Get Wokeism Out of Montessori (Part I)
It’s been about nine months now since I had my first baby. As many new parents before me have said, “Going from no child to one is life-changing.” And, indeed, it is. My time, namely, is divvied up differently and the rooms in my home are occupied in new ways. I’ve spent the past couple of years delving into parenting book after parenting book. However, two of the latest ones I’ve read come to mind as being egregious in their “advice.” Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn and The Montessori Child by Simone Davies and Junnifa Uzodike are examples of how “wokeism” has maliciously slipped itself into Montessori and other parenting books in general, becoming tools of propaganda over parenting advice.
In Unconditional Parenting, chapter one opens with
I have sometimes derived comfort from the idea that, despite all the mistakes I’ve made (and will continue to make) as a parent, my children will turn out just fine for the simple reason that I really love them. After all, love heals all wounds. All you need is love. Love means never having to say you’re sorry about how you lost your temper this morning in the kitchen (Kohn, 10).
This is followed by his main thesis for the book:
This book looks at one such distinction—namely, between loving kids for what they do and loving them for who they are. The first sort of love is conditional, which means children must earn it by acting in ways that we deem appropriate, or by performing up to our standards. The second sort of love is unconditional: It doesn’t hinge on how they act, whether they’re successful or well behaved or anything else.
I want to defend the idea of unconditional parenting on the basis of both a value judgment and a prediction. The value judgment is, very simply, that children shouldn’t have to earn our approval. We ought to love them, as my friend Deborah says, “for no good reason.” Furthermore, what counts is not just that we believe we love them unconditionally, but that they feel loved in that way.
The prediction, meanwhile, is that loving children unconditionally will have a positive effect. It’s not only the right thing to do, morally speaking, but also a smart thing to do. Children need to be loved as they are, and for who they are. When that happens, they can accept themselves as fundamentally good people, even when they screw up or fall short. And with this basic need met, they’re also freer to accept (and help) other people. Unconditional love, in short, is what children require in order to flourish.
Nevertheless, we parents are often pulled in the direction of placing conditions on our approval. We’re led to do so not only by what we were raised to believe, but also by the way we were raised. You might say we’re conditioned to be conditional. The roots of this sensibility have crept deep into the soil of American consciousness. In fact, unconditional acceptance seems to be rare even as an ideal: An Internet search for variants of the word unconditional mostly turns up discussions about religion or pets. Apparently, it’s hard for many people to imagine love among humans without strings attached (Kohn, 10–1).
If you have known about Objectivism for any amount of time, then your skin should crawl reading (or hearing) these words. Kohn’s words ooze a pro-altruism and anti-selfishness approach to life, which includes being anti-capitalist and, therefore, anti-American. If you didn’t catch all that, here’s how I gleaned it from his first couple of pages.
Kohn wants parents to love their children for no reason at all, just like the husband who is supposed to be altruistic in loving his wife and only love her for her sake, not his own. So, parents are not supposed to derive any joy from their children, they simply have a duty to love them without any values. But children are born having an abundance of potential and that potential to become valuers in the future is what makes them so lovable in the parents’ eyes. If their children are healthy, then they have beautiful eyes to see, hands to hold, legs to climb, and feet to take them far and wide. They are born a clean slate, without knowing about the world yet, and as the parents, they get to see them through all their “firsts”: first breath of air, first nursing, first hug, first clothes, first lullaby, first cough, first smile, and on and on. Parents get to see how they came into this world knowing nothing and how much wonder there is in learning about its laws: cause and effect, object permanence, proprioception, and so forth.
As far as “string attached” when it comes to love, what Kohn is really saying is that babies should be loved without reason, without values, and if values are found, then those are materialistic strings that automatically turn this mystical bond into one of economic, capitalistic stuff of nightmares. That Americans are the worst at understanding this concept because they are so pro-individual and pro-capitalist, unlike their European counterparts. Yet, most people live in reality. What is economics anyway but a trade of values between two consenting individuals? What is money but a way of peacefully allowing that exchange to occur? Would you rather use money or a gun to acquire goods? All these questions are to say that economics is not a bad term nor is it some isolated creature. Economics is what allows us to behave and survive civilly. Children should grow up in a civilization, not a Rousseauesque, primitive playground or a violent, Aztecan tribe. Humans have already done that for most of human history until the Age of Enlightenment, which then led to the Industrial Revolution. But what Kohn wants is the destruction of civilization.
Usually, a baby born to parents who want the child already sees them as a value. The parents wanted that child. To want something, to desire something, to create something is to value. They did not produce a child for nothing. So, when the baby comes into this world, they are already loved. Clearly, the opposite case, when a would-be parent does not want them, they either terminate the pregnancy, give them up for adoption, or, sadly, end up abusing the child whether that is through neglect, apathy, or targeted emotional and/or physical violence. Children know when they are not wanted, and that is when trouble begins.
So, right off the bat, parents do not love their children unconditionally, they love them for the value they bring to them: the joy, the potential, the wonder, the excitement, the entire process that alters their everyday experience. The (healthy) parents take on the journey to become good parents by starting from creating a value, their child.
Kohn continues:
In our society, we are taught that good things must always be earned, never given away. Indeed, many people become infuriated at the possibility that this precept has been violated. Notice, for example, the hostility many people feel toward welfare and those who rely on it. Or the rampant use of pay-for-performance schemes in the workplace. Or the number of teachers who define anything enjoyable (like recess) as a treat, a kind of payment for living up to the teacher’s expectations.
Ultimately, conditional parenting reflects a tendency to see almost every human interaction, even among family members, as a kind of economic transaction. The law of the marketplace—supply and demand, tit for tat—have assumed the status of universal and absolute principles, as though everything in our lives, including what we do with our children, is analogous to buying a car or renting an apartment (Kohn, 17).
I’ve heard many people over the years attack atheists by calling them “materialistic” and “superficial” in their motives without understanding that you can have values on earth without needing to be motivated by anything outside of yourself and your own life. Is loving another human being “materialistic”? To me, most people think materialistic means that I value only man-made items over emotional relationships, but that is an unfair accusation to make of anyone who is not religious.
Are values economic in nature? I think they are because values are earned. For example, in order to gain the value of closeness in a relationship, you must first be truthful with the other person and remain so in order to keep it. There is a give and take in relationships due to the fact that it requires action. And action requires living. If you are dying, then you are not taking action and will soon cease to make any sort of transactions in life; your last breath is the final transaction, if you will. I don’t think people like looking at relationships in terms of economics, but that does not mean those systems are not functioning all the time in our minds. You cannot divorce yourself from reality.
If a lover cheats, you may forgive them, but your respect (aka a value) goes in the trash. Now your love for them is waning. Then, a person capable of cheating may also just as well lie to you. You discover this lie and now your closeness (aka a value) is gone. At this point, couples’ therapy will not change the person you are with and the relationship crumbles to nothing. Is this not a person giving and another person taking away values? Without any values left, is there any room for love? Is the honest, non-cheating partner supposed to suck it up and love them regardless of their actions because “real love is unconditional”? No, of course not. That’s not how reality works.
I do think children are a different type of relationship simply because they come into the world without preconceived notions or any factual knowledge about it. Babies are potentials, usually values to their parents, and, normally, bringers of immense joy. There is a kind of transaction happening. For example, a mother receives oxytocin from her baby nursing and the baby receives oxytocin back as well as nourishment. It is this powerful give and take between the two that solidifies that bond. A mother will typically protect her child at any cost because losing them would cause her to feel great suffering—not because it is her duty to love unconditionally or to pity the helpless, innocent state of the baby. Such an altruistic outlook is what leads to unhappy people coercing other people to be just as unhappy.
Continuing:
Also, when I hear the “privilege, not a right” line, I always find myself wondering what the speaker would regard as a right. Is there anything to which human beings are simply entitled? Are there no relationships we would want to exempt from economic laws? It’s true that adults expect to be compensated for their work, just as they expect to pay for food and other things. But the question is whether, or under what circumstances, a similar “rule of reciprocity” applies to our dealing with friends and family (Kohn, 18).
The word “entitled” here should be your red flag that you are dealing with a leftist. Leftists want things for nothing. They desire values for nothing, money for nothing, friends for nothing, lovers for nothing—big, fat zeroes. They are not valuers, they are scavengers. Kohn acts as if wanting to live life, to obtain values is some astronomically difficult thing to do, which no man can do. But a child is already a value to their parents, maybe not their distant third cousin. It matters who the valuer is in relation to the value. A child gets the value of nutrition from eating an apple but not from eating a bag of chips. Their parents give their love from the beginning because of what they see in their child. Maybe this feels unconditional, but it would be more accurate to say that their love is so intense that it towers over most, if not all, the other values in their life. Love is measurable in that way. Love would have no meaning (nor would life) without having something to compare it to. It would be a colorless world without the varying shapes love takes.
Moving on:
When our kids grow up, there will be plenty of occasions for them to take their places as economic actors, as consumers and workers, where self-interest rules and the terms of each exchange can be precisely calculated. But unconditional parenting insists that the family ought to be a haven, a refuge, from such transactions. In particular, love from one’s parents does not have to be paid for in any sense. It is purely and simply a gift. It is something to which all children are entitled (Kohn, 19).
Here, Kohn uses “self-interest” in the common cultural sense to mean someone who only cares about themselves in a narcissistic sort of way. He cannot possibly imagine that parents expect to follow a certain path when they have their children. Pretend for a moment that the would-be parents were expecting to have a healthy baby, but in the last trimester, doctors discovered the baby had a cleft lip. Would the parents love their child any less? No. Would they mourn the fact that their child will not come out healthy and their plans for care will change (e.g., no home birth)? Certainly. Will they compare their difficult situation to their friends’ healthy baby? Yes. Those are value judgments based on reality; they are, by their nature, conditional.
I think that all newborns typically are loved and should be loved as potentials who will turn into valuing adults, worthy of that pure love parents have for their child. However, not all children get that love from adults who are not interested in having them. Remember the legal cases of teenagers throwing their babies away in trash cans? That love is voluntarily given because people have free will. Children, once born, only have a right to their own life. The law will punish those who take that life but not if they were not unconditionally loved. These moves, judgments, feelings are all calculated. What does Kohn even envision when he says that all parents should give their love freely, immeasurably, unconditionally to their children?
He goes on to say:
By contrast, unconditional self-esteem, the very sort that’s most likely to be ridiculed in some quarters, turns out to be the best goal to shoot for. People who, as a rule, don’t think their value hinges on their performance are more likely to see failure as just a temporary setback, a problem to be solved. They also seem less likely to be anxious or depressed. And one more thing: They’re less likely to be concerned about the whole issue of self-esteem! Spending time evaluating how good you are, or deliberately trying to feel better about yourself, not only doesn’t tend to work very well, but may be a bad sign. It’s a marker for other problems—specifically, an indication that your self-worth is vulnerable and contingent (Kohn, 44).
First of all, what the heck even is “unconditional self-esteem”? That seems like an oxymoron to me. You can’t have self-esteem without accomplishing things in reality, thereby making it conditional. Self-esteem comes from knowing that you are worthy of living. You eat an additional meal to live another day because you choose to. It does not survive in the ether. Therefore, whether you like it or not, you are always weighing your self-esteem. Children are no different and their self-esteem can only flourish when parents follow their interests and guide them to be fact-based, aka reality-based, in their thinking. For instance, a newborn should be encouraged to lay on their tummies in “tummy time” in order to build up their strength to eventually lift their heads, roll over, crawl, and then walk. These movements cannot be done by the parent for them, but the parent can set up the environment and gently move the baby into certain positions to encourage such movements. It is up to the baby to do the rest, which, when accomplished, adds more to their “self-esteem bucket.” The more independent the child becomes, the less “vulnerable and contingent” their self-esteem is.
Now, allow me to combine a few more quotes together to reach the end of this painful reading experience more quickly:
1. “When children feel they’re loved by their parents only under certain conditions—a feeling typically evoked by the use of love-withdrawal techniques and positive reinforcement—it’s very hard for them to accept themselves” (Kohn, 45).
2. To begin with, they need us to stop doing things that interfere with moral growth, things like punishment and rewards, which are rooted in—and underscore a child’s preoccupation with—self-interest. The elimination of these staples of traditional discipline is an important step toward helping children become attuned to the well-being of others (Kohn, 192).
3. “For example, to say nothing when a child acts selfishly is to send a clear message, and that message has more to do with the acceptability of selfishness than it does with the virtues of nonintrusive parenting” (Kohn, 195).
4. “[…] I’m all in favor of teaching by ‘consequences,’ as long as the consequences we’re stressing are those experienced by people our children are interacting with rather than just those that they themselves experience” (Kohn, 198).
5. “Many researchers have followed Martin Hoffman in referring to this approach as ‘other-oriented’ reasoning or ‘inductive’ discipline (because children are induced to think about the effects of their actions on others). Hoffman discovered that children whose mothers consistently did this tended to show ‘advanced moral development’” (Kohn, 198–9).
6. Given that the ability to imagine other people’s points of view is an act of imagination, a way of thinking differently, you may not be surprised to learn that those who are adept at it are likely to be impressive thinkers in other ways, too. But my primary interest in perspective taking here is ethical rather than intellectual. What we’re talking about, after all, is quite literally the opposite of self-centeredness, and therefore it offers a foundation for morality (Kohn, 201).
Okay, so Kohn really is hung up on this idea that selfishness is bad and selflessness is good. Any Objectivist understands this age-old problem that just refuses to vacate the intellectual premises. Children are naturally selfish because they have to be in order to survive. A toddler will fight their baby sibling over their toys because they actually feel afraid of losing their parents’ love because if they lose that, then they don’t survive. That is the more primitive nature behind what is going on in the child’s world. Anything that gets in the way of their primary food and attachment source will become the enemy. That nature does not die when we become adults. As many other parenting books point out, babies do not understand the concept of sharing and so it is often thought best to let a child hide their most prized possession that they consider theirs from others and allow the more communal items to be shared. As an example, imagine that you just bought the latest iPhone and now your uncle wants to use it, but he is a hoarder and there are bugs in his house. Do you really want to share that with your uncle? No. So you will find a way to give him your old flip phone that still works or say that you can’t for some other reason—any excuse not to hand it over. But the couch? Eh, you’ll let him sit there and just clean it later. That’s sharing from a rational perspective.
Another point I wanted to bring up is that if parents are using “love-withdrawal techniques,” then they have a mental health problem and need to seek therapy. Love should never be withdrawn from a child for making honest mistakes in the process of becoming adults. I agree that you should not have to use positive reinforcement, like a cookie, every time your child puts away their laundry. They will need to do it as adults in order to have nice, wrinkle-free clothes, which is the reward in and of itself—no cookie needed.
To promote being “other-oriented” means not having a self, no self-esteem that Mr. Kohn wants either. You cannot live through others nor have others live through you. Kohn wants people to be voids, not humans. He wants parents to be altruistic givers to children, who take no joy in having them.
On a final note in terms of this book, the very first footnote in the References section was from “Adorno, T. W.” (Kohn, 243). The only reason that name even registered as a red flag for me was from my college days, when a couple of my classes referenced him. For those who are unacquainted, you lucky people, you, Theodor W. Adorno was a German philosopher who was influenced by Marx, Hegel, and Kant, among others. To me, this served only as confirmation that Kohn is yet another cultural Marxist whose goal is to rob America of what makes it unique: its reverence for the individual in the full meaning of the term. Marx has once again snuck into the very corners we thought were safe—parenting books about how to raise our children. Our children are no longer safe, and it is time we fight back against death draped in the Marxist cloth.
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Links: https://www.pexels.com/photo/teacher-writing-on-the-blackboard-8087931/; https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-of-an-updated-pride-flag-12641808; https://www.rawpixel.com/image/11536696/womens-rights-png-diversity-illustration-transparent-background; https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-holding-a-sign-4676369; https://www.amazon.com/Unconditional-Parenting-Moving-Rewards-Punishments/dp/0743487486; https://www.amazon.com/Montessori-Child-Children-Creative-Compassionate/dp/1523512415
Views Expressed Disclaimer: Please know that while I consider myself an Objectivist and my work is inspired by Objectivism, it is not nor should it be considered Objectivist since I am not the creator of the philosophy. For more information about Ayn Rand's philosophy visit: aynrand.org.