. Well, that seems suspect to me.
KWIM?
