Tormented regularly by this passage from Holt's How Children Fail: "This idea that children won't learn without outside rewards and penalties…usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat children long enough as if that were true, they will come to believe it is true."
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I'm sure I'm seeing a sliver of the tip of the iceberg here, but what's the alternative? Letting children choose? They'll choose Netflix and ice cream 24/7 😅
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Holt sketches some solutions in his books (see also Dewey, Bruner, Illich, Egan, Papert, etc), but the short of it in my estimation is "we don't know, exactly." eg Montessori classrooms are an improvement along many axes for young children but hasn't "scaled" well to older kids…
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I'm sure this author doesn't do it, but I'm skeptical of advice about children that just talks about "children" when their needs and understanding change so much with age. A crawling infant needs a "NO!" before touching a hot poker; a kindergartener can use a chat about physics.
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Total ditto there, and plenty of folks in this space do talk about the situation as narrowly as you're ascribing. "Experience and Education" is sort of positioned as a reaction to what Dewey perceived as an over-correction on the part of progressives here.
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