Radical Acts no. 7

Adult gaze, conceptions of children, inner drive & love.

Hello friends,

Last week I spoke about the way we turn the adult gaze onto ourselves, and this week I thought I’d say more about what the adult gaze may feel like to a child.

I mean - I’m obviously not a child anymore, but I used to be. And I was a very sensitive child and really FELT that gaze. Some children, perhaps, do not. Or perhaps they can brush it off more easily. But I would say that in my experience, most children do - to different extents. I have one very sensitive child, and they also feel it - I know they feel it because they’ve told me, but also because I can feel them feeling it. Is that crazy? And I’m pretty sure I’m not projecting because they tell me later what it is they felt.

Anyway I wanted to get to the root of why adults look upon children in a certain way and I think the root is the adult conception of the child and childhood.

It’s easy to generalize that there is ONE adult conception - of course there isn’t. So I’ll just call out the conception that has taken hold in most Western countries: that of the child as an adult-in-training, as an empty vessel needing to be filled, a piece of clay needing to be moulded and shaped. I should qualify this by saying that this is the view that Western schooling has taken, and that most middle class Western parents also seem to take. It is not everybody’s view, and studies have shown that working class parents also don’t particularly care for this view (check out Annette Laureau’s research and book - it’s a little dated, and she focuses on class differences to the detriment of other identities, but it’s still interesting.)

This conception of the child sees children as reproducers of knowledge, culture and identity that adults pour into them. It equates teaching with learning, to the extent that what adults teach is taken in by the child in its original form and reproduced exactly as intended by the adult. I mean - this is the basis of mainstream schooling, right? The curriculum assumes that teachers will teach pre-defined content, that that content will be directly transmitted to a receptive child, and that the child will then reproduce that content out in the world (but more importantly, on a workbook or assessment or exam). When you put it like this, it sounds highly improbable! Probably because it is.

When we see children like this, as empty vessels and reproducers of top-down cultural values, our focus as parents and educators is on creating a situation where the child can best learn all the things we want them to learn in exactly the way we want them to learn them. So schools, and parents, will go to great lengths to cajole, persuade, and often coerce, children into believing that they NEED to learn, and that they need to find ways to be ready to learn. ‘School-ready’ means exactly this: preparing children to be well-disposed to learning the things the adults in charge have decided they need to learn.

This in turn makes childhood a period of preparation, as opposed to a stage of life in its own right. It turns children into works in progress, rather than people in their own right.

And as a result, the gaze that is turned to them is a gaze that evaluates, judges, assesses. Because from the perspective, we the adults are always responsible for making sure the child is actually doing the preparing and training. We no longer look at them with unconditional positive regard - we look at them from a place of making sure they are in fact, slowly becoming the adult we want them to be, and that they are doing it in the way we expect them to do it. This is the root of the adult gaze.

And the way it manifests is as us checking on their progress, judging and giving feedback on what we feel they should do better and where we feel they are going wrong, and also what we feel they are doing well. That becomes OUR JOB. The adult gaze is our job.

I believe it shouldn’t be our job. I strongly believe it is our job to NOT buy into this.

And there is lots of research that supports this. One of my favorite books is The Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik, where she likens modern parenting, or what Annette Laureau would call “concerted cultivation”, to parents as carpenters - literally believing it is our job to design, build and shape our child from the blank slate that they are. Gopnik argues that parenting should really look much more like gardening. She is not a home educator of any kind, but her thinking aligns with unschooling and slow education: our children are not ours to shape. We are gardeners - we provide the setting for them to grow, we give them love and support and encouragement (water, soil, compost), but we cannot and shouldn’t try to control the way they grow and the final outcome. They are their own beings - and they might become creeping vines or orchids or wildflowers.

This approach is much more aligned with a view of the child as a full person who constructs their own identity, knowledge and culture, rather than the empty vessel view. It speaks to the idea that the adult gaze that is inherent in the empty vessel or carpenter approach, should not exist in the gardener version of the parent and educator. What a gardener would do is provide a loving gaze, a gaze of unconditional positive regard, no matter what plant ended up growing from the seed that was sown.

I could go on and on about this! I would love to hear your thoughts, though.

Rabbit Trails.

I posted last week about slow education and the ways it nurtures inner drive.

I’ve been re-reading The Self-Driven Child (which is called The Thriving Child in the UK edition!) arguably one of my favorite books, and have noticed how slow education, and child-led, consent-based learning, ticks so many of the boxes that help foster motivation and inner drive in children (and people!).

Check out my post here if you missed it.

I thought I’d include a bunch of references here if you wanted to dig a little deeper, so here goes:

Self-Determination theory - Deci & Ryan’s original 2012 research on a theory of motivation

Gina Riley speaks about SDT on the Off-Trail Learning podcast

Gina Riley’s academic article on SDT in home education

Carol Dweck Ted Talk

Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset (new edition)

Flow, the book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

There are tons of studies on the role of dopamine on motivation, which I find fascinating! Some recent research suggests that dopamine promotes goal-oriented motivation, but not reward-driven motivation. I’m into this because I’ve recently become a huge fan of pleasure-led education, and the belief that if we can follow the pleasure and connection, we stimulate dopamine, which in turn helps us stay on task. How very cool is that?

Community.

Lastly, if you are of an unschooly bent, or maybe just pro-human, go listen to Meghan talk vulnerably about the state of the world and mostly, about love. Right here on her podcast.

Ok then, I’m wrapping it up for this week.

And thinking this may have to be a fortnightly email because I have lots to say and landing in your inbox every week might be a bit much (for both me and you!)

As always thank you for reading.

Love,

Fran x