Defeating Adultism

In our culture (and many others in the world), adults have a special status of control and coercion over kids. It's time to move beyond this discrimination.

I want to talk about adultism. It is one of many “isms” in our vocabulary – racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, and so on – that address discrimination on the basis of things like ethnicity, economic status, gender, sexual orientation, age, and physical abilities. Many of us try to overturn these “isms” in our own lives and in the broader culture. But adultism is one “ism” that isn’t dealt with as often – even by those who call themselves progressive. In fact, I think that it may be the last frontier of “isms.” And that may be because its pervasiveness makes it almost invisible.

In our culture (and many others in the world), adults have a special status of control over kids. Adults make decisions for their own and other people’s children, create rules that govern children’s day-to-day lives, and generally tell them what to do. That often manifests in ordering, directing, preaching, disciplining, demeaning, embarrassing, questioning, patting and other touching without permission, yanking, ignoring, yelling, and referring to children in the third person.

This coercive behaviour isn’t usually undertaken with abusive intent; indeed, most adults wield power over kids because they assume it’s their duty, as well as their right. Adults are thought to be entitled to these behaviours on the assumption that they are superior to children and young people, and that they know best what’s good for the younger generation. Those assumptions are often false and, in fact, can be harmful to both adults and kids, as well as to the betterment of our society.

Scratch below the surface, and you’ll find that this sort of adult disrespect is inherited. It’s how we were treated as children by our parents and in our schools…and how our parents were treated by the generation before that. And it’s reinforced by other social institutions like churches and medical systems, as well as by laws. The context of the adult-child relationship in our society is mistrust, hierarchy, power, and coercion.

One of the places that adultism manifests itself most strongly is our compulsory education system. Most people believe that children and young people must be made to go to school or else they won’t learn. (They don’t.) And many adults think schools are needed to keep children safe while parents work and, in some cases, to provide things like food and social activities that they might not get from their families and communities. (In some cases, that is, unfortunately true but doesn’t have to be.) So we have created factories in which children are processed and warehouses where they are stored until it’s convenient for adults to have them around. Getting rid of the factory model of public education challenges not just our assumptions about how children learn, but a variety of agendas related to economics, adultism, and other sorts of power. (In case you’re new here, I’ve written tens of thousands of words over the past 40+ years about how children learn.)

By our very use of words like “teaching” and “schooling,” we seem to accept the idea that some people at the top can and should do things to other people farther down the totem pole. As I see it, public (and much private) education reflects our society’s paternalistic, hierarchical worldview, which exploits children in the same way it takes the earth’s resources for granted. That is no way to help children grow up into compassionate citizens who think independently and participate in the life of their communities and countries.

Arguing against adultism is difficult. Giving up power can make people fearful and leave them feeling threatened. Plus, they assume that “unschooling” means unparenting, and life learning means being uneducated. (Here’s a link to my take on home education terminology.) (And here’s an essay in Fran Liberatore’s A Life Unschooled about how the word “parenting” also relates to this discussion.)

But life learners/unschoolers are at the leading edge of an important attempt to broaden the definition of childhood, to respect children not just as self-directed learners but as whole people who are functioning members of society. And who know but this change in attitude toward children might just improve our education system along the way.

Since life learners/unschoolers are already living and modeling the opposite of adultism, I believe that we can contribute to the defeat of adultism by being conscious about how we speak to (and about) children, and by how we treat them. Both the behaviour of respecting children that we model to other adults and the effect on our children of that fair treatment will help slay this last “ism” dragon. At the same time, we can do our part to conceptualize and advocate for better ways of organizing ourselves to benefit everyone in society, no matter their age, ethnicity, economic status, gender, sexual orientation, and physical abilities.

This post borrows from an article I wrote in 2016 for Life Learning Magazine. Photo licensed through Shutterstock Images.