Of course, the democratic procedures that the Sudbury Valley School has been using successfully for over 40 years are founded on the assumption that children can reason.ģ. It does so even today, and even by people who know, from recalling their own childhood thoughts and reasons, that the premise is false. This premise-which is contradicted by the experience of every child and every person who ever was a child-provides a rationale for failing to listen seriously to what children have to say. The young child can learn physical skills and can learn through experiencing the direct consequences of his actions, but cannot learn anything useful through the symbolic means of language.

According to Rousseau, there is no sense in trying to reason with a young child, because the child has no capacity to reason. Of most significance, Rousseau expresses with certainty the view that children are unable to reason logically until the age of 12 years old, a view remarkably like that expressed nearly two centuries years later by the famous developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. Each stage represents a metamorphosis from one way of being to another. Rousseau divides his treatise into several 'books' (units), which correspond with what he sees to be separate stages of development. The stage-of-development fallacy: The idea that children can learn only certain kinds of things at certain ages. To prepare for the real world, children need to grow up in that world, experiencing its warts as well as its roses.Ģ. In order to form useful opinions, they must hear all sides and decide for themselves where the contradictions lie. In order to decide what works and what doesn't, they must see a range of models, who behave differently from one another. The more children can explore the realities of the world the more skilled they become at coping with those realities. They pay attention not just to others' actions, but also to the consequences of those actions. Children don't just blindly mimic what they see in others.

We are all fundamentally social beings, and to deprive children of the full range of social interactions is to deprive them of that which is essential to normal human development. My view - consistent with the philosophy and practices of the Sudbury Valley School - is that human beings are neither fundamentally good nor bad nor are young children necessarily more innocent and pure than are older children and adults.

Jean jacques rousseau emil