500
PARTISAN REVIEW
II
These ruinous measures can be schematically traced back to three
basic assumptions with which, in themselves, you are all familiar.
The
first
is that the child's world or the society that children form among
themselves is independent by nature and must in so far as possible
be
left to them to govern. Adults are only there to help with this gov–
ernment. The authority that tells the individual child what to
do
and what not to do rests with the child group itself-and this
p~
duces, among other consequences, a situation in which the adult
stands helpless before the individual child and out of contact
with
him. He can only tell him to do what he likes and then prevent
the
worst from happening. The real and normal relations between chil–
dren and adults, arising from the fact that people of all ages are
always simultaneously together in the world, are thus broken off.
And
SO
it is of the essence of this first basic assumption that it takes into
account only the group and not the individual child.
As
for the child in the group, he is of course rather worse off
than before. For the authority of a group, even a child group,
i
always considerably stronger and more tyrannical than the severest
authority of an individual person can ever be.
If
one looks at it from
the standpoint of the individual child, his chances to rebel or to
do
anything on his own hook are practically nil; he no longer finds
himself in a very unequal contest with a person who has, to be sure,
absolute superiority over him but in contest with whom he can never–
theless count on the solidarity of other children, that is, of his own
kind; rather he is in the position, hopeless by definition, of a minority
of one confronted by the absolute majority of all the others.
There
are very few grown people who can endure such a situation, eveD
when it is not supported by external means of compulsion; childltll
are simply and utterly incapable of it.
Therefore by being emancipated from the authority of adul1s
the child has not been freed but has been subjected to a much more
terrifying and truly tyrannical authority, the tyranny of the majority.
In any case the result is that the children have been so to speak
banished from the world of grown-ups. They are either thrown back
upon themselves or handed over to the tyranny of their own group,
against which, because of its numerical superiority, they cannot rebel,
with which, because they are children, they cannot reason, and
out
