Equal rights for children

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34130, 17 April 1976, Page 10

Equal rights for children

Escape From Childhood. The Needs and Rights of Children. By John Holt. Penguin Books. 218 pp. N.Z. price $2.25. (Reviewed by Alison Neale) Equal rights for children is the somewhat startling demand put forward by John Holt in this book. Adults, he claims, are making a mess of their own lives and the world. Children, given equal rights, would not make any worse mess and might effect some improvement. “How can .we tell children how to live their lives when we so clearly do not know how to live our own,” he writes. The first par! of I he book deals with problems of children in society today, problems arising from their inability to take a working place in that society and from adults’ desire to, have “someone to boss, someone to ‘help.’ someone to love.” In a largely anecdotal fashion, supported by quotations from writers such as Elizabeth Janeway and J. H. Van den Berg, Mr Holt suggests that adults

underestimate children’s ability to live their own lives and over-protect them. Thus far many who work with children would go along with him. When, in the second part of the book, he writes of the rights of children to do such things as vote, work for money, have legal and financial responsibility and to have a guaranteed income, many readers may jib. Mr Holt quotes a saying that people react to new ideas in one of two ways (1) it is crazy or (2) I’ve always known it. His first best-seller “How Children Fail” gave many the feeling that it put into words something the reader had always known. Reactions to this latest book may’ be more of the “it's crazy” variety. Whatever the emotional reaction the thesis put forward must encourage thought and perhaps action on the rights and needs of children in our society. [Alison Neale is a play centre officer and lectures in early childhood education at Christchurch Teachers’ College. j