Sarah Fitz-Claridge - Taking Children Seriously | The Lunar Society #15
What this covers
Sarah Fitz-Claridge and host Dwarkesh Patel examine the philosophical foundations and practical implications of Taking Children Seriously, an educational philosophy rooted in the claim that children possess rationality and creativity from birth. The conversation spans fifty-eight minutes across philosophical argument, empirical claims about child development, and extended critique of compulsory schooling. Fitz-Claridge's core position is that the standard coercive model of parenting and education rests on a false premise about children's cognitive capacity, and that this error justifies moral condemnation independent of measurable downstream harms.
The discussion moves through several distinct territories. Early sections establish the rationality question: whether babies acquire language through creativity and reasoning rather than mere conditioning, and whether this settles what rationality means. From there, the conversation turns to coercion itself—the claim that "might makes right" cannot generate correct answers—before addressing schooling directly. Fitz-Claridge argues that compulsory education is a factory-era holdover that suppresses the creativity modern economies require, that standardized curricula are self-defeating, and that children taught under coercion develop lifelong aversion to academic subjects. Later segments examine whether uncoerced children actually learn mathematics, whether the "terrible twos" are myth or inevitable development, and how coercive parenting perpetuates itself across generations. The conversation becomes increasingly contentious around claims about school's actual efficacy, whether identical-twin studies undermine parental influence, and whether activities like video games and television constitute rational leisure or wasted time. A final section briefly addresses child labor and age-of-consent law, touching the legal implications of Fitz-Claridge's position.
Fitz-Claridge argues that children are fully creative and rational from birth and that the standard authoritarian, coercive model of parenting and schooling is a moral error analogous to past treatment of women and slaves; the alternative is non-coercive, consent-based education ('Taking Children Seriously').
- Rationality and creativity are present from birth (evidenced by language acquisition), so the standard view that children are not-yet-rational is false.
- Coercion embodies 'might makes right' and cannot generate correct answers, so problems should be solved by reason and consent.
- Compulsory schooling is a factory-era throwback that suppresses creativity and harms children without producing the claimed benefits.
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Identical twins separated at birth and raised in different households tend to turn out quite similar regardless of how different their parents are, suggesting parenting style does not significantly change how children ultimately turn out.
“there's a lot of literature with twin studies where twins that are separated at birth and are adopted by different parents... regardless of how different the parents are usually most of the difference usually the twins are actually pretty similar”
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.
“obviously when it comes to adults we don't use those arguments... we say it's wrong to hit someone... thinking about the effects is not the point that's an example of this different view that we have of children”
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.
“this idea of um the terrible twos and temper tantrums that doesn't happen if you're taking your children seriously it just doesn't happen because you're never it's never getting to where it's that kind of a problem”
A school superintendent's district that delayed required math instruction until seventh grade found that those students were no more behind in mathematics by eighth grade than students who had been learning math since first grade.
“there was some superintendent who in his or her district decided that children would not be required to learn math before the seventh grade and it turned out that the children who learned math in the seventh grade were no more behind after eighth grade”
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.
“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”
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.
“we didn't end slavery because the studies said such and such we didn't emancipate women because the studies said such and such it was the arguments were moral and philosophical”
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.
“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... it's the same circular argument”
From an evolutionary first-principles standpoint, it would be astonishing if natural selection produced a survival machine that lay around doing nothing for its first 18 years; the existence of childhood implies we are evolved to be curious and to explore.
“it would be astonishing if millions of years of evolution resulted... would decided the best way to produce a survival machine would be to have something that lays around for the first 18 years of its life and does nothing”
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.
“children are creative and rational and they're creative and rational from birth you know we're born with human minds not just animal minds... how does a child learn language a baby learn language if they're not creative and rational”
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.
“if you just define rationality to exclude young children then obviously you're going to say look uh therefore young children are irrational but rationality means your ability to actually learn create new knowledge”
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 child has been forming inexplicit conjectures about what words mean about what we call different things... whereas a chimp or whatever animal is doing none of those things”
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.
“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”
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.
“if everyone has the same body of knowledge where are the new ideas going to come from... new ideas are more likely to come from people who who haven't got the same body of knowledge as everyone else”
Bryan Caplan argues that people are much less educated than 12 years of mandatory schooling would predict—people forget the basics of government, math, and science after leaving college—yet he forces his own homeschooled children to learn mathematics because unschooled children seem to struggle with even basic arithmetic.
“brian kaplan... wrote a book called cases against education and he homeschools his own kids the basic idea is that people are much less educated than you would expect given the 12 years of mandatory schooling... the one thing he forces his children to learn is mathematics”
There is no evidence that spending time playing video games is a worse use of time than attending school; studies on the efficacy of school show children are wasting their time there anyway, but they suffer while doing so, whereas they don't suffer while playing video games.
“where's the evidence that this is any worse a time way to spend time than going to school... if you just look at the studies on the efficacy of school you know they're wasting their time there anyways but the fact is that they're getting they're suffering while they're spending their time there”
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.
“every new idea in mathematics every discovery in the field of mathematics was discovered by someone who was not being coerced to to learn maths it was discovered by someone who found mathematics a joy”
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.
“the school system is uh is i think it's a sort of throwback to the past when people were trying to turn out good factory workers... we're looking for people who are creative who come up with new ideas”
Ignoring a child's tantrum applies behaviorist dog-training techniques (operant/classical conditioning) to children; from a young child's perspective, being shunned amounts to a terrifying withdrawal of love, which is immoral—reason, not conditioning, is the appropriate tool because humans have human minds.
“using um dog training techniques on children is i think is just immoral... when you are shunning them ignoring them you're basically withdrawing love and it for a child a young child that is absolutely terrifying”
Activities dismissed as lazy or mindless—video games and television—are in fact highly educational and a rational way for stressed children to relax; an alien wanting to learn human culture would learn far more from watching soap operas than from classroom lessons, and apparent laziness is often a needed escape from coercive family and school stress.
“if an alien came from outer space what would the quickest way to learn about our culture be well it would probably be doing things like watching soap operas on television rather than someone trying to teach them in a school situation”
Compulsory schooling imposes large hidden costs beyond boredom: children have a different sleep cycle than adults so school schedules leave them sleep-deprived and disrupt development, while roughly three hours of daily homework on top of eight hours of school consumes the time children need to grow and develop.
“children have a different sleep cycle than adults and so they're sleep deprived and that's probably messing up their development there's also the fact that you're using all their time with homework... in the us it's like average of three hours a day of homework that's after eight hours of schooling”
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.
“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 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”
Anti-rational memes explain why people who suffered coercion as children grow up to coerce their own children: unlike rational memes which thrive under criticism, anti-rational memes survive by disabling their holders' ability to criticize them, so they replicate the same hang-ups across generations.
“whereas rational memes replicate themselves with criticism... anti-rational means disable their holders ability to criticize them and so people brought up in this anti-rational way develop the same hang-ups the same anti-rational memes that cause them to do the same thing to their children”
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.
“children should be supported to learn whatever they want to learn and how they want to learn it and very few children actually would want to go to school”
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.
“this idea of teaching children self-discipline by coercing them by disciplining them is an equivocation on the word discipline... in the case of the olympic athlete or the mma fighter or the concert pianist this is something that they live for”
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.
“if there's a very good reason surely you can persuade your child of that reason if it is a good reason... maybe that's because of the way that they are thwarted left and right throughout their childhood and so then they don't trust the adults around them”
Child labor laws cause real problems for young entrepreneurs—e.g., an 11-year-old who started a business had to lie about his age and was later banned from a financial service for doing so—and in the future, as children are taken seriously, such laws may change because a child working a voluntary, paid job they choose is more pleasing than being forced to stay in an institution.
“child labor laws definitely do cause problems for young entrepreneurs... started a business at the age of i think it was 11 and he had to lie about his age and so now he's been banned from that the particular financial online financial service”
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.
“these little bits of coercion that you want to get in there because you're worried about some future thing that might never happen but sort of make everything go wrong in the present”
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.
“if you're imagining that you can raise a child from birth with a coercive top-down authoritarian dictatorship sort of relationship and then suddenly switch at whatever age you think that they become rational... by that time you've already wrecked your relationship with your child”
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.
“there is a lot of resentment between parents and children both ways... it does pit parents and child against each other so it does cause problems instead of solving problems”
The shift toward taking children seriously will unfold gradually like women's emancipation—through incremental cultural change punctuated by milestones—rather than all at once; once people see that the modern view of children mirrors past views of women and slaves, they cannot unsee it, producing a domino effect.
“the shift will come in a similar way to the shift that came when women were emancipated it wasn't all in one go”
Coercion is causing someone to do or not do something against their will—imposing your will on another against theirs—though there are more subtle dimensions to it.
“coercion is causing someone to do something or not do something against their will roughly speaking... you're talking about imposing your will on someone else against their will”
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.
“karl popper's phd thesis was not in philosophy it was in psychology educational psychology and yet he became one of the most important philosophers ever so there is an example of someone who changed his direction late in his life”
There will come a time when people look back at how we view children today and feel as horrified as we now feel about past arguments made about black people and women.
“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”
Any sexual relationship involving a differential of power and authority is dangerous; current age-of-consent laws exist to protect children given the prevailing view of them, and while they may still be needed in some respects, they might not be needed in a distant future when children are taken just as seriously as everyone else.
“any kind of sexual relationship where there is a differential of power and authority is going to be dangerous... many of these laws obviously were needed to protect children and maybe still are in some respects but may not in the future when children are taken seriously”
Taking Children Seriously is best understood as a late phase of the Enlightenment—an area to which Enlightenment thinking has not yet been applied.
“i think of taking children seriously as like the final phase of the enlightenment or maybe not the final phase but it is certainly one area that we haven't applied enlightenment thinking to”
The market/economy exists and children are people.
“it's not that they're not people they are people”