Expedient, science-of-it arguments for liberating children are a mistake; major moral advances like ending slavery and emancipating women were won by moral and philosophical arguments, not by studies, and trying to turn everything into a science that isn't science is scientism.

The claim that coercive schooling instills self-discipline equivocates on the word 'discipline': the self-discipline of a concert pianist or MMA fighter comes from wholeheartedly pursuing their own passion, which is the opposite of disciplining children to suppress their passions and obey—so coercion actually trains children to be unable to pursue anything wholeheartedly.

Taking Children Seriously is an educational philosophy that takes fallibilism seriously—including parental fallibility—and therefore replaces coercive interaction with the creation of consent and the search for non-coercive solutions to problems.

Inserting small bits of coercion to guard against speculative future problems often makes the present go wrong; since what matters most is how we live in the present, making a child's present life miserable teaches them that life is miserable and that problems are insoluble, which is counterproductive.

Children should be supported to learn whatever they want, however they want; very few children would freely choose to attend school because it is an inefficient and authoritarian way to learn, though they may later choose formal education when pursuing a specific goal like becoming a doctor.

People can radically change intellectual direction late in life, as shown by Karl Popper, whose PhD was in educational psychology rather than philosophy yet who became one of the most important philosophers ever—so learning needed skills later in childhood or life is unproblematic.

You cannot raise a child coercively for years and then switch to a rational relationship at some 'age of reason'—by that point you have already wrecked the relationship; the non-coercive view must be adopted from birth.

Coercion creates friction and mutual resentment between parents and children, pits them against each other, and tends to come bundled with self-sacrifice; far from solving problems, it hurts everyone including the parents.

Children are creative and rational from birth—we are born with human minds, not merely animal minds—so it makes no sense to think rationality is switched on at a later developmental stage; language acquisition by babies is itself evidence of this creativity and rationality.

The standard view of children is structurally identical to the pre-emancipation view of women and slaves: they are recognized as people but treated as not quite able to control their own lives, requiring a benevolent authority to manage them.

Defining rationality as the capacity for explicit verbal argument arbitrarily excludes young children; rationality properly means the ability to learn and create new knowledge, which babies demonstrate by acquiring language.

The argument that children deserve fewer rights because they are biologically different from adults is the same circular reasoning historically used to deny rights to women and black people ('they're women, so obviously they're different'), and is therefore invalid.

Coercion embodies the theory that 'might makes right,' which is false, so coercion decides issues under an irrational institution and cannot reliably produce correct answers.

What distinguishes children from chimps (and grants them rights against coercion) is not raw intelligence or working memory but unlimited human creativity—the capacity to form inexplicit conjectures and create new knowledge—which a two-year-old demonstrates by speaking while no animal ever will.

The 'common body of knowledge' justification for coercive schooling is self-defeating: if everyone shares the same foundational knowledge, new ideas have no source; historically, breakthroughs came from people with idiosyncratic histories who learned things for the joy of it, not from a standardized foundation.

It is not true that most people need mathematics; to the extent they do, they learn it naturally when they need it, and every mathematical discovery was made by someone who found maths a joy rather than being coerced—school coercion is enough to give people a lifelong aversion to it.

If a reason for a child to learn something is genuinely good, you should be able to persuade the child of it by reason; children's reputed resistance to persuasion is itself a product of being thwarted and coerced throughout childhood, which erodes their trust in adults' judgments.

The school system is a throwback to an era of producing obedient factory workers, but a modern knowledge-based society needs creative people who generate new ideas; the authoritarian school structure damps down creativity and is stultifying for the majority.

Babies are reasonable, and the 'terrible twos' and tantrums are largely a myth produced by ignoring infants' early signals; if parents attentively make conjectures about and respond to a baby's wants at an early stage, the escalating screaming and conflict-ridden relationship never develops.

Whether coercion produces measurable long-term psychological harm is irrelevant to its morality: we condemn coercing or hitting an adult as simply wrong, not because studies show downstream effects, so demanding evidence of harm before objecting to coercing children reflects the same mistaken view of children.