I think all relationships between people should be voluntary. That includes the teacher-child relationship: we should only teach a child what he wants to learn. But parents and teachers force children to learn things regardless. So how can we tell if they’re genuinely interested in something?

That’s what Zelalem Mekonnen, Tom Nassis, and I discussed in my recent space on X. For example, imagine some parents offering you money to teach their son math. You want your lessons to be fully voluntary, so you need to make sure he wants to learn math. But how can you know that?

Maybe you could just ask him. But you can’t do it in front of his parents: kids commonly get in trouble with their parents for disagreeing. So you ask to speak with their son in private for a few minutes. ‘Just between you and me, is math really something you want to learn?’, you ask him. ‘Yes’, he says. But what does that tell you? He doesn’t know you. He doesn’t know if he can trust you. He does know that his parents are willing to pay you to continue school coercion at home. And adults usually conspire against children, so he has reason to fear you. For all he knows, if he says ‘no’, you might rat him out to his parents. He may take it as a rhetorical question because he knows he’s supposed to say ‘yes’. And if they don’t hire you specifically, they’ll just find someone else – so what’s the point in saying ‘no’?

If he did well in school, his parents wouldn’t look for a tutor anyway. So he’s probably bad at math. It’s rare for kids to be bad at things they enjoy. But even if he loved math, got straight A’s, and his parents only hired you so he could learn more of it in his spare time, his teachers would still force him to learn math if he didn’t like it. So the situation is tainted either way. If his face lights up the moment you mention math, that could be a good sign. Or maybe he’s just practiced at faking an interest to please the adults around him. Parents try to coax their kids into doing things they don’t want to do all the time – see a long list of such attempts here, and a specific example here. For all of these reasons, a ‘yes’ means nothing in this situation, and asking him is not good enough.

The problem extends to working with children in general. Adults have disenfranchised them, so it’s hard to know if their consent is real. In some ways, it’s easier to tell with younger kids. They’re ‘bad’ at hiding their true thoughts and good at refusing the unwanted loudly and clearly. Try giving a two-year-old some food he doesn’t want: he’ll fling it across the room! He doesn’t care about pleasing the adults around him. Unfortunately, they’ll beat this ability to refuse the unwanted out of him, figuratively if not literally. Many people can’t develop a genuine interest in anything once they’re young adults. In this regard, the older a kid is, the harder it is to tell if he consents.

In Germany, where I grew up, high school is voluntary on paper: the German government does not force kids to go to high school. I believe after ninth grade, it’s up to the kids to continue. But after nine years of coercion and indoctrination, of daily practice ignoring their own preferences, many teenagers can’t refuse. By that I mean they’re mentally unable to seriously think about alternatives. There’s also the reality that their parents can just force them to go to high school. A 15-year-old can’t just move out – it’s not that simple.

This problem continues into college and beyond. Think of all the young people who pursue a degree they think they should pursue, instead of the degree they want to pursue (if any). There comes a ‘coercive crossover point’ when the coercion from K-12 is so practiced that it becomes second nature, and the young adult continues the coercion on himself. I don’t see any other way people could stay in jobs they hate for 40+ years. A healthy mind couldn’t do that.

K-12 teachers don’t care about their students’ consent. They’ll claim otherwise, and they have good intentions, but the road to hell is famously paved with those. If such teachers cared about their students’ consent, they wouldn’t work at public schools to begin with. They uncritically accept the cultural background that kids need to be molded into people, for their own good and against their will if necessary. But this approach is just institutionalized irrationality.

Teachers outside school might, on the surface, seem more interested in children’s consent. Unlike K-12 teachers, they can consider consent, at least. For example, I took clarinet lessons from around age 8 through age 14 or so. The lessons were private and extracurricular. There was no legal requirement to take them. On paper, I could have stopped the lessons anytime. My mother paid for them – also with good intentions – and the state was not involved.

But were those lessons truly voluntary? Did my face light up with joy whenever I thought about playing the clarinet? Was I sitting in school, daydreaming about practicing the moment I got home? Looking back, the answer to all of these questions is ‘no’. My teacher should have understood my lack of progress to mean that I wasn’t interested. Again, it’s rare for kids to be bad at things they enjoy. I did just enough to keep the adults off my back. The teacher meant well, and he secretly taught me math when I requested it. But that alone should have been enough of a sign for him, and I’m not sure he ever seriously considered the issue of consent.

This example from my childhood shows that a teacher-child relationship is not necessarily consensual just because it’s outside school. But suppose I had been genuinely interested in playing the clarinet, and suppose my teacher had required my consent. Then we’d be back to asking: how could he have known that I consented against the common coercive background?

Zelalem suggested sitting down with a prospective student and ‘testing’ him a bit, asking him questions, to gauge interest. But again, maybe the reason the child would ‘agree’ to be subjected to such questions in the first place is to keep the adults happy. So spending even five minutes with him could be immoral.

In a follow-up conversation during another space on X (starting at 40:14), Liberty Fitz-Claridge, who teaches English as a foreign language, suggested it would be okay to accept money from parents to teach their child. Although you’d effectively become the child’s “prison guard”, you could at least make it “as nice for them as possible”. You’d do everything you can so that the child would have agreed to being there. And if you weren’t his teacher, someone far worse might be – better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. But I don’t think it works that way: the parents expect you to exert some minimum amount of coercion. They expect to see results in the form of improved grades. And you don’t advance your values by violating them, even partially. If you sabotaged them and secretly played computer games with their kid, say, eventually they’d find out and replace you with a teacher who coerces their child enough to get the results they want.

To clarify things, let me replace private lessons with a different example: slavery. I’m not suggesting that private lessons are as evil as slavery or that parents are like slaveholders. They’re not. What I mean is, we’ve made the cultural progress needed to recognize slavery as evil. We understand what’s wrong with it. It’s easy for us to judge concrete examples of slavery by reference to moral principles – at least easier than examples of forced education. So consider, just for the sake of argument, that you’re an enlightened, free man living in the antebellum South. You think about slavery the way we do in 2026. You’re an expert crop picker. A slaveholder offers to pay you handsomely if you teach his slaves to be better at picking crops. Maybe some slaves genuinely want to learn a better technique – so they don’t get whipped as much, say. But you’d never ask yourself how you could possibly know whether slaves truly want to be taught. The master has robbed his slaves of the ability to consent, so the question is pointless, and you’d stay a million miles away from that nasty business.

Maybe you want to help those poor slaves. But you can’t do it by conspiring with their master. Again, you don’t advance your values by violating them; don’t become a devil just to avoid another devil that you don’t know. The slaveholder would expect you to exert some minimum amount of coercion to get the results he wants: improved crop yields or whatever. Real ways to help slaves at the time included freeing them, helping them escape, advancing the Underground Railroad, spreading abolitionist ideas, lobbying lawmakers, and similar activities.

The only time you could have associated with a slave and known that the association was voluntary was if he hid it from his master; if he asked you about something no master would want his slaves to know. For example, parents typically forbid their teenagers from smoking. So if you work at a cigarette factory, and a teenager approaches you wanting to learn more about how to make cigarettes, that’s a good sign that he’s there of his own free will, especially if he asks you not to tell his parents. One of the best ways to work with children nowadays, though not directly, is to make products they enjoy – especially the ones parents hate, like violent video games.

Liberty did raise a valid concern: wouldn’t my point of view imply that no (enlightened) adult could ever interact with children directly, for fear of violating their consent? If everyone thought like me, would there be any teachers left? First, the reality is that almost nobody thinks this way, so it’s not a concern. Second, if everyone did seek children’s consent, then they wouldn’t be systematically coerced, they wouldn’t be robbed of their ability to consent, and we wouldn’t have this problem to begin with. Third, if teachers suddenly realized that students’ consent matters, and quit in droves, then parents’ tune would change quickly: they need teachers. Lastly, although rare, there are children who grow up without coercion, like Aaron Stupple’s kids. So there’d be no issue teaching them because you’d know they could only be taught when they want to be.