A corollary of the idea that children under 12 can't reason is that they can learn little if anything of importance through verbal means. They learn, instead, from their direct sensory experiences and their manipulation of objects in the physical world. Rousseau claimed to believe that, and so did Piaget. But everyday experience clearly proves this view to be wrong. When children want to know something, their most frequent route to finding the answer is to ask someone who might know. Their reactions show that very often they understand what they hear. They ask appropriate follow-up questions, make reasonable (sometimes infuriatingly reasonable) objections to what they hear, and subsequently behave in ways that show that they understand. Children do also learn through non-social means, through direct experiences with physical objects in their environment, and that is important; but they learn even more through language. Indeed, for human beings, other people who can speak and understand have always been an essential ingredient of the natural environment. To think that young children cannot learn from the social part of their natural environment is absurd.
4. The controllability fallacy: The idea that it is possible to know a child so well as to be able to control, through subtle means, what the child learns.
The most serious of Rousseau's errors is the idea that human behavior is sufficiently predictable and controllable that a teacher can ever guide a student in anything like the manner that the master guided Émile. At least Rousseau was willing to admit that such a teacher would have to be a sort of superhero--a person with extraordinary powers of observation and reason, who would dedicate essentially his whole life to the education of a single child. Some more recent philosophies of education seem to expect this from real teachers, who have real lives, and who have more than one child to deal with.
The usual debate between traditionalists and progressivists in education has to do with means of control. Both sides agree that the educator's job is to ensure that children learn a certain curriculum, but they differ on the means of achieving that goal. Traditionalists believe in the direct approach: You tell students what they need to learn; you use direct and open power-assertive means, with lots of drill, to try to make them learn it; you test them on it; and then you go through the whole process again if they didn't learn it the first time. Progressivists believe in the indirect approach: You know what it is that the children should learn and you feel it is your responsibility to get them to learn it, but, to the degree possible, you try to do it through means that do not involve any obvious power assertion. You try to do it by calling forth children's natural learning activities, including play and exploration, and by subtly guiding those activities so that the children will "discover," on their own, the right answers and not the wrong ones. That, of course, is the method of Rousseau. In this debate I find it hard to prefer one view over the other; I agree with neither.
Rousseau's fundamental error, and that of essentially all modern educators, is the belief that the secret to education lies in the capacities of the teacher. It does not; it lies in the capacities of the children. Children educate themselves.
The great insight of the founders of Sudbury Valley School--an insight understood for millennia earlier by hunter-gatherers--is that you don't need a curriculum. You don't need to take responsibility for children's learning. You don't need to use either power assertion or cleverness to get children to learn. All you need to do is to provide an environment in which children (a) can explore, play, and socialize to their hearts' content; (b) are free of bullying and other forms of intimidation; (c) can interact freely with others of all ages; (d) have access to the culturally valued tools for learning; and (e) can experience directly enough of the culture in which they are growing up that they can figure out what it is that they need to know to do well in that culture.
Unlike Rousseau's fantasy, Sudbury Valley is not a pipe dream. It has been operating successfully for over 40 years, at a cost per student far less than that of the local public schools and at far less trouble, and more joy, for all involved. It has hundreds of graduates, succeeding in all walks of life. It's high time that the education professors of the world took a serious look at it.
